Sunday's Tournament Test Realm stress test was, in my opinion, a huge success. Despite the lag, the occasional crash or kick, and a one-hour maintenance downtime, the server held up quite well considering just how many people were bombing around on it. After maintenance, the lag improved quite a bit, and I'm guessing that Blizzard learned a fair amount that will help them to design the arena tournament realm.

Of course, interaction with the GMs, fighting spawned bosses dropping orange epics, being polymorphed into all sorts of things, receiving rare mounts, and reading through /general, /say, and /yell, not to mention tells, were the real highlights from yesterday. While Alex has already given a fairly detailed account of our adventures, I have some stories of my own to tell.

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My main is a tanking feral druid who respecs to PvP resto pretty regularly (you know you're playing a hybrid class when your local trainer publicly thanks you for financing his boat payments), and every week I find myself staring at my talent calculator wanting to take a shillelagh to Nature's Focus. The Druid restoration tree has a lot of talents that leave you wondering what you're supposed to be using them for, and I nominate this one as winner, class, and show. Which says something, given the number of resto talents there are that either: a). make no sense if you take the 41-point talent Tree of Life, which virtually every raiding resto does, or b). also make no sense if you mostly PvP.

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Yeah yeah, lolRP, but even though I'd never seriously do an emote with my character (though I do enjoy /coughing at inappropriate times), I do kind of enjoy thinking of what my characters did before I started playing them in the game. As I've said before, my Orc Shaman was actually a prisoner in Durnholde Keep along with Thrall (and though I've tried to find him among the Orcs down there, I don't look too hard -- wouldn't want to cause a paradox).

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It's an interesting moment, the one that mikkeneko talks about over on WoW LJ. It's the one where you first enter a battleground, or an Arena, or just head out into the world, attack someone of the opposite faction and win, and first realize that yes, you can PvP.

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Yesterday's TTR Stress Test had its up and it had its downs, but overall it was a very fun experience. It was rocky in the beginning, with the server needing to be pulled down for a hardware upgrade shortly after the test was scheduled to begin. The TTR was riddled with soul-searing, unplayable lag up until that point, so I'd say it was needed.

The WoW Insider gang sat around for an hour doing a load of nothing until the server came back, but it was worth it. Most of the lag was gone, the Blizzard Entertainment crew were out and about doing their thing, and we were finally able to hit the arena. Unfortunately, our first match was against a three Resto Druid team. In a magical fairy world where Druids don't have Innervate or any natural mana regen whatsoever, I'm pretty sure Adam would have still gone OOM trying to Mana Burn all three of them to nothing.

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You'll want to be a bit more cautious when looking up information on the game today. World of Raids reports that an unknown ad banner appearing on Wowhead, Thottbot, and Allakhazam has an embedded keylogger. You don't even need to click on the banner, apparently, simply mousing over it will be enough. Wowhead says that all they know for sure is that it originates from "ad.yieldmanager.com", and will produce a redirect to "xpantivirus.com." They're working at isolating it.

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Here at WoW Insider, we've had extensive coverage of changes and updates that are being tested for the release of patch 2.4. It occurred to me that many of our newer players may not know what patching is all about.

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While not directly related to the World of Warcraft, I'm sure most of our readers are deeply interested in the progress of Blizzard's upcoming sequel to Starcraft, Starcraft II. Just recently, Blizzard has shown off the Zerg cinematic, a reveal that many people have been waiting for, myself included.

The quality on the video isn't super amazing, no copy out on the net right now is. Camcorder ftw. Don't worry, though. I'm sure Blizzard will have a fantastic version up on the Starcraft II website in no time.

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As scheduled, our good friend Duncor (and his co-host Cadwallion) on WoW Radio's WoW Things Considered podcast sat down for an interview with three guildies from Vis Maior, the guild that's been rolling through the PTR so far. It's a good interview -- Duncor and Cadwallion go through Vis Maior's (not Vis Major) history, how they've moved on to the PTR and begun raiding there, and what they think of the new content.

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Tipster Kronack sent us a link to this video, which shows the Sunwell Plateau's final boss, Kil'jaedan. The animations look to be his initial summoning and his final defeat. I'm pretty impressed by how awesome he looks, but what really intrigues me is what these animations could reveal about the lore behind the encounter - and what follows it. We still don't know much about the Kil'jaedan encounter, since Blizzard is mostly focusing testing on the Eredar Twins these days -- when the dungeon is even activated -- so most of what we have for now is speculation. That said, there's still some pretty good things I can see in these animations.

Anyway, I'll be using Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau lore spoilers to explain what I think, so If you don't mind that and want to speculate along with me, please, do join me after the jump.

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MMO-Champion has posted images of possible new portals to Theramore and Stonard in patch 2.4. Now, the highest level mage I have is level 20, so this probably won't directly affect me in any way, but I have to think the idea of new portals and the ability to teleport to new places would be pretty nice for mages. I guess it would all depend on what level they had to be to get these new abilities. A portal to Theramore wouldn't really be that helpful for a level 70 mage as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong: it would certainly make the CoT instances easier to run. (Then again, we're supposedly getting a teleporter directly to those anyway, and a Stonard portal wouldn't help with that.)

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

If the wildlife in Nagrand didn't reproduce faster than rabbits injected with Viagra, one could accuse the genocidal Hemet Nesingwary, or even the Consortium (with their endless need for ivory tusks), of funding poaching on a massive scale. And of course, we would be the perpetrators, guilty of the annihilation of entire generations of species. But fortunately, those elekks, clefthooves, and talbuks never seem to become endangered. This week's e-mail is about a different kind of poaching, but one that is no less nefarious.

Hey. I have been reading your blog for awhile now and I am an officer in a small casual guild (66 accounts) that one day hopes to have some endgame on farm. The problem we seem to have is people just leaving with a stealth guild quit. When asked they normally say they left for a friends guild or something along the lines of "just wasn't working out." About a week later I see them in Shattrath with a guild tag of another guild that I know just poached them from us. I understand that it's their $15 a month but is there anything that we as a guild can do to keep them? We seem to lose one once a week.

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2.4 Daily Quest: Bloodberry Elixir

Last week, a new daily quest "Open for Business" in the Sunwell Isle has been added, the daily reward for completing this quest will be rather useful (if you can stay alive for the full duration) to Sunwell Plateau raiders : The Bloodberry Elixir.

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Lastydruid has released the latest installment in his Story of a Druid series. Set to Limp Bizkit's cover of "Behind Blue Eyes" Part 5 tells the story of a Tauren haunted by the death of his three friends. I haven't heard this version of the 70s classic song and was happy to have stumbled upon it in this video.

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I'm still not sure what to make of this, but according to a number of very upset hunters on the official forums, Blizzard has handed a permanent ban to a player known as Megatf, said to be the best arena hunter in the world. His Armory does in fact show him as being #2 in his battlegroup (Reckoning) for 2's, #1 for 3's, and #1 for 5's, so even if he wasn't the best in the world, the guy knew a thing or two about PvP. The ban is popularly attributed to Megatf's having posted criticism of how Blizzard has handled the Hunter crisis in arena. It's certainly tough to argue that hunters are doing well; they are the only class that is underperforming in all three brackets, even by Blizzard's standards and months after the introduction of an MS-debuff to Aimed Shot.

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On Wednesday, March 5 we asked readers what races they would like to have added into the game. Pandarens seemed to be the most desired playable race along, with Worgen, Goblins, Murlocs, Furbolgs, and Naga. It was fun to dream of new races and places, but the rebuttals for why different races wouldn't work were equally as interesting.

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Waiting for a tank to fill the last slot in his pick up group for Durnholde, player Corvia decided to take a break in one of the swirls in the Caverns of Time. A camera move later revealed a very cool symmetrical pattern with his party in key positions.

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Here in the States it's election season. Newspapers and websites are plastered with campaign information. Preliminary polling for both factions will close on March 20, 2008. Then the leaders will go head to head, vying for the leader of the World... of Warcraft. Feel free to campaign in the comments for your candidate of choice.

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World of Warcraft players who log into the game using PC systems instead of Macs are asking Blizzard if the iTunes interface can be ported to their preferred systems. We really can't blame them if they get a bit jealous as the said interface does offer a lot.

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The week end have been calm with the Sunwell Plateau disabled until further notice and the usual lack of blue posts, however we've still got a couple of things to keep you busy on monday.

New teleportation portals in 2.4 ?
That's a change I didn't notice when I checked the latest PTR build patch, but it looks like two new teleportation portals have been added to the game. These portals should let players teleport to Theramore and Stonard, but it's still unknown if they will be used as part of an event or just added to the mage spell book. This could also be linked to this quest but in this case I don't really understand why they would add a Stonard portal as well. Thanks a lot to endarion for his mail about this !

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All the World's a Stage is a source for roleplaying ideas, commentary, and discussions. It is published every Sunday evening, (though it was delayed somewhat this time by technical difficulties).

Mary Sue is extremely unpopular with roleplayers. She comes along pretending to be the only daughter of Illidan and Tyrande's one-night stand, secretly spirited away and raised by furlbogs until she underwent a mysterious transformation that turned her into a human, seduced Arthas away from Jaina, and learned from him more than you will ever know about how to be a Death (i.e. Retribution) Paladin.

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