Longtime World of Warcraft players might have noticed a new and somewhat "un-Blizzard-like" trend that has been developing during the past six months. Newer players probably haven't picked up on it, because they don't have much past experience to draw on. But whether you've noticed the change on your own or read about it in forums or fansite blogs, you'd be hard-pressed to try and deny it: Blizzard has been releasing new content and patches at break-neck speeds, faster than ever has before.

Perhaps as proof that you'll never be able to please everyone, two distinct camps have popped up; those who love it and think the new pace is what it should have been all along, and those who feel that all this content is just too much, coming too fast. At risk of starting a flame war, I think it's a really interesting topic to consider. World of Warcraft is the world's most popular MMORPG, and Blizzard earned part of its rock-solid reputation by giving fans consistency throughout the past four years. Drastic changes to such core paradigms aren't something we'd expect from Blizzard (whether it's for better or worse). What's the bigger picture? What can we predict by examining some of these new trends? More importantly, how will it affect you as a customer?

Blizzard has created an under development page for the Tier 9 class sets that will be released in patch 3.2. You can currently check out the Alliance Mage (above), Priest and Warlock sets, as well as the Horde Hunter and Shaman sets.

So what do you think of the designs?

Blizzard has posted its newest class Q&A session with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, and this one focuses on Warlocks. Ghostcrawler covers numerous topics, but one he emphasizes is an upcoming revamp of the soul shard system: "This is a big change, beyond the scope of the 3.2 patch, but we are confident -- CONFIDENT -- that the new system will be something warlocks finally enjoy." The team hopes to talk about it more at BlizzCon, but Ghostcrawler says they want to "make shards fun and remove the hassle."

Ghostcrawler also says the team thinks Warlock pets are too fragile now, so they'll be adding resilience to pets to "fix it right." You can read the full Q&A below and discuss it in this thread in our Warlock forum.

Bornakk has posted an update on the instance capacity issue that causes players to receive a message stating additional instances cannot be launched once the limit has been reached. According to the post, Blizzard is "in the process of modifying our hardware setup to allow for more instances to be active without negatively impacting the performance of these instances." Of course, this will take time and testing to complete.

Bornakk said the instance capacity limit was only supposed to be a short-term solution, and emphasized "this issue currently a top priority for us, and we are working on resolving it as quickly as possible." You can read the full post below.

Have you ever wondered what Blizzard Headquarters looks like? The team over at MMOsite has posted 64 photos from a tour of the main building and two development buildings, and the pictures range from exterior shots to images of Blizzard's museum and library. There's even photos of the gym, which is available 24 hours a day, and the cafeteria to show what employees can do when they're not working on World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III or other projects.

MMOsite even took photos inside the office of Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime and caught a glimpse of the StarCraft II development room. Check out their article to view 16 pages of pictures from the tour.