World of Warcraft in 2009 Retrospective

Ten Ton Hammer has taken a retrospective look at the various bits of news that World of Warcraft generated during 2009. Let’s go all the way back to January:

January started off with patch 3.0.8 which introduced a ton of class changes. The most popular among the changes were the removal of the (Shield Wall) spells from the global cooldown, racial restrictions were removed from mounts, faster spirit forms, the ability to create new Death Knights on any realm once you hit 55, and some achievement mix-ups. The Loremaster achievement was nerfed and even better, there were a bajillion changes made to each class which included changing everything up, fixing stuff, and a lot of buffs.

Of course, 3.0.8 was also a really awful patch at the same time. Wintergrasp was taking down servers, Human females looked stupid with their hats on, Ritual of Summoning was broken, tooltips were wrong, and a ton of other things. Thankfully, patch 3.0.8a fixed most of it along with some hotfixes too.

January also brought about the major concerns for the SteelSeries mouse, namely how it could violate the ToS, not to mention the massive amount of either really positive or really negative reviews it received. Youplayorwepay also began its rapid descent into closure, which wouldn’t complete until April 15th when Blizzard threatened legal action.

January also was the month that Blizzard had gold selling ads on their official forums for a day, before they took an aggressive approach on purging them from their ad servers.