In a piece called "Fury of the Sunwell and Beyond: an Insider Interview" (were they thinking of us when they named that?), Blizzard Europe sat down with J. Allen Brack, WoW lead producer, as well as art director Chris Robinson. They talked about the recent patch 2.4, as well as a bit about my favorite topic, the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King. As usual in these interviews, there isn't a ton of solid, new information, but it's still a good read.

Here are the parts I found the most interesting:

• Sunwell Plateau is the evolution of what Naxxramas was for the original game. They learned some lessons from Naxx; for instance, Naxx was just too big for many guilds to be able to get through it before The Burning Crusade hit.
  
• Northrend will have "a very Nordic, gothic fantasy feel" -- sounds cool! To set the scene, players will be rewarded with "Northrendy" items early in Wrath: "for example, say, a two-handed axe that's made of a dragon jaw, covered with spikes, leather, and other traditional materials. We want players to see the new gear and think, 'Yeah, that guy's been to Northrend.'" I want my dragon jaw axe now please. Er...you can make that with +heal, right? And give priests axe skill?
  
• As the player treks through the zones of Northrend, the landscape bleaker and players get more spread out, escaping the hyper-population of the starting zones. Blizzard wants to invoke a "growing sense of isolation and dread" as players get closer to Arthas.
• The two starting zones are at opposite tips of crescent-shaped Northrend. They wanted to give us an easy way to travel between them, so we get boats. But not just any boats -- turtle boats! Brack talks about "a giant turtle with a deck mounted on top of its shell." Best form of transportation since Captain Placeholder, if you ask me.


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Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy:   So let's talk about the Arena Tournament, and what it means for World of Warcraft.
Tom Chilton: The big objective is to build WoW into a viable eSports game platform.
Apparently PvP is still heading towards eSport acceptance from their point of view, and from comments later in the interview, it is nice to see that they recognize how far it still is.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy: Arenas definitely turn WoW into more of a competitive game, but the Arena Tournament realm has a wildly different approach from the live realms. Do you feel that players will want to have this kind of approach available at all times?
Tom Chilton: We don't really intend for the Arena Tournament realm to replace WoW. We do feel like the arena games are a game within the game, a meta-game of WoW. We don't necessarily want people to feel like WoW is no longer a game to them. Also, within that, it kind of makes sense to structure the tournaments in a way we're doing. They're not something we can run all the time, so we've broken them into this seasonal concept, allowing us to pace how often we have them, and to make sure that they're as well-supported as we can support them. There you have it, no permanent TR planned for now. The TTR, and I am sure the TR, are something fun to play on, trying out different classes on equal gear footing, but not how WoW should be. PvP is only part of the game, and I imagine that people would grow bored with the game much faster if they could just create a 70 alt that is well geared on live. Not to mention how many bad players would fill the ladder with classes they have no idea how to play.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy:  Have you looked internally at the distribution of players doing arenas on the live realm, separating those who are playing competitively with those selling teams or just tanking games to get gear?
Tom Chilton:  We don't really have any way of knowing that. We can't distinguish what the intent of a given player is, whether they consider themselves to be competitive or whether they're just doing it for the gear or whatever. Certainly as far as players who are trying to exploit the system through loopholes, we have some changes coming in a patch just a few weeks away where we'll close a lot of those loopholes.
GameSpy: Are you able to talk about those changes yet?
Tom Chilton: Not just yet.
GameSpy: But we can expect the changes will be targeted at the point-selling teams.
Tom Chilton:  Point selling, personal rating selling.
GameSpy: The two big things that players seem like they're against are the point-selling teams, since you can face highly skilled and geared players at even the low ratings, and those who bring alts or friends on a team to tank a team so that they can then get a high personal rating on the real team.
Tom Chilton:  Exactly, that's what we'll be addressing.
I know this is a welcome change for me, as dragging my alt up in 3s when fighting a team with shoulders that is selling PR or points every other game was annoying. Also will cut out the PvPers way to make gold, which I am sure is not welcome to many of the people that sell. I am still not sold on this "fixing" it permanently, as they may leave loopholes in. Only time will tell.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy:  How did you go from way back in the days when you didn't believe that World of Warcraft could ever be a competitive eSports type game to now, when you have an eSports team on board?
Tom Chilton:  I'll tell you, it's been a slow evolution. When WoW first came out, we didn't really have any semblance of organized PvP. We had Tarren Mill versus Southshore...
GameSpy: Which was awesome!
Tom Chilton: That's nostalgia speaking!
Now, I was not around for these fights, so any opinion I have is based off of the oldest videos that contain them, but it looked like it was reasonably fun. There likely is some truth to it being nostalgia for players, as pre-BC was apparently much more fun for some people, but if you asked them how much they liked it then, you would find a very different answer. I don't think you can deny that old world PvP was fun though.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy:  Has shifting WoW over to a game with a full-fledged arena system for competitive players heavily influenced development in other aspects of the game? Making sure that classes and talents remain arena viable?
Tom Chilton: Sure, we call it the Arena magnifying glass. There's definitely more emphasis now on class balance. It puts everything under the microscope. Even what would ordinarily be considered extremely small balance differences really look big under the arena microscope. It's definitely influenced us in terms of the things we have to do so that players feel that it's a strong and balanced environment.
    At the same time, WoW isn't just an arena game. We always have to play that against what the implications are for the rest of the game. To make sure that nothing that we do isn't making the rest of the game not fun. All aspects of the game are now tied together. Inevitably, changes that we make don't influence PvP alone, and don't influence PvE alone, so we're very cognizant of that every time that we make a change.
WoW will likely never achieve perfect balance, more swinging of one extreme to another, resto druids going from virtually unnoticed in 2s to extremely popular, and warriors staying very strong regardless. Keeping PvE in mind for balancing also would make it much more difficult to come to any near balance for arenas.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy: When "small" balance changes come about to fix arenas, like the recent Druid Lifebloom change, how do you handle it interfering with raid balancing and soloing? Are you ever forced to change the conditions of the world to reflect an arena change?
Tom Chilton: We do a little bit of that, where sometimes we'll change something for the sake of class balance with some kind of change to a PvE encounter as necessary. Like retune them or change the dynamics of the spells or abilities. We try to avoid having to do that, and our general tactic that we take is that if we're going to make a change that negatively impacts PvE, we try not to, and offset it in some other way.
    One example would be the Lifebloom change. Rather than hitting the periodic heal effect of Lifebloom, we ended up changing the backend part of it, the actual bloom, which really doesn't have as significant an impact in PvE.
    We try to make sure that we isolate the changes as much as we reasonably can, and at the same time, with each patch, we're all often looking for ways to retune and improve PvE through our PvP balance changes.
    An example would be that recently, more because of PvP, all mages got access to Ice Block. Not only do all Fire mages have Ice Block as a survivability mechanism, etc., we've also replaced that talent slot with Icy Veins. We knew that this was an ability that was also useful for PvE. It opened up a different build. Prior to Icy Veins, you generally saw all raiding mages going deep fire and spec some in arcane. But that opened up a Frost mix with Fire as a viable raiding spec. And that's had really positive effects on PvE balance.
I don't see the Lifebloom change as significant in either PvP or PvE, but I guess on the bright side he didn't hurt resto druids in PvE that much? As far as the mage changes go, ice block did not make fire or arcane viable at all, but did help out in PvE, allowing several debuffs to be removed and deaths to be avoided. I see it as more of a PvE change than PvP. As far as Icy Veins goes, sure he made 2/48/11 viable, but now it is the mainstream spec, and 10/48/3 is less useful now. Icy Veins is a welcome PvP buff though, and helped so far as mage burst and a slight amount of pushback protection. It being dispelled is another matter though.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy: Have you had similar balance issues with the battlegrounds as opposed to arenas?
Tom Chilton: Definitely, they're very different PvP experiences. The PvP balance feels different between arenas and battlegrounds, but also between 2v2, 3v3, 5v5. Class synergies come into play more in the smaller environments. There are certain classes that feel like they're extremely strong in battlegrounds, but are either harder to play or are just not as good in some arena formats.
    A good example is the Hunter class. If you're playing a Hunter in a battleground, you generally feel they're a very strong class. Arguably one of the stronger battleground classes in the game. But they're extremely skill-sensitive in the arena environment because of the line of sight issues, that sort of thing. We find that the very skilled players can play Hunters well in the arenas, but I think it's fair to say that it may take a higher level of player skill to achieve the same kind of result in the smaller arena environment.
Glad to see that they recognize most hunters are "huntards". At least he put it nicely. Hunters in battlegrounds are extremely annoying, often topping damage/KBs as multishot does a nice job of finishing people off.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy: Do you feel that you have a good grasp of what group compositions are like in the arena formats, and that balancing is about where it should be? Should Druid healers continue to be retooled for the smaller formats?
Tom Chilton: There's more balancing that we can do. Balance changes tend to take a very long time to play out, and to realize the full effects. So we'll make a change in the game, and players have the expectation that there will be immediate results. Suddenly X class is now performing far better in the arenas than it used to be. Usually if you see those immediate results, we've swung the pendulum way too far. It means that three months later, six months later, that class will be completely dominating the arena. So we're kind of always struggling with that knowledge that when we make changes, we have to be subtle, where we can, and be patient to let those changes shake out.
    We're looking forward to the arena tournament environment to give our most competitive players a chance to try out those changes. There's a lot of inertia that the players have right now with the prevailing builds and the strong group make ups, that sort of thing. When we make changes, it's not always easy for them to adjust and try new things.
Most players have no desire to wait out changes and feel that they must go and demand change today, rather than provide any constructive feedback.
Quote from Blizzard staffGameSpy: How satisfied are you with the layouts and physical setups of the current three arenas? And do you plan to create new arenas with environmental hazards or other forms of variety?
Tom Chilton: The arena environment can use more locations. We'll probably get a little more bold with some of those, and in some areas we may even simplify. For example, when we introduced Ruins of Lordaeron, it was geometrically more simple than the Blade's Edge arena. There are fewer line-of-sight obstacles than Blade's Edge. It was in a lot of ways a product of what we really liked about Nagrand arena and Blade's Edge, and trying to use that to make an arena that we felt a lot of classes would be happy with. We'll probably try some new things, we'll add some new arenas for Wrath of the Lich King. Some may be a bit different from what we've seen so far.
I, as a mage/warlock don't mind ruins that much. Sure a priest or druid running up and around and down the center is annoying, but it is less annoying than chasing them all over the BEM arena to me. They have less space to run, and won't gain an entire arenas length ahead of you, giving them time to stop and heal or drink + shadowmeld. New arenas sound interesting, and maybe will bring something other than things to LoS around all day. Clearly trapdoors and smoke in the future. 

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If you think your World of Warcraft realm is getting a little bit too crowded, you might want to know that Blizzard has opened character migration once again from the highest populated PvP realms to the lowest populated servers in Europe.

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It was previously mentioned that the new badge items for Blizzard's World of Warcraft were supposed to reflect the theme for the blood elves. However, several players on the WoW forums noted that the overall design of the items don't follow in the actual gold and red color design that the race favors.

In contrast to the supposed theme advertised by Blizzard, most of the new gear still retain the look of the Zul'Aman badge items which were aimed primarily for trolls. Fortunately, Blizzard Poster Drysc was there to give a rather lengthy explanation regarding this:

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I wrote up about Leatherworking as the hardcore raider's profession of choice. This is due to one particular item -- the Drums of Battle -- which greatly increases raid efficiency, particularly if the buff can be kept up indefinitely throughout a boss encounter. The item is so raid-beneficial that even cloth-wearers, who cannot equip any leather items, drop more aligned professions such as Tailoring. For Arena PvP, where each stat point counts towards survivability and lethality, there is no better profession than Enchanting and to a lesser degree, Jewelcrafting. Arena players competing at the highest levels have taken up Enchanting purely for the exclusive ring enchantments. A quick inspection of all players rated 2k and above will reveal that most have taken up at least Enchanting and enchanted their rings with the appropriate enchantments.

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So you're getting all rich and the gold's started to pour in. You've made lots of wise investments and your arbitrage has been paying off great dividends. You've even got a bank toon to handle all your business -- after all, the rich folk leave all the dirty work to their accountants. Here's a question for you... is your bank toon dressed for the part? See, it just isn't right for your bank toon to run around Stormwind or Orgrimmar in their underwear, no matter how much that delights your inner pervert. Bank toons must be dignified... classy, even. They are the keepers of your wealth, so give them their due by throwing out that ratty Thug Shirt.

Fortunately for you, WoW Insider has prepared a simple makeover guide for your bank toon. If you've been treating your banker right, you've probably dressed them in the tuxedo sets made from Tailoring or obtained through the Noblegarden event. Complete the look with a perfectly matching pair of Frayed Shoes. You probably won't find these on the Auction House, but they drop from Level 1-5 mobs, so they shouldn't be a problem to farm. If you're too lazy (or unlucky), you can purchase Heavy Weave Shoes from clothiers in most cities. These also go very well with tuxedo sets but require Level 12. I personally keep my banker at Level 1 too keep her ego in check, so it's the Frayed Shoes for her.
Of course, the truly rich gift their bankers with a pair of Antique Silver Cufflinks, which can be obtained from the lucrative fishing daily quest. Non-anglers can troll the Auction Houses or trade channels for these beauties -- but be prepared to pay a steep price! These simple white items sell for over 11 Gold to vendors, so fishermen won't easily be parted with them. Some people marry their bankers or accountants to make sure the wealth stays within the family... so why not throw in The Rock and Gold Wedding Band to celebrate the influx of Gold? The Rock is an exorbitant gift you can purchase from vendors in Booty Bay, Silvermoon City, or the Exodar for a whopping 100 Gold. Gold Wedding Bands come from those Bags of Fishing Treasures, just like the cufflinks, and sell for 15 Gold to vendor so expect to pay similar if you don't fish.

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Here's a nice little bit of news for all leveling Hunters, people looking into starting a hunter alt, or people looking to switch out or tweak out their current pet: the popular depository of all things Hunter pet related in WoW, Petopia, has gotten a facelift and a few handy new reference pages. The quick links and references seem to be a lot more streamlined now, and it should be even easier to find information. Some pages are still making the transition, and some of the pet pictures have not been updated to the new color scheme, but Mania assures us she is working on that.

In the meantime, she's also added a few new pages to the library, namely the Retired Pet page and the "Fake" Pet Skills page. The former deals with formerly tamable pets that can no longer be tamed, while the latter deals with pet skills that are present during the newbie hunter taming quests, but not on any permanently tamed pet.

I rather like both of the new pages. Not only should the information be helpful (if sad) to any newbie wondering where they can get that awesome ghost wolf, but the pages were a nice walk down memory lane for this old hunter. I remember when I made first Tauren Hunter, I was always disappointed that Swoop wasn't an actual bird pet skill, and I was considering a pet crab for my Dwarf Hunter at one point, and would have loved to have a thorny pet to add a bit more damage and threat power for tanking. Crabs could probably use some love anyway, as they seem to be competing with the likes of Sporebats and Bears for most neglected pet family.

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I don't know what it is about the WoW community, but every link I see I'm forced to double check its authenticity just so I don't get Rick Rolled. What is this cultural phenomenon of Rick Rolling you ask? No, it's not some sort of new drug, it's just a YouTube video of Rick Astley singing "Never gonna give you up." When you watch the video for the hundredth time it gets a tad annoying. And you do have to watch the whole video, because let's face it, if you don't the tune is just going to sit in your head for the rest of the day. Then you'll be dreaming of Rick Astley, and that's...well... just unsettling.

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Vims has already speculated on when Arena Season 4 will arrive, pegging it somewhere around early to mid-June. I tend to agree with that statement as Blizzard has noted on several occasions that Season 4 isn't coming anytime soon. Considering that none of servers worldwide have even opened the second gate in Sunwell Plateau, it means that equivalent level PvE items won't be cascading into the player base for quite some time. This gives players roughly around a month and two weeks to prepare for the next Arena season, if not longer.

Banking ahead
Because Arena points are capped at 5,000, players with enough Arena gear can start banking points in preparation for the new season. If gear prices remain the same (which is likely as prices have been constant through Seasons 1-3), players can open the Arena week with 3/5 Brutal Gladiator pieces: the gloves, which are priced at 1,125 Arena points during the current season; and any two of the chestpiece, headpiece, or leg piece, which go for 1,875 points. It is also possible to purchase the 1,500 points worth shoulder piece on the first week if players manage to raise their personal rating to a highly restrictive 2200 if the speculated changes make it live. Because personal ratings are calculated directly after each game, it is possible to purchase the personal ratings-limited shoulder pieces or weapons provided the player has enough points during the first week.
Players only beginning their Arena trek now can bank 5,000 points in five weeks by maintaining at least a 1959 Rating in 5v5, 2065 in 3v3, and a high 2259 in 2v2. Realistically, however, many players will probably average around 1600-1700, which will net roughly 353 Arena points for a 1600 2v2 team up to 607 points for a 1700 5v5 team. Maintaining these moderate team ratings for the rest of Season 3 should guarantee enough Arena points for at least one Season 4 piece.

Another option for players is to bank points for the eventual price reduction on Season 3 items. If the new season follows tradition, current Season 3 armor will receive up to a 245 Arena point reduction in cost. For many players, that's one week less of fighting in the Arenas. It isn't such a bad idea to go for the previous season's gear as it will gear up players faster and offer more Resilience and overall power than all other gear aside from the latest Season. Ideally, of course, players will have gotten 5/5 Vengeful Gladiator, and one or more S3 weapons. But for those who started Season 3 rather slowly, there are many ways to be prepared for Season 4.

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WoW Insider has been contacted by a producer of the reality show Wife Swap -- apparently they're on the hunt for families who play WoW and other MMOs together, so they're sending out a casting call to the community. Any families applying should play MMOs together, have two parents and two children between 7 and 17, and live somewhere in the United States. If you're chosen for the show, you get a $20,000 honorarium, and anyone who refers a family that makes it on the show gets a grand for their efforts.

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We hit on this one with Mount Hyjal before, but Ironcog brings up an interesting point: why exactly are we going to be mucking around in the old city of Stratholme via the Caverns of Time? In Escape from Durnholde, we're obviously trying to make sure Thrall gets out of the prison camp, and the Infinite Dragonflight is fighting to stop us and ruin history. Same deal in the Black Morass -- the Infinite Dragonflight is trying to keep Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. But in Hyjal, the dragonflight is nowhere to be seen, and we're basically just time tourists. You'd think the Bronze Dragonflight would want us to stay out of there.

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2.4 Known Issues list updated

Hortus updated the 2.4 Known Issues list with several additions (see below):

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Wondering what will happen to Naxxramas when Wrath of the Lich King goes live in World of Warcraft? You're not the only one.

You might be interested to know that Community Manager Bornakk gave out a few interesting facts regarding the dungeon, namely attunement as well as the difficulty level of the instance.

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Blizzard has released a new wallpaper featuring exquisite artwork from the "Mias the Putrid" card from the WoW TCG. The work is just as fantastic as it was with previous TCG-themed work -- maybe even better. Well, nothing is gonna beat the Stefen Colbear thing, but still. It's fabulous.

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It would appear as if I didn't sabotage Stormscape Creations' PR campaign after all. He was true to his word and produced a sequel that is a much better improvement over Chapter One. It's so good, in fact, that it was recommended immediately upon upload on Warcraftmovies.com.

This time around, Stormscape finishes up the loose ends from Chapter One, and creates new plotlines with which to move forward in the saga of the Thaenor brothers. He also employs voice actors, which was a major complaint from the first movie. However, since YouTube nerfed Director's accounts, he had to upload his 20+ minutes opus, The Thaenor Chronicles: Chapter Two, in three separate parts. If you liked the first part shown here, we highly suggest that you check out the high quality Filefront download.

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Over at the World of Warcraft forums, Shimarenda from the Cenarion Circle quoted lines from an interview of Tom Chilton and GameSpy.

The quote pointed out that Chilton and the design team got their feedback from pretty popular and well respected players in the arena community.

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What's a good way to earn Gold? Some PvP players seem to think that Arena point selling is a viable option. As detrimental it is to the spirit of competition and working for achievements, it currently does not qualify as a violation of Blizzard's Terms of Use. This small loophole has helped make it a rampant, although unsupported and unsavory, practice. It's an old practice that dates back from Season 1. There are a couple of ways by which players sell Arena points. One is through outright sale of a moderately ranked team. Players take a team to a decent ranking of, say, 1800-2000, and sell the team wholesale, transferring leadership of the team to the purchaser. Depending on the size of the team, costs can vary. A 1900 2v2 team can sell for maybe 900 Gold, while a 3v3 team can go for about 1,300 Gold, and a 5v5 will cost anywhere from 1,700 to 2,000 Gold.

The one caveat of team buying is that players will almost never get what they're paying for. The irony is that those who purchase teams are almost never equipped or skilled to compete at the level they're purchasing. These players often end up tanking their newly-bought team a couple of hundred points just to complete the minimum 10 games to qualify for Arena point gain. In this way, team purchases are an unwise investment unless players can competitively maintain the team's rating. In some dastardly cases, very high-rated teams are bought by win traders who use the purchase to inflate their team ratings.

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While the Incgamers malware problem is fixed, it looks like there's another malware flare up in the world of addons. The WoW Ace Updater, according to many users, may be passing off a trojan from an ad in the guise of an antivirus program. The program, called Winfixer, pops up in a window and (in some cases automatically) installs malware while claiming your computer is compromised and that you need to buy the full retail version to fix it. It can be detected and removed by Spybot Search and Destroy and Vundofix, and Symantec includes instructions on how to manually remove it here.

Wowace.com site owner Kaelten has disabled the ads on WoW Ace Updater completely for now, and is talking to his Ad provider to find out what went wrong and which ads might be causing problems.


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Seeing links and patterns between various things can be an enlightening experience. Speaking of which, did you know that there is a connection between the Fury of the Sunwell update, World of Warcraft lore, and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion?

J. Allen Brack and Chris Robinson of Blizzard talked a little bit about it in a recent interview. According to Brack and Robinson, the Fury of the Sunwell is all about giving closure to the major story arcs of The Burning Crusade.

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Tom "Kalgan" Chilton, in his interview we posted yesterday, said that one of Blizzard's class designers was the guild leader of one of the world's best known PvP guilds, but he wants to keep him anonymous. Wait, what?

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Having trouble trying to contact Landro Longshot to redeem your  World of Warcraft Trading Card game goodies? If your problems involves having a Hated reputation with the Booty Bay faction, then you've got the same problem as player Lieandra.

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Sometimes, less is more. The appears to be true in Blizzard's World of Warcraft - at least with the guild known as adult swim. You see, the guild from European realm Stormscale managed to defeat Gruul the Dragonkiller with only eight members. Guild leader Snookiwooki took the time to talk a little bit about the experience and about the guild itself.

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Insider Interview - Fury of the Sunwell and Beyond
An interview was posted on the official site yesterday, nothing really new but it's still a good read if you're interested in Sunwell and Wrath of the Lich King (and you probably are)
Quote from: Blizzard (Source)Insider: Speaking of Wrath of the Lich King -- How is Northrend progressing? What are your feelings about going from the world style of Outland to the very different Northrend setting?
Chris Robinson: Coming up with the high concept look of The Burning Crusade was a great experience, and as a team we really enjoyed working in this style. For a designer, it’s always a breath of fresh air to have some new elements to play with. So naturally it’s great to now have this opportunity to go back to the more traditional elements of fantasy that comprise the look and feel of Wrath of the Lich King, even though this poses new challenges in and of itself. Northrend has a very Nordic, gothic fantasy feel that’s a departure from the wild scenescapes of Outland.

One way we’re attempting to reflect these new visual themes is by making sure all the item rewards of Northrend faithfully embody the new style. From the get-go, players will earn trophies of war that are very “Northrendy” -- for example, say, a two-handed axe that’s made of a dragon jaw, covered with spikes, leather, and other traditional materials. We want players to see the new gear and think, “Yeah, that guy’s been to Northrend.”

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About a month ago, Dr. Tanya Byron made headlines regarding her review on video game violence. Now, she's has taken the spotlight once again with a BBC TV show she wrote and hosted.
Through it, she linked video game to heroin addiction. In her show, Byron delved deeper to the world of gaming by talking about several situations gamers are in.

She went as far as to compare playing video games to cocaine or even heroin addiction. One of her interviewees was Michelle Hart, a 39-year-old World of Warcraft addict. Hart said she's been playing the MMORPG for two years and spends most of her free time playing it.

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We all know too much computer exposure is bad for your eyes. Now if you really can't take your self away from World of Warcraft, why not try the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game? Even Blizzard wants you to.

In fact, the latest official wallpaper to come out for Warcraft features Mias the Putrid - a visual treat using artwork from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game.

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Guildwatch is back, and boy do we have a drama-stacked edition for you this week. How about this Vent recording we've got, complete with classical piano playing in the background. Or this hacked guild that didn't really get hacked at all? We've got Shaman ninjas, Auction House drama, and even a Warglaive fight. Our tipsters really, really came through this week (thanks everybody!), and you reap the benefits.

Additionally, there's also plenty of downed news behind the break as well, and just a bit of recruiting news also (seems like most guilds are filled up for the time being). If you've got a tip for GW, whether for your guild or a great piece of drama you've seen somewhere, drop us a line at wowguildwatch@gmail.com and see it here next week. In the meantime, click the link below to see this week's GW!

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