Open the floodgates!

Well, it looks like the flood gates have been opened. As I arrived home from work yesterday after picking up the kids, I checked my twitter feed, which was empty before I left work. Now as I look at the notification bar on my phone, there are nearly 250 tweets from everybody and their brother. Looks like the NDA is lifted, the Alpha is over, and the Beta is to begin.

The Flood Gates have Opened.

There are some fellow bloggeres, those of whom I will not hold a grudge nor covet, who revealed that they were in the Friends and Family Alpha, and are now in the Beta. I cried a little on the inside, but then I remembered… I was “in the alpha”, just not a functional questing/dungeon crawling/lore finding version.

I will not lie, I had a copy of the Alpha client, and in turn a local sandbox to play in. I will not reveal where I got it, though, simply to protect those who happened to make it available, and in turn give me this little peek into the Cataclysm. Sure, I had no NPCs, no quests, no items, and mostly broken terrain and the occasional complete system lockup, but it was still fun to see the new content. In fact it got me even more excited about the upcoming expansion.

Anyway, with the new information flowing onto the web, I hope to bring you some speculation on the upcoming Paladin changes.  Most likely I will focus on the Holy and Protection trees, but will touch on Retribution as well.

So, for now, I leave you with my favorite shot of a very inquizitive Deathwing… guess he’s wondering what you’re doing at his welcome back party.

Hey... did you bring the cake?

The NDA and you

At the moment, the World of Warcraft community is all up in a tizzy. Yesterday, MMO-Champion.com spewed a massive amount of leaked screenshots onto their main page. These were apparently pulled from the Alpha Client. The interesting part about it all, is that the Friends & Family Alpha is supposedly covered by an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). A Non-Disclosure Agreement is:

a legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wish to restrict access to by third parties. It is a contract through which the parties agree not to disclose information covered by the agreement. An NDA creates a confidential relationship between the parties to protect any type of confidential and proprietary information or trade secrets. As such, an NDA protects non-public business information.

So, according to the contract, which I’m assuming had to be signed to be part of the Alpha test, the party who is agreeing to the contract must not leak or provide information provided from the Alpha test to the outside/a 3rd party.

Slight SPOILER ALERT, after the break, one image, but it’s kind of important, I’d think.