Posts with tag 2013-year-in-review

Patch 5.4 was gearing up to go live in early September, so it's not too surprising that August was dominated by the wait for both that and BlizzCon's approach. However, this turned out to be a very news-heavy months for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the patch.

Also, The Burdens of Shahao was released this month. More like this, Blizz!

July was a very heavy month for news on the patch 5.4 PTR, but it sparked a lot of good discussion concerning the new Proving Grounds feature and where the story would finally end in Mists of Pandaria. This was also an excellent month for the Know Your Lore column.

Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate! And for everyone, stay safe out there today, particularly if you have to be out and about in bad weather.

June 2013 saw an avalanche of information off the patch 5.4 PTR, announcements of several upcoming features like connected realms and flex raiding, some class introspection over action-bar bloat, and unfortunately for Mobile Armory users, a successful hacking attempt.

May was all about patch 5.3 news, heroic scenarios, Battlefield: Barrens, and (strangely enough) an awful lot of debate over whether WoW was too easy or not. Where did that come from?

Oh, well. We also got crochet worgen and a lot of really nifty screenshots in Around Azeroth in May.

News was pretty slow in the early part of the month as everyone settled to the task of working to unlock all of the Isle of Thunder's goodies and getting to Lei Shen. Things picked up as more information rolled off the patch 5.3 PTR.

There were three pretty obvious themes in April that got a lot of play: The game's gearing model and how it could be improved, the lack of tanks and healers in the Throne of Thunder LFR, and what on earth was going on with the Alliance and its major lore figures.

This is the fifth year that I've done the Best of WoW Insider series, and I have rarely encountered a month in which it was harder to cut so much out in pursuit of the "best." March 2013 was embarrassingly full of riches. I mean, any month in which a major patch drops is always interesting, but this one just had a tidal wave of great commentary, screenshots, art, and machinima. I apologize to everyone and everything that I had to leave out.

The end of the month did get a bit quieter. I can't tell whether that's because players settled down a little to work on the content, or if it's because Bioshock: Infinite dropped on the 26th and everyone played themselves into a state of collapse.

February 2013 was largely consumed with PTR work in anticipation of patch 5.2, and I'd be remiss not to mention the insane amount of work that Matticus did to get us up-to-date and accurate information on what to expect in the Throne of Thunder. Apart from that, February saw a run of great raid and guild recruitment videos in Moviewatch (not all of which I was able to include here, regrettably) and a noticeable streak of class-based introspection.

Welcome back to the Best of WoW Insider series! If you're new to WoW Insider, every December we run a retrospective series on the best articles from the previous year and/or those pieces that most ably captured the zeitgeist of the WoW community. There'll be one retrospective post each day through December 31st, so keep checking back as we count down.

We start today with January 2013, which saw patch 5.2 reach the PTR for the first time. Like other months in which the current raid content is stale and we're waiting on new PTR news, it was a very busy month for opinion pieces and the art scene. The latter in particular saw one of the year's most popular videos debut at the end of the month.

For some reason, GC also popped up in the news a lot this January.