WoW Panders, Ryan Gets Angry

To the people who take the Warcraft fiction seriously, the ones that scoff at my demands for a playable Pandaren race whenever a new WoW expansion gets announced, I submit to you this: motorcycles in Azeroth. That's right, in this medieval land of swords and sorcery, you'll soon be able to roll around on a long-forked chopper like some kind of pauldron-wearing Hell's Angel.

Now, I understand the need for a regular influx of extreme novelty items to keep long-haul players on their toes, but how do you justify a big-ass Harley-style chopper--with the vanity plate "PWN" no less--within the Warcraft canon? WoW Insider rationalizes the introduction of motorcycles citing other mechanical anomolies already present in Azeroth, such as helicopters and submarines. Those don't seem like the kinds of exceptions that you want to encourage. If nothing else, the least they could do is make them look like something Azeroth's engineers might've actually cooked up.

Using the phrase "jump the shark" makes me feel a little more like Mo Rocca than I'm comfortable with, but I can honestly think of no better summation of this turn of events. I'm all for some silliness, and Warcraft certainly has a built-in capacity for it, but this just seems like Blizzard's playing it a little too fast and loose.