A player on the official forums asked what the new woodworking profession would be like, how gathering wood would work, and so on.

If it had been me I'd have asked, "How much wood could a woodworker work if a woodworker could work wood?" and "Where would a wannabe woodworker who would work with wood find wood with which to work the woodworker's wood work?" But I digress.

Nethaera was kind enough to pop in and basically tell us that we were getting ahead of ourselves again, and imply that woodworking probably wouldn't work in this expansion.

"But why just one profession per expansion?" you ask? Got profession fever have you?

Well Nethaera responds to this as well:

We're never short on ideas. We have many that we would like to implement, but implementing them isn't always such a simple task.

For a new profession you need to consider:
How it will work?
Where will the recipes come from and where in the world will they be placed?
Who will the trainers be and what is their story?
What recipes are necessary and what materials are required for them?
What exactly will be the result of the profession as far as stat changes and enhancements be?
What art assets are going to be needed?
What technology will support it on the back end?
Why will people want it?
Is it ultimately fun and interesting?

And many more things. Then in the end, it must balance out with the rest of the game as well as with other professions. Combine that with all the other things we are working on for Wrath of the Lich King and it isn't something we can just toss together overnight.

So there it is, as usual: this whole "game development" thing can be a lot more complex than it seems, and consequently we players can't always have as much new stuff as we might want. Still, woodworking is in those Blizzard offices somewhere, percolating through the developers' brains -- so maybe one day we might actually get to work with the wood we've always wanted.

It seems that WoW Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan has a new bit of expansion information for every journalist he talks to at this week's European Game Conference in Leipzig, Germany. This batch of news comes from Curse gaming, who has sent a couple of journalists over to get the scoop.

• We already know about the L70 instance called Utgarde Keep in the Howling Fjord zone. Now we learn that there will be a second wing of the instance for L80 players called Utgarde Pinnacle. Both dungeons will have Normal and Heroic modes. Yay for key grinding! Anybody?

• The new Inscription profession will do more than increases effectiveness of spells and abilities. Devs are playing with the concept of using Inscription to improve other elements like range, duration, etc.

• The "increased leveling curve" of levels 20-60 is going to be accomplished two ways: reduction of the amount of experience required per level and increasing the amount of experience a quest grants by 30%.

• To address Hunter concerns, Blizzard is considering a Woodworking profession as well as a Mortal Strike kind of ability that reduces healing effectiveness on the target in PvP. These are just ideas they are currently considering and have not been confirmed as going live.

The full interview can be read on Curse's front page. Curse promises a video of the interview later tonight. I'll update this post with the link when it goes live.

As for the pre-60 leveling increase, I've been toying with leveling an enhancement shaman, but have been weary about the grind. This may be the incentive to get me to accomplish that goal. Is this enough for you? Will you level an alt before the expansion?

Mystic Worlds lays out exactly what is, in my humble opinion, the biggest problem with World of Warcraft right now: We need some horizontal change. As I said in my impressions of BlizzCon, Blizzard seems intent on building more and more vertical content into the game-- Zul'Aman is built to be played after Karazhan, and Wrath of the Lich King will add another 10 levels onto the top of the 70 we have now. And while Blizzard keeps building up, they're more or less ditching everything that happens from 1-58. Even worse, the only changes we're seeing there are going to be to move past that stuff faster-- not only are they ignoring it, they're working on pushing it out of the game entirely.

So Mystic Worlds wants more horizontal changes. That doesn't necessarily mean midlevel content (although a lot of her suggestions mean more things to do for midlevel players). Instead it means that Blizzard should take a breath, and set their teams on making the existing game experience more fulfilling. Things like guild halls, single player dungeons, more professions (Inscription will probably provide new items 1-70, but Woodworking has been necessary for a long time), and little touches-- more live events, gambling minigames (that all players can do), and fun little additions that all players can get involved in, not just those who have made it to 70.

Now, there has to be some part of Blizzard that is pushing for this stuff-- it's not quite as simple as casual vs. raiders in this case. But Blizzard seems to think that they're behind on high end content, and that they're rushing to catch up to players who are hungry for more of it. I don't think either perception is true. If anyone is hungry for new things to do, it's players who have more than three alts, and yet a main that hasn't yet reached 70. I'm more than willing to trade one of the three or four 25 man instances planned in WotLK for two or three of these "horizontal changes," and I'd guess most other players are, too.

The lack of information about the next expansion continues, and so does the fabrication by fans hungry for info about new content. This time Tobold lays out what he'd like to see in the next expansion, which he is calling, as a parody of the Burning Crusade, the Freezing Jihad.

He's got some of the usual suspects in there, including the long awaited hero classes. But his biggest suggestion is probably that the expansion focuses on adding oomph (technical term) to the midlevels of the game. In his imagination, there is no new level cap, but rather a complete reworking of everything between 1 and 70, including an all new neutral faction with four new races, and a new continent of quests for players from beginning to end. I doubt we'll get anything near that comprehensive, but it's true that players want more midlevel content. While this is probably beyond their wildest dreams, hopefully Blizzard will at least hear their pleas.

In other places, Tobold is just plain wrong-- we're going to see guild housing before we ever see player housing, and Blizzard has consistently said they want their armor to look like what they say, not what players say. But he's dead right on the new professions-- woodworking and the ability of players to make arrows and bows would both fit perfectly with the lore, and fill a nice hole in crafting that's been there for a long time.