Three more reasons to like patch day

The first reason to like patch day should be obvious: new content! However, for me personally the real reasons for enjoying patch day don't actually lie in the new content itself, but in some of its side effects.

1. Dead places come back to life.

Now, calling my guild "dead" before the patch would be doing it a great injustice, but it's a simple truth that things quiet down as people have less and less reason to play, to explore new things and to achieve new goals. They log on to raid and do dailies, without talking much or doing a lot of other things in between. Some might not log on for whole weeks.

Not so on patch day! Suddenly everyone and their grandmother is back online and guild chat is overflowing with excited chatter about new patch features. For a social player like me that's great!

2. For a brief amount of time you get to feel like a newbie again.

I think most players still remember the first time they entered the WoW capital of their choice and went "whoa". I'll definitely never forget the first time I walked through the gates of Stormwind. It was an amazing experience, and I felt like I had a whole world laid out in front of me, just waiting for me to discover it. Which I did! The only sad thing about that kind of experience is that you can't really repeat it (not in the same game anyway) - once you know the game inside out, you can't just go and forget it all again.

The moment you log in on patch day however, you're flooded with so much new information it can be hard to keep track. Where's the entrance to that new raid? Cool pet, where did you get that? What's that new achievement that just popped up in guild chat? Personally I find that it's very much comparable to the newbie experience (So much cool new stuff, what the hell am I supposed to look at first?), even if it doesn't last for a very long time. As an added advantage everybody else is new to the content as well, so it's not at all embarrassing to to ask questions or, say, go into a new dungeon without having a clue about the boss encounters.

3. The little things.

New raids, new battlegrounds and new daily quests are very nice and all, but in all honesty I think that the many small, sometimes even undocumented, new features are usually the best ones. They likely cost relatively little effort but can still bring you quite a lot of joy.

For example I tried out the new raid on ten-man with a couple of guildies and we all sat down to eat a fish feast at the start. Lo and behold, the new cat form for druids actually has a proper eating animation! So we all just sat there and stared at our feral druid munching, it was quite mesmerising.

Or take the achievements for emblems: I remember reading multiple times that the old "get so-and-so-many emblems" achievements for heroism and valor would be converted to feats of strength and more or less be replaced by new achievements for conquest and triumph. As it turns out, Blizzard decided to merge them all into one big "dungeon emblems" achievement instead, which is great because it means no part of your old badge count is lost and all of it can count towards the new achievement. With the originally proposed setup, someone with, say, 900 emblems of heroism would have got the "500 emblems" feat of strength, but 400 more badges would have been lost in space, so to speak. As it is now, I'm almost at 1000 Dungeon & Raid Emblems on my main and pretty pleased with that. Small things...

I also squeed with delight when I opened the in-game mail from the orphan matron and it contained images. I really like the new music at the Argent Tournament. I giggled at the cute things the wolvar orphan said. And I could go on and on, even though I've only got a glimpse of all the new stuff so far!

I hope everybody else is having a good patch day as well and not being plagued by too much lag.