When the Burning Crusade first came out, veterans noticed a few things back on Azeroth: Some of our favorite NPCs had disappeared! The wandering Rexxar was replaced by a fellow name Rokaro, and Hemet Nesingwary left Stranglethorn, leaving his son, Hemet Nesingwary Jr., to take over the hunt. More recently, Lady Liadrin has come to Shattrath City, leaving behind Lord Solanar Bloodwrath to guide up and coming Blood Knights in her place. In order to move along a few story lines, Blizzard decided that it was worth moving NPCs to move along the story, and left other NPCs in place with minor alterations so that other people could still experience their old quests.

This, however, isn't the only way Blizzard has dealt with progressing story lines.

While we reported a while back on the use of the Essence of the Immortals as a method to unlock the Sunwell Plateau 25-man, progressive patching has continued its march, as Tigole explains to us in a recent forum thread.

The Essence of the Immortals itself is now gone, and instead, all gates will open automatically over time on each server. Tigole explains that although they like the idea of cross-server competition, and plan to implement in the future, The Essence of the Immortals concept wasn't working out as well as they'd hoped. Of course, servers can still compete to unlock the daily quests the fastest.

Blizzard is apparently captivated by Griftah, the snake-oil sales Troll in Shattrath, because they've changed him yet again in 2.3. He's back inside the city, so apparently that investigation the Peacekeeper was doing dug up nothing. And he's gotten a bigger role in the game than ever-- not only does he now have a quest for you to do (that leads into Zul'Aman), but apparently one of the ingredients for the Engineering mount, a hula doll (don't ask), is sold by him for a whopping 100g.

I like Griftah, and I'm glad that he's back-- that jerk Scryer going through his things was none too kind to the shifty Troll while he was gone. And my guess is that Griftah isn't done being vindicated-- I think it would be really funny if, in an upcoming patch, Blizzard changed that old 30g necklace Griftah sold to have a really cool proc or effect put on it, sort of a reward for those who've stood by Griftah the whole time.

On the other hand, I hope this "guinea pig" of progressive content is really helping Blizzard learn how to do it-- seems a little strange to waste updates like this on just one Troll when we could be seeing real progressive content elsewhere in the game. Still, every little step counts-- it's just another update in the whole saga of Griftah the Troll.