I haven’t had the chance to play too much WoW the entire last week or two – I’ve been working on getting this site up and running, as well as spending time outside by the pool while the weather’s favorable for it.  This is regrettable in a way, since the Midsummer Fire Festival is in full swing and I still need to get a couple pets that I missed last year.  However, believe it or not, there are things more important than WoW.

That being said, I’m really looking forward to patch 3.2 for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is the redesign of druid bear and cat forms.  At long last, my tauren druid will have some rather nifty cat forms instead of the hideous abomination of a cat form that we’ve had for nearly five years.

Now, each form for each race of druid (night elf and tauren) have several different cat and bear skins, which is insanely cool!  The downside?  I think Blizzard should have just given in and let players choose whichever bear and cat skin they wish to use instead of tying it to their character’s skin or hair color.  For night elves its not such a big deal, since hair color doesn’t necessarily change your overall character.  Tauren, though, get the bum side of this deal.  We have to change our entire skin color to change the color of our cat/bear skin.  How lame!

Being an RP-er, and having written stories for my character that introduced them to Northrend, and his reason for falling off the radar for several months (during the time I had my account deactivated), I had an idea all planned in mind to have him use the polar bear and white cat forms, since he spent a lot of time in the cold of Northrend.  But no, Blizzard has to rain on my parade.  There’s no way I’m giving my druid the “albino” tauren skin color to get the white cat and polar bear skins, that would completely change who he is.

Needless to say, I’m rather excited anyway.  Here’s a video from wow.com showing the various tauren druid forms from the 3.2 PTR.

I’ll hopefully have more time to play around the time 3.2 hits the live realms to give mini-reviews of the various new features and content included in that update. Stay tuned!

Another summer, another Mt. Dew gamer-related promotion. Last time it was Halo, this time its World of Warcraft. While I think it’s a cool idea in theory, especially awarding everyone who even bothers to go to the Mt. Dew game fuel promo site with an in-game vanity pet (assuming you have a WoW BattleNet account), I think the idea of using the promotion to sell Mt. Dew failed miserably.

The goal of any promotion like this is to sell related items on both sides – bottles/cans of Mt. Dew and copies of World of Warcraft. In my opinion, Blizzard has the upper hand in this deal. Copies of WoW and its two expansions are everywhere. Dozens of copies line the shelves of any Best Buy, Wal-Mart, GameStop, Target or any number of other software retailers, local and nation-wide. There’s no problem there and, perhaps, Blizzard might sell some copies based on this promotion.

On the other side of the coin, I can’t find either of the two WoW game fuel flavors anywhere – not at Wal-Mart, Target or two other fairly large, more localized chains. I’ve checked a few gas stations, as well…nothing. How exactly does Mt. Dew expect to sell more products if their products aren’t on store shelves? I do realize that the stores themselves determine what products they stock and the quantity, but you would think Mt. Dew would work with any retailers who get their regular products to make sure these promotional drinks are on store shelves. This also goes for special or seasonal flavors like their new Voltage and Live Wire. I don’t drink much Mt. Dew, but the Voltage flavor is my favorite ever, and I can see it disappearing because it doesn’t sell well enough. Why? Because its incredibly hard to find.

To switch gears a tiny bit, I think it’s a sneaky move by Blizzard to require everyone to convert their WoW account to a BattleNet account to be eligible to receive the in-game Battle-Bot. With as many issues as they’ve been having with these converted BattleNet accounts, it’s a bit premature to force people to switch their account over.

Taking everything into account, I feel this is a failed promotion, mostly on Mt. Dew’s end of things (or, perhaps, the stores that sell Mt. Dew?). Mt. Dew should have done more to convince the retailers stocking their regular products to also carry a decent amount of the promotional drinks. Blizzard seems to be able to sit back and watch the cash come in, not having much to do besides designing the Battle-Bot and a few other behind-the-scenes web-based connections with the Mt. Dew site.

There’s always next year, right? I wonder what game they will team up with then? Any guesses?

[Disclaimer: I don't live in a large, metropolitan area, but I don't live in hicksville, either. Its possible large areas like Chicago or St. Louis will see a larger influx of the promotional drinks just because they will be exposed to more people. This article is just from my point of view based on my location.]