You probably know Peter Molyneux's name if you've been playing video games for any significant amount of time -- he's the mind behind such classics as Populous and Dungeon Keeper, all the way up to Black and White and the current Fable series. He recently gave a talk to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and early on his talk (part 1 is here, part 2 and part 3 are also online), he speaks out about our favorite game, World of Warcraft. Specifically, he mentions it as an influence on his game design, and says the most brilliant thing about the game are "the steeds," or the mounts you could pick up at level 40 (nowadays, of course, they're available at level 20). He says that in his own games, he tries to give everything out to the player as soon as possible, but the fact that Blizzard made you wait to ride a mount around, made you work up a few levels for it, really stuck with him.

Now, of course, he's taking away his own lessons here -- Blizzard's philosophy with the game as a whole seems to reward the player as much as possible, and especially lately, with emblems and the different modes and all of the other daily and weekly quests they've come up with, they're making you do less waiting for prizes than they ever have before (in fact, compared to MMOs when they first started, much, much less waiting). And Molyneux's own games are very "rewarding" -- I don't think more than two minutes went by in Fable without me getting a level or a new spell or a new item to play around with. But his point is still good, even after all that: anticipation of a reward can be just as strong a motivator as the reward itself.

Here's a great tip from WoW LJ on the Ravasaur quest. Like me, many of you probably headed for the new Ravasaur mount on the Horde side the first chance you had in patch 3.2. But there's a hiccup in the quest: while you have to get poisoned by the raptors, the Ravasaurs die pretty easily. You need to attack them for them to poison you, but if you kill them before they sting you, you're out of luck.

Still, those crafty folks over on LJ already have a solution. You can use things that work as weapons, but are still weak enough to keep the raptors alive, even in your uber-powerful level 80 hands. Lances from the Argent Tournament, low-level fishing poles, Blacksmith hammers and mining picks all work, along with anything else that can be wielded but has low damage. You can also level up any weapon specialties you don't have maxed out yet, but be careful there, too: anything that goes too high will kill the level 51 raptors off as well.

Good luck -- to the raptors for staying alive, as all you'll want is the poison. And good luck to you with the rest of the quest. By the time you're all done, the poison task might actually have revealed itself as the easiest part.

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WoW's Patch 3.2 ushers in the Crusaders' Coliseum, the Isle of Conquest, flying mounts at 60, and much more. WoW.com has all the patch information your Worgen obsessed mind can handle in WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2!

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Tired of hoofing it yet? Once you reach level 20, you can hoof it in an entirely new way: on your first mount. Mounts used to become available at level 40; then the level requirement was dropped to 30, and now Patch 3.2 (August 2009) has set the bar for obtaining your first mount to level 20. On the back of your trusty steed (or Kodo or lizard or birdie or ...), you'll be able to zip across increasingly larger zones and quest areas in style. You'll start off on a standard ground mount. Later, you can upgrade to faster versions of those creatures and eventually to mounts that can fly.

There are two parts to getting yourself into the saddle. The first step is training your riding skill. You'll upgrade your riding skill at level 40, 60 and 70, giving you access to faster mounts and mounts that fly.

WoW.com has covered patch 3.2 extensively. Everything from the surprising changes to flying mounts, to the latest and greatest loot, and all the changes in between. In our patch 3.2 class, raiding, and PvP guides we take a look at exactly what changes and how the changes will affect your playing.

Patch 3.2 is here, and there is a whole herd of mount changes stampeding into your stables. Here's a quick rundown of just what's changed about all the things you ride in patch 3.2, from updates to when you can buy mounts and for how much, new tweaks to old mounts like the Ulduar Proto-drakes and the TCG items, and brand new mounts like the hippogryphs from the Argent Tournament and the long-awaited Ravasaur.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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In what appears to be an attempt to put an end to scams capitalizing on the vanity mounts found in Upper Deck's popular World of Warcraft trading card game, the latest Patch 3.2 PTR build seems to have removed the Bind-on-Pickup restriction on the loot mounts. Originally unearthed by Boubouille on MMO Champion, the removal seems to be intended, and includes new methods for obtaining the loot items from Landro Longshot in Booty Bay (with the exception of the Riding Turtle, which reportedly remains BoP).

This means it should be easier to obtain these special mounts if players are indeed selling them for copious amounts of gold - conceivably setting record amounts at the auction house. This effectively kills the scamming method of supposedly selling desireable items like the Spectral Tiger mount. On the other hand, someone with real world cash who gets one of those mounts off eBay can theoretically trade it in game for some whopper gold. That's kind of like they're selling gold in some roundabout way. Either way, score one for Blizzard. It looks like it might be time to start earning a bit of money... think anyone will sell the tiger for 500 Gold? No? Drat.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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Patch 3.2 is looking more and more solid. There are still some bugs with the bosses in the Argent Coliseum, but those are being worked out and appear to be more of a technical thing than a design flaw. This leads us to think that patch 3.2 will be dropping relatively soon.

So with that said, I've been wondering lately about my alts. In particular the four left between 60 and 70 who are sitting in Outland not doing anything in particular. I know that if I drop the gold on them and let them fly around I'll have much more incentive to play them through to 80, and perhaps even find a new class that I love (truth be told, I'm finding my 63 rogue quite a bit of fun to play lately).

As I'm thinking of finishing my army of level 80 alts, I have to plan a little bit. Why should I level right now if within the next couple weeks I'm going to be able to fly around and do it all much faster? Wouldn't my time be better spent playing Fallout 3 working on WoW.com projects?

Blizzard simply can't make up their minds about this, can they? The Rusted and Ironbound Proto-Drakes, which are rewarded for completing Glory of the Ulduar Raider on Normal and Heroic, were slated for removal at an unspecified time in the future after patch 3.2's launch. The reasoning was that it would be easier to acquire them with Coliseum gear, and they were meant for cutting-edge players only.

However, Eyonix has just announced that they are not planning on removing these proto-drake rewards from the achievement in patch 3.2, and furthermore, they don't plan to do it "in the foreseeable future." In the event that they do change their minds again, you are promised a one-month warning. So get back to those hard-modes!

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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As dear Wryxian announced earlier today, we're getting a new build on the PTR. The unofficial notes for this build are already making the rounds, and they're... not very interesting! Perhaps the most notable change is that the change to mount casting speed, previously only applied to ground mounts, now affects flying mounts as well.

When the casting time change to ground mounts in Patch 3.2 was announced, Eliah Hecht, Michael Gray and I had a long debate about why they wouldn't have applied the change to flying mounts as well. We ended up coming to the conclusion that they were avoiding it for PvP reasons; only needing to be out of combat for a second and a half to mount up and zoom off to escape a fight that's not going your way would be a little... cheap. The outlier here was the Druid Flight Form, which is an instant cast spell. Everyone but Druids hate that though, right? It's pretty freaking annoying when you get into a scuffle, you gain the upper hand, and then the Druid just runs in circles like a headless boomkin spamming their flight button and hoping it eventually takes. So we figured that didn't count. It was a perfect example of why being able to fly away quickly was a bad thing.

Boy, are our faces red. Flying mounts get the 1.5s cast time now as well. Sometimes trying to figure out Blizzard's reasoning doesn't really pay off. I'm not going to complain that much, though. I certainly appreciate being able to get into the air faster!

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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A little surprise on the Patch 3.2 PTR was discovered this evening. The Cold Weather Flying training, which previously had to be purchased for each character that wanted to fly in Northrend is now available as a Bind on Account book purchasable at the exotic mounts vendor in Dalaran.

The Use text is a little odd in that it notes the "tome is consumed when read." To me that means that the book is only a one use thing, which is a departure from current BoA items. And why have a level 68 requirement on this and not the normal Cold Weather Flying training? If you're 68 you're likely to be able to get to Dalaran anyways these days.

But wait Did you see it? You might have missed it.

It shows level 68 being the required level, not level 77.

Rock Paper Shotgun has an interesting piece up looking at travel in massively multiplayer games, and while the analysis is really about travel in all MMOs, of course World of Warcraft gets placed front and center -- with the notable exceptions of Mages and Warlock summons, it's a game that squarely places you in its vast world, and asks you to make some solid decisions about where you want to be. While travel has certainly gotten easier (and will continue to do so), it's still an important part of the world -- sometimes, when you're in a backwater zone and your hearthstone is down and there's no summons available to you, you've just got to get on a griffon and put the time in to fly around.

Why is that? Why can't we just teleport around at will to places we've been before (a la Fallout 3 or Fable 2, if you've ever played those games)? Why does Blizzard make us traverse the wide world? RPS lands on two solutions: either they just want you to play the game more (certainly possible, especially since big worlds with long travel times and subscription fees are a trademark of the MMO genre), or they're just being jerks about it. But their panelists, and Blizzard, have offered one more suggestion: they want this world to feel vast, and one way to do that is to make you move around it rather than warp anywhere you want at a moment's notice.

Then again, that's some deep psychology, and sometimes you just want to get in an instance with your friends and fight (hence the recent changes to summoning anywhere, queueing from anywhere, and so on). Travel definitely serves a purpose in MMOs, but the genre has shown in the past few years that while instant travel all the time might shrink the world a little too much, sometimes you just need to get to where you want to be.

[via Slashdot]

You're a pet and mount maniac. You've hunted down every noncombat pet you can find, gotten a lucky roll on every rare mount you can possibly pick up, and after long last, you've earned both the "Lil' Game Hunter" and "Mountain o' Mounts" achievements. But still, you want more for some reason. More pets, more mounts, more achievement points.

Good news: Bornakk says that there will still be more to find. While he says they won't be upping the achievements every time they bring out a patch that has more pets and mounts to collect, they will definitely add in new achievements periodically for collecting both noncombat pets and mounts (and, though he doesn't say so, we'd assume they'll add in extra rewards besides the achievement points, including extra pets or mounts to be earned at each level).

So if you are in fact a collecting master and have already earned the 75 pets and 100 mounts (a much easier feat than it used to be) for both maximum achievements currently in the game, just be patient. There'll be new goals to go after soon.

After yet another Cracked Egg with nothing but a Cobra Hatchling in it, and the bigtime raiding proto-drakes constantly getting dropped out of the game, there's really only one other option: the Red Proto-drake, a reward for the Glory of the Hero meta-achievement. It's not easy: you've got to not only beat all of the heroics in the game, but all of the hard mode achievements for each of them. Guides like our OverAchievers can help, and a really great group to go along with helps more, but some of the achievements are so tough they need extra attention.

The Oculus' achievement, however, is one that needs an even closer look. And 4 Haelz kindly provides exactly that, with an in-depth guide to toppling two achievements in one, both the Emerald and Ruby Void, by doing the boss with five Amber drakes. The Amber drakes are usually meant as DPS, which makes this fight extra tough: you can't take much damage at all, because you can't get any damage back without healers. So what it requires, instead, is communication and coordination. Basically, you use the drakes' Time Stop ability to slow the fight down, and then try to do some coordinated kiting while DPSing like mad, all the time hoping that you can bring him down before he takes one of you out.

As Bell says, once you get the idea (and have wiped a few times -- you should probably be riding the drakes naked, since not only does your gear not affect their performance, but it'll save you repair costs), the fight's not actually that hard to pull off, but it's the learning that's going to hurt.