Zarhym with the World of Warcraft community team on BlizzCast Episode 10, did you find it? Here are some discusstions of the highlights of World of Warcraft's recent patch 3.2, Call of the Crusade, are Lead Encounter Designer Mr.Scott Mercer and Senior Game Designer Mr. Dave Maldonado.

Zarhym: First up, can you just give us an overview of the story that is developing here? For instance, why are players taking part in the Argent Tournament?

Dave Maldonado:  The Argent Crusade's tournament serves two purposes really. One is to unite the Alliance and the Horde in their efforts against Icecrown. It was never really kind of a unified thing from the very start and after the events at the Wrathgate it just completely fell apart. And so Tirion's really just trying to get the two factions and their leaders - you know and sort of all the heroes that are working under them, for them - together at the tournament and sort of trying to change the way that they see one another, or communicate with one another and, you know, get them actually working together against this thing instead of wheeling around in the sky above Icecrown taking pot shots at one another.

And really the second goal is Tirion's just gathering heroes to assault Icecrown; and again, the events at the Wrathgate really showed that, you know, any conventional force that assaults the citadel are just going to get kind of wiped out en masse and then raised as undead, attack their own commanders and it's all going to fall apart. So the idea is that this relatively small force of very skilled and very well-equipped attackers can maybe move on the citadel and see some degree of success. So not only does the tournament, with all its rewards, draw adventurers that might not normally show up just out of a sense of duty. It'll get people that are looking for fame, people that are looking for money, you know, just really all the bad asses in Northrend together. It allows Tirion to sort of scout them all and kind of hand-pick the best candidates for this final attack.

Zarhym: So what objectives have to be achieved in order to claim victory in Isle of Conquest? I mean, you know, what objectives do you have to accomplish in order to win an actual match?

Scott Mercer: Sure. The basic objective is to kill the opposing general who's in the keep. You can't just walk up to the general and go, "hi!" and start tanking and spanking him.

[more friendly chuckles]

You have to destroy the keep walls to allow access to him. So the first part of the Battleground ends up being really just trying to take down those walls and we give you all kinds of tools to do it. There are points of interest that you can take over that provide you with vehicles and we've got, I believe four or five different vehicles that you can pilot there. There's an airship area where, if you take that point of interest, you can actually hop onto an airship that flies over the enemy base. And you can man guns from there and shoot the walls down. Another really cool thing you can do is, actually if you leap off of the airship, you can actually parachute into the enemy base, steal some of their explosives and then use those explosives to take out the doors. So the first part of it is just taking down the doors as fast as possible and having this huge 40 vs. 40-player fight over the various points of interest that provide vehicles; and then once the doors are down, then it's a mad rush to get inside the keep and take out the general.

You can find more interesting questions from Zarhym again.