Dance Studio Mini Preview
Every now and then, people mail me to ask if there is any information on the Dance Studio promised in the early days of Wrath of the Lich King and the answer is simple: no. Of course it doesn't mean that I can't dig through the files to see if there is anything interesting here.

Reminder - This information isn't official.

Dance Moves
A few dance moves were added to the game files a few months ago and have been here since then.


According to this file, players should be able to customize their dance with a few options :

• Race / Gender specific moves - in this case we can see 10 variations for the Blood Elf Female's dance.
• Special Effects - The "ALL - FX - Frost Nova" effect is called "Icy Finale", we can assume that players will be able to include shiny visual effects to their dances.
• Modifiers - A few options like "Hold for four seconds" or "Repeat for ten seconds" are here
• Emotes - Apparently you will have the option to include some of the in-game emotes to your dance.

By digging a little more in the game files, we can also find a few command / error messages related to the dance studio.

• ERR_DANCE_CREATE_DUPLICATE
• ERR_DANCE_SAVE_FAILED
• ERR_DANCE_DELETE_FAILED
• PlayDance
• WARNING! Cannot start a new dance while one is in progress
• Unknown dance move (ID: %u)!
• Dance Loaded:
• Dance no longer exists
• You haven't created a dance with that name
• Usage: PlayDance("dance name")
• dancecache.wdb
• ERROR! danceMovesDB does not have record id %d
• DBFilesClient\DanceMoves.dbc

Again, keep in mind that this isn't official for the moment but if I had to draw conclusions based on what we have in the game files, I'd say that the Dance Studio will let players create custom dances by combining different moves, effects, and modifiers. Once they are happy with their dance, it looks like they will be able to name it and share it with other players (it would explain the dancecache.wdb to store them clientside). The PlayDance("dance name") command most likely means that players will be able to save multiple dances on a character and pick one depending on their mood.

That's it, I know it's not much but I thought it might be interesting to share what I already know about this even if some of this info could already be outdated. Blizzard doesn't update these files regularly and we will only know how it works when we see if on the official site or the test server.


Comics
Dark Legacy Comic #206 and Teh Gladiators #92 are out.

Seems neat!

It's time for Kael'Thas to start the preliminaries for his Dance-Off contest!

I'm glad blizz has time to work on animating custom dances while they feed us recycled loot art and super sized mobs for progression bosses.  gg

Blizz has numerous teams working on numerous projects.  Its not like they have 5 programmers and 5 graphics designers all working on the same thing.  Think before you type.  Its not hard.

Anyone else thinks that Teh Gladiators are not funny?

Seems like I'm the only one who thinks this is probably the most useless thing added (or going to be added) to WoW, ever.
On par with the frequently used voice chat system.

Dance studios, unique dances... I mean... really?



Yes, but dedicating a team to work on the dance studio obviously takes away resources from other stuff.


But I guess it's cooler to add "UNIQUE, CUSTOMIZED DANCES" to the Cataclysm box instead of "GUYS, WE FIXED THE VANISH BUG*"

* no, I'm not a rogue. Just tried to write a commonly known issue.

Duh.  But they are still manhours spent on flavor crap that could be spent on worthwhile things.  I dont care if they have 300 people in their Modeling and Animation department, if 5 of them are working on dances and another 5 working on pets, that's 400 manhours a week spent on stupid crap.