Exclusive Interview
with Tyren

By Thurston Hillman & Byron Mudry

It’s noon , and Ratboy and I headed back to the Vivendi booth to meet up with Kacy Dishon (Public Relations Assistant) for an interview. When we arrived, we found out that the very capable and friendly Daniel Chin (Associate Community Manager – International) would be looking after us. We discovered Daniel’s not-so-secret alias is none other than Tyren from the Forums!

While waiting for Tyren to complete an earlier interview, I tracked down Rob Barris (Lead Software Engineer – Mac Team) to discuss their plans for the Mac client. As many of you know I switched to an iMac several months ago and have never looked back

(covered in Gaming on the dark side).

Rob and I have chatted via email a few times, and I wanted to at least say hello while I was down in sunny LA.

MAC Info

While waiting for Tyren, I got the chance to talk briefly with Rob about the Mac client. He was very passionate about the fact that Blizzard supports the Mac and said it would continue despite Bootcamp being made available for the new intel iMacs.

In fact, he said that Bootcamp has been pushing him to increase the performance of the Mac client as WoW actually runs faster through Bootcamp on an iMac, than in native OS X mode. He let slip that he has been working on this as a pet peeve and that most of the technology to significantly increase the frame rate on the OS X side has been done and is being included in the 1.11 patch. However it will not go active until a new driver is released from Apple, which may not be as soon as patch 1.11.

When pressed on exact frame rates that we could expect once it has been optimized, he would only say, “significantly faster than it is now”.

I thanked him again for all the Mac players, for supporting WoW on Mac and allowing us to natively game on a system we love. To which he commented that Blizzard will support Macs for the foreseeable future.

Meet Remnants of the Alliance

At this point Daniel came to meet us and to provide an overview of the changes upcoming in WoW.

He started by going over the big news of the day. The Draenei are the official new race for the Alliance . He gave us a tour of the Deainei starting zone and a brief history of the Draenei and how they have worked them into the storyline of WoW.