They’re here. To be honest, I don’t find these quite as odious as just selling the in-game items, at least you’re getting something actual and real for your money other than pixels. And to be honest, $25 isn’t too bad — you could pay a lot more and get a lot less in terms of a pillow shaped like an animal. But I’m still not quite sold. Not that it matters — like I said last week, I’m sure Blizzard made yet another mint on these already.

• Hey hey, patch 3.3.5! Called it! So the Black Dragonflight is invading the Ruby Sanctum, and that’s the kickoff for Cataclysm. I’m down for sure — I said last week that I wasn’t sure whether or not Cataclysm held as much signficance for players as the Arthas story did, but one way Blizzard can make that happen is by bringing in the old lore early and often, and it looks like they’re going to do exactly that with this patch. Sounds good to me. There are a few other spoilers released so far, and they do make things interesting, I’ll say that. But I won’t reveal here what they are.
• One of the things about Warcraft I was actually most excited about this week wasn’t in Warcraft at all: it was the Starcraft II beta. I finally joined up a few days ago, and I have to say, not only am I impressed by the game, but I’m very impressed by the social connections made with the new Battle.net. Finding friends is super easy, and while you can tell the party matching system is definitely still in beta (I’m not even sure their netcode has been optimized yet), I like all the options available: You can leave notes for and about your friends, you can share replays with each other (and I’d imagine that there’ll be a web interface for doing just that eventually), and it looks like you’ll even be able to create and share maps. Very social, and very much the influence of Blizzard’s time spent on World of Warcraft. I’m interested to see what they come up with for Diablo 3 as well — I can’t wait to see new ways to share your character, or keep track of friends as they’re playing.
• Felicia Day at Farpoint last Saturday. With some good insight about creating media, and a funny story about Vork. Although how much of a WoW nerd is he really if he’s bragging about being 78? Hit 80 already, man!
• I guess there are going to be “overcloaks” added to the game in the future. I guess that’s cool — it’s actually a step away from the idea of “gear as identification.” We always used to talk about why you couldn’t customize your gear, or just change the look of your gear to, say, your favorite tier while keeping your stats the same: it’s because Blizzard wants your gear to be an identifier not only of who you are, but of what you are: which race, which faction, which spec, and so on. I guess covering up the cloak doesn’t change things too much (I can only ID one cloak by look, and then only because it’s “white and longer than your average cape”), and it does provide a little more graphical flair on the character.
• Is it possible that people are tired of the Dungeon Finder system already? I guess if you ran the thing day and night when it first came out, you might be a little burned out on it, but let’s not forget that we had five years, five years of “LFG Gundrak plzzzz need healer and tank” before this. Wait times have been a little longer, I’ll grant, but I think that’s just the state of the game at this point — we’re between patches and between expansions, and you have to admit, 2010 has had some terrific games so far. I would laugh if people are going after the Dungeon Finder already, though. We just got it — if you’re already tired of it, you’ve played too much. And speaking of the Dungeon Finder, this is a great move as well.
• Finally, this isn’t about WoW, but wow. I played Global Agenda at E3 last year and I liked it a lot. But it’s fine to have a differnet opinion of the game — assuming you’ve actually played it long enough to know.

That’s it — a little short this week, but in my defense, I cleared out the feed complete. There isn’t much going on, though I did let a few good drama stories slip by. If only there was a place where someone was collecting and posting those…