The Tournament Test Realm outside of the Orc starting area.

We've been covering the Tournament Test Realm (TTR) lately, especially the stress test tomorrow between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. PST. It's going to be a lot of fun I'm sure – assuming the server can stay up.

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One of the many excellent sessions in the ScreenBurn track at SXSW Interactive this year, the "How Gamers Are Adopting the Wiki Way" panel featured George Pribul (lead admin of WoWWiki.com), April "CuppaJo" Burba (Community Manager for NCsoft's Tabula Rasa), Angelique Shelton (GM of Wikia Gaming at Wikia Inc), and Jake McKee (Principal at Ant's Eye View) talking about the symbiotic relationship between gamers and wikis. Interesting factoid: WoWWiki is now the second largest wiki in the world behind Wikipedia. At 3 million unique users per month, a full half of English-speaking WoW players visit WoWWiki every month. Head on over to our MMO-besotted sister site Massively for the complete writeup.

We've added a gallery of screenshots just in time for the worldwide Arena battle. The battle will take place tomorrow, Sunday March 9 from noon until three PM Pacific time (GMT -8). The latest patch gives players full sets of merciless gladiator gear for each spec for their given class. This change should reduce some of the frustration in gearing up a character.

Each player is given 5000 gold. You must still purchase you gems, enchantments, and accessories. These are available for purchase from vendors as there are no trade skills on the TTR. If you want alternative armor and weapons, you will have to buy those from their respective vendors. It's still crowded, but it seems more manageable than earlier in the week.

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Many thanks to Agate of Eldre'Thalas for providing us with the video!

So I was out working on heroic Steam Vaults with some friends last night. Like usual Hydromancer Thespia was being a pain, and we wiped a couple of times. On one of the death walks back, fellow guildie Agate and I meet up with another group of ghosts running over to Coilfang Reservoir. Nothing new there.

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The Libram of Absolute Truth has been on a bit of a roller coaster on the patch 2.4 PTR. Its current form on Live servers is a 27 mana off of Holy Light. The PTR gave it a boost to an 84 mana reduction, but it has recently been gutted back down to 34.

While 84 mana off is really, really nice, I can understand the nerf(or fix), even if it makes my paladin buddies sad. Off of the top rank of Holy Light, it was a 10% reduction in mana cost. In general, a bonus that large comes from 5 talent points or a set bonus rather than one piece of gear, and unless it diminishes over time, it would be hard to beat that bonus in a Relic slot for Wrath. Unless they start adding raw stats to Relics, which they've stated they don't want to do, things would start looking pretty crazy to top that.

In the 84 mana reduction state, it was possible to cast Holy Light rank 2 for free. While not a big heal considering you acquire it at level 6, it was something to do when you're completely drained of mana. You can still do this with the 'nerfed' version, but with Rank 1 of Holy Light, so I'm not sure if that had any effect on the decision.

There's also a strong possibility the devs have crappy handwriting and the people punching in the values read 34 as 84. Who knows?

I do a lot of checking the Blizzard Job Opportunities page, even though I'm fully aware I don't have much of a chance of landing a spot on their team. A shame, really, considering how sexy and charming I am! And such a hard worker, too!

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There was a bit of an uproar caused by Blizzard Poster Kalgan when he gave an unexpected preview to one possible new skill warlocks may be getting in the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft.

The new skills described by Kalgan sounded very similar to the mage class' own Blink ability. This caused a lot of discussion on the WoW forums whether or not warlocks should warrant a "buff" such as this instead of adding more gameplay balances to nerf their already powerful set of skills.

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If you were expecting to trash around in the Sunwell Plateau this weekend, think again. According to a Daelo post, Blizzard has taken the instance offline for the next couple of days.

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Bornakk announced today on the general discussion forums (why he didn't do this on the tech support forums, I don't know...) that they are having a number of realms randomly drop people. Indeed, this happened to me over on Eldre'Thalas this morning.

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For those of us who use dozens of addons, it becomes far too easy to take the basics of using them for granted. I'd like to take a few moments to go over how to begin using addons.

To begin, you addon newbs may be wondering how to go about finding good, reputable addons. Our own Addon Spotlight feature here at WoW Insider is a great place to start your search. We've reviewed many popular addons, and our readers have chimed in with lots of great advice and feedback about addons. You can also ask fellow gamers, or better yet, your guild. Some guilds require certain addons for members, but regardless of your own guild's policies, your guild-mates may have some good addon advice. There are a few primary sites you can visit to find addons, each of them doing essentially the same thing in different formats.

• Curse Gaming
• WoW UI
• WoW Interface

These three sites are the major hubs for addons and UI packages. Different people swear by different sites, so choose one that appeals to you. As far as I am aware, you can consider these to be fairly safe from viruses and the like. Although I cannot guarantee or endorse the actual safety of any files from any website. (Got to keep the lawyers at bay.) These sites all employ some sort of rating system, which can give you a general idea of how other players rate different addons. Another characteristic to note is how often an addon is updated, as active developers tend to release better software.

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We recently stumbled upon the, uh, spirited machina style of Shepiwot. Now, I'm not a big fan of 22 minute videos, but watching one of these is like all those 22 minutes compressed into six. Not a bad deal. Unless you're prone to seizures. Then you should stay far, far away.

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We all deal with them. Their annoying spam, their flooding of the general channels. Those gold sellers deserve the kiss of death. Wouldn't it be nice if their industry just went and slept with the fishes?

In a tactic that even Don Corleone himself would be angry at, gold sellers have sunken to a new low. John M. wrote in to tell us the tale of a fellow guild mate who fell under the gaze of a gold seller who took his account hostage, demanding payment from his guild. Sit back, open up a new window with this Godfather music, and read on after the break.

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Forums, especially popular ones, have a way of getting saturated with threads. Sometimes there's so much that moderators often don't have time to reply to each one. Gamers often wonder if moderators were even able to go through the thread.

Now the World of Warcraft Forums is a very active one, and a lot of gamers often express their fears that moderators don't pay attention to certain threads. As a solution, gamer Schizzo proposed this in the forums:

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If you've been to the Tournament Test Server (TTR), you might have noticed a few things. Like lag the fact that your previous three characters have been deleted. According to Eyonix, Blizzard's latest push of the TTR sees a new character template whereby newly created characters will have existing sets of gear. In the previous build of the TTR, newly-created characters start out at Level 70 but are equipped with starting equipment like Acolyte's Robe or Worn Mace. Hybrid classes or classes with healing and DPS talent trees will have two to three sets of gear, based on the Merciless Gladiator sets from Season 2. Oddly enough, after creating multiple characters, it appears to me that the default gear equipped on hybrid classes is healing gear -- a hint from Blizzard to spec for healing? Maybe.

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Last week I covered playing with your mouse, and playing with your keyboard. In my keyboard post I mentioned that I would share with you all my Logitech G15 keyboard map. For those of you who don't have a G15, the keyboard is unique in that there are 18 programmable keys located on the left side of the keyboard. The keys looks like those pictured to the right.

Each of these 18 keys can be assigned three independent functions – based on selecting "M1", "M2", or "M3" at the top of the keyboard. This gives a whooping 54 possible key combinations and functions. I don't use all these though, only the first 18 for most everything, and then the second for some random addon and programming things. So without further ado, here's what my G15 keyboard map looks like:

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What does it take to get a super-sized bear mount? According to the anonymous sender of this screenshot: "2 growths, a size increasing battle elixir, and had kissed mojo." Sounds like a winning combination to create an XL ride for that special Tauren in your guild.

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Hybrid Theory comes to you yet again from blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart. You're in for thrills, chills, and quite possibly some useful information, but I doubt it.
Last week on Hybrid Theory, I got into some of the basic details of what would make you and your spec desirable in a raid. I covered the DPS specs, and this week I'll be covering tanks and healers. Warriors, priests, I'll be leaving you out of this one. I love you, really, I do! But it's that conditional love, where I only love you if you're specced how I like. I hear Rossi, Knox and Harper still love you! Man, they sound way cooler when you refer to them by their last names, don't they? Like detectives, or super heroes.

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Inspired by this thread on the official forums, I have a pretty simple question: How do you view guild quitting? Is it possible to gquit with dignity? Is it possible to leave behind a guild with no bad feelings and as little malice as possible on the part of the quitter and the guild?

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The WoW Insider Show is live this afternoon at 3:30pm ET on WC Radio. I'll be leading the hour along with Druid columnist John Patricelli (aka Big Bear Butt Blogger), Amanda Dean and the always-inappropriate Turpster. We'll be talking about the hot issues surrounding WoW this week including the recent rollbacks of the Warlock Lifetap nerf on the PTR, the back and forth on Druid Lifebloom and more.

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The recent trend in Around Azeroth seems to be that of anything floating or flying in Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Last time, visitors were treated to a view of the allegedly floating city of Silvermoon. This time, Around Azeroth features not a floating city, but rocketeer shaman.

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Over on the World of Warcraft Tournament Test Realm forums, Eyonix recently had an important announcement for all the arena fans in the area. In it, he announced a couple of big things happening for the TTR: new spawn locations upon character creation after the next push of data for the TTR, and a new build which will wipe existing characters from the server.

First off, the new spawn locations. Eyonix mentioned that "Sometime today we'll be pushing new data" to the TTR, and that new data includes new spawn areas for the new characters who'll be signing up for the realm.

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If you aren't a fan of those lengthy attunement quests, then we have some news for you. Over on the World of Warcraft forums, Tigole has announced that Essence of the Immortals quest chain has been removed from the PTR, meaning that the Sunwell Plateau raid instance will be available from the get-go.

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It seems that Blizzard fans love their picnic baskets. Over on the World of Warcraft forums, Bornakk has announced that Blizzard has opened up a giant gallery filled with nothing but people enjoying the loot that comes with the TCG card "Rest and Relaxation."

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Have a favorite game developing firm? Then heads up as Think Services' Game Developer magazine has just unveiled its first ever annual Top 50 Game Development Studios worldwide list, showcasing the very best of this industry's movers and shakers.

This is the first time that Game Developer Magazine has held such an event, so it's definitely a special moment not only for the magazine itself, but for those who got into the list.

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In preparation for the upcoming World of Warcraft event, Midsummer Fire Festival, Blizzard poster Kisirani (World Designer) announced a few weeks back that testing on the said event has started. This time, Kisirani explains why some changes were made to the event.

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