Blizzard (kind of) announces 10 man cross-realm raiding, and how it will work

Blizzard as a corporate identity is pretty consistent, so you can often speculate on interesting information by reading between the lines, or noticing what goes unsaid. And trust me, as a Blizzard News Junkie I relate this to you in the same way an alcoholic might tell you that Children's Tylenol contains an astounding amount of alcohol**.

A couple of weeks ago I was curious if Blizzard had said anything more about Gnomeregan in Cataclysm. So I checked around and didn't find much, except for several forum threads stating that since "Blizzard didn't say it", nothing that might happen to Gnomeregan was official.

Well, not really.

The information did not come directly from Blizzard, but it came from PC Gamer, who were doing an Exclusive Article on Cataclysm. Considering the official motto of Blizzard PR ("Manage Expectations or DIE") and the lengths Blizzard goes to avoid granting even tiny grains of hope ("Possible Potential Release Date"), it seems unlikely that Bliz would let an Exclusive Content Provider deceive the WoW-playing public.

Blizzard said nothing, which said everything, and now we are retaking Gnomeregan, and I'm ecstatic.

Well, today Blizzard had some welcome news about Holiday Bosses :

Just to clarify some misconceptions about this new functionality, the summoning of holiday bosses is going away. Players can queue for these bosses via the Dungeon Finder or special holiday NPCs found in the world. Once the party is finalized, the group will be ported directly to the area where the holiday boss resides. Players can kill the holiday bosses as often as they want for standard loot (epic rings, trinkets, etc.), however, they will only drop one holiday-themed loot trove per player per day. These loot troves will have a chance of containing rare holiday items such as The Horseman's Reins.

So Blizzard has added functionality to track dungeon process of players individually, instead of relying on timers or daily quests ... or Raid IDs. I wonder if they could find a use for that :

Doing [cross-realm 10-mans] is a bit more complicated than the 5 player dungeons. For 5 player dungeons it's not a big deal to allow the random heroics to skip lock outs and is not very hard to setup a group. We obviously can't skip lockouts for raids and it just much more common for raids to not complete all of the content, so you could come back a few days later and find someone else cleared your instance. It's definitely something that sounds good in theory but there are a lot of issues that we would have to figure out first.

Oh yeah -- so if Blizzard is now tracking and rewarding individual player progress on Holiday Dungeon Bosses, they could also track and reward individual player progress on, say, 10-man cross-server raids. Awesome.

** Probably not true