Hi, everyone. This is Averry, the writer behind the Warchief’s Command Board.

As those of you who’ve read the site’s About page already know, I’ve always made a point never to break character in the blog. I’ve decided to make this one exception, though, to address a recent development that affects the Command Board. This is a one-time thing; I don’t plan on ever posting as myself here again after this.

You probably already know what this is about. During Blizzard’s Mists of Pandaria press tour, it was announced that the final tier of the MoP expansion will be the Siege of Orgrimmar, in which both Alliance and Horde lay siege to the city in order to end the rule of Garrosh Hellscream.

Since news broke about Garrosh being the final boss of the expansion, I’ve gotten a number of comments on Twitter and in e-mails, either wondering how this news will affect the blog, or, more flatteringly, basically saying that blog-Garrosh has had a hand in making them a little less excited about the prospect of being rid of game-Garrosh. Thank you for that – it really feels great to think that people have been enjoying the blog at all, much less that they’ve developed sympathy for – let’s face it – a rather unlikable character as a result of it.

I’m not sure yet what this is going to mean for the blog.  There’s still plenty of time to figure that out. The short version, for the short term, is that the blog isn’t going anywhere. I’m already cooking up a fair number of ideas about how I might play this upcoming storyline, but since we still know very little, they’re just possibilities. Once we have more definite information about the MoP story, I’ll start incorporating it into the blog.

The one request I would make is that everyone try as much as possible to keep direct references to the planned MoP developments out of their comments to posts here. (Well, other than this post. Comment away on this one!) Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love seeing your comments and hearing from you. But to a certain extent, talking about the upcoming Siege of Orgrimmar tier here breaks the blog: since I write from Garrosh’s perspective, and the conceit of it all is that Garrosh is an actual person who’s writing about events as they’re actually happening to him, upcoming patches represent events that are out of his frame of reference right now. There’s no way he could respond to comments about them, simply because they wouldn’t make any sense to him. It would be like someone showing up at your work and saying to you, “So how does it feel knowing that two years from now they’re going to fire you for embezzling funds, which by the way you’re not actually going to start doing for another six months or so.” You’d be at a loss to respond to this person, because you’d be too busy calling the nearest insane asylum.

One of the things I enjoy most about the blog is hearing from readers and getting the chance to respond, whether that be through comments or the mailbag posts (yes, “Bob” notwithstanding, the vast majority of the letters really are from actual readers). But when I get comments that basically say “Hey, look what’s going to be happening to you, Garrosh!”, there’s really no way for me to respond, because if you think about it, all Garrosh could respond with would be a blank stare. I mean, a blanker stare.

Rest assured, we’re a long way from seeing the end of Garrosh’s adventures across the internet. I still have plenty of ideas (WTB more time to write them in!), and I’m sure MoP will end up giving me even more great material to play off of.

Thanks once again for reading, friends. Honor go with us all—hang on. Ack, it really is easy to lapse into character sometimes. Sorry.

Be seeing you,

Averry

ADDENDUM (Added 7/26/12) — In light of the Mists of Pandaria release date, I thought I would add one additional note to this post, just to give everyone a heads up – don’t be surprised if there’s a bit of a time delay between new lore developments going live in-game and being acknowledged in-blog. The new storylines of MoP, and the pre-launch events, will definitely be reflected in Garrosh’s posts here, but I’ll be giving myself a little leeway time-wise to play through the new content and process it for post/story ideas. I’m not on the Beta, so other than a few odds and ends that I’ve picked up online, I’ll be getting my first exposure to the new material on launch day. Please don’t send leave angry comments on September 26 when I haven’t started talking about Pandaria yet!