There have been a number of sites lately, especially with the recent rise in endgame pickup groups, designed to help you find and examine potential PuGgers quickly. But none of them have made it quite as easy as Zarkmark, a site that allows you to quickly rate anybody you come across ingame by "zarking" (rating them up) or "marking" (rating them down) them. Then, they offer a quick search, which will not only give you a one-click link to the Armory, but an easy-to-read screen of how many people have rated the player you're looking at. Theoretically, ninjas will never find a group again.

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The Wordy Warrior has added to their series of "10 Ways..." posts with today's 10 Ways to Make Your Guild Love You. Whereas her first couple of posts in the series were aimed at the rank and file of a guild or raid, aiming to warm up to your raid leaders or guild officers, this one is aimed at those very officers. How do you get the rank and file to like you?

As a Guild Leader, I absolutely agree with the points she puts forth, and I recommend this list to any guild officer, especially those that are just getting started with their guild. Over the last four years of being a GM, the #1 thing I've learned is that there are absolutely real faces behind those pixels, and you need to know how to interact with those people. You need to get to know them, you need to try and be a little personal with them, and you should know how to talk to them. Everyone is a little bit different.

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The twinks were a little doom-and-gloom before the patch, but it seems like the end of the world has come and gone, and they're still interested in twinking. As Drayner over at Twinkinfo predicted, all of the changes on the PTR went live: enchants have level requirements, as did profession buffs, and those aren't scaling either. At this point, it sounds like the only way to twink out your character (which means make it super powerful at a certain low level) is to fit them out in the best gear you can find for the level.

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We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Leafshine tracked the first hour of their patch 3.1 experience, and managed to get incredibly lucky with the Fishing daily quest.
• I Like Bubbles has a strategy up for the very first boss of Patch 3.1: The servers themselves.
• Now that raiding is back in style, raid leaders might actually start to care if people have good DPS or not. World of Snarkcraft is here to help you learn to read combat logs with WWS.
• Critical QQ thinks Season 6 will be a much more newbie friendly season, and has some tips for those newbies who want to get started!
• Lorecrafted brings us a short review of the latest issue of the World of Warcraft comic. To sum up: It's still lame.


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In what every Blizzard fanboy hopes to be a precursor to the real thing, the company has announced the winners of the Blizzard Theme Park Contest where creators were called to submit their best ideas for a theme park based on each of Blizzard's properties or even all of them. The grand prize winner, Christina Marie DeLong, designed a brightly colored map that had the most amazing stuff in it.

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Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW Insider's series of fantasy death matches. This season's bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King.

To battle! This week, Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves pits Hadronox (Azjol-Nerub) against Zuramat the Obliterator (Violet Hold). Poison against shadow damage ... the not-yet-trapped versus the already imprisoned ... Can you predict the outcome?

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TalentChic, the site that displays the most popular talent specs based on Armory data, has updated to reflect the most popular builds for patch 3.1. They've also added glyph functionality via GlyphChic, which should help those players that choose their glyphs just by checking what's on the auction house at that particular moment. Good glyph resources are pretty hard to find, so we'll see how this turns out!

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If you're one of the people who tried to play this past Tuesday, you experienced the same thing as the rest of us. The servers, they were just plain dead. Even since then, the instances and world servers have been a little less than friendly. This was all to put in Patch 3.1, but there were definitely some hiccups along the way. The game just hasn't been running smoothly, and some folks haven't been able to play at all.

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With stealthiness worthy of an Arashikage, Blizzard removed the Flawless Victor title granted by the Achievement Hot Hot Hot Streak, along with the Achievement itself in Patch 3.1. This tiny little 'inconvenience' was conveniently left out of the patch notes, surprising many players who logged in to the puzzling message 'Title removed: Flawless Victor'. Conversations with GMs didn't manage to shed light into the situation, either, with the standard answer bring "apologies for the inconvenience".

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The Book of Glyph Mastery is something of a ‘perfect storm’ in terms of profit potential: It’s new, it is extremely rare (for now), highly desired and can be found by just about anyone. Put another way, these books are extremely high in demand while being severely limited in quantity. When we see that formula, we can’t help but think ‘opportunity’ and here are a few reasons why you should as well.

About the Book- Demand

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Congratulations, Argent Valiant! You've progressed past the Aspirant rank and proven your chops at mounted combat before your peers. You've even become a representative of your home city in the Argent Tournament.

Well, guess what? Playtime's over.

Remember, the whole point of the Argent Tournament is to train all comers into Scourge-killing badasses, so now that you've proven yourself, it's time to crack some decaying skulls. And this time, you get to do it on horseback.

Find out how after the jump.

Talk to your city rep in your faction's tent. You must have completed the entire Aspirant quest line, including the Aspirant's Challenge, to take part in this quest.

Your rep will inform you that some brave crusaders have set up a camp in the Court of Bones, just outside Icecrown Citadel, and it's your charge to head there and help them out.

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In what seems to be an inevitable move, Blizzard has ordered the controversial and too-good-to-be-true services of You Play or We Pay. According to their website, Blizzard found YPOWP's offering to be a violation of their intellectual property rights. You Play or We Pay, which stirred up a bit of controversy and a lot of skepticism when it first launched, aimed to compensate players whenever the World of Warcraft had unscheduled downtime. Essentially, it was insurance for WoW game time.

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So it's been a heady week for us all. I was wrong about the patch dropping this week, and have since respecced my shaman resto in order to begin tackling Ulduar - 10 as a healer. Things I have learned healing in Ulduar - 10?

• I am not geared enough to heal in Ulduar yet.
• Razorscale likes to hit me with fireballs. Perhaps someone told him about my not being geared enough.
• Ignis likes to put me in his slag pot. See Razorscale.
• XT - 002 makes me the Gravity Bomb constantly.

Overall it's been an interesting couple of days. Since I've been running the instance on two different toons and on two different levels (10 and 25 man) the whole thing seems to blur together in my head, but so far I'm enjoying Ulduar. XT - 002's voice alone was worth the price of admission. Sadly the instance has been very unstable (on Norgannon at least) so the four bosses in the entrance zone (the Colossal Forge, according to the teleporter) are the only ones I've gotten to see personally. I did get to float around for three hours with Chain Heal casting endlessly at one point, that was interesting in an extremely boring way.

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Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW Insider's series of fantasy death matches. This season's bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King.

Utgarde Pinnacle's Svala Sorrowgrave impaled The Prophet Tharon'ja of Drak'Tharon Keep in this week's Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves fantasy deathmatch. Reader Talusazaroth sets the scene: "... The dueling arena is probably going to be the coolest out there. If we're giving the Vrykul her altar, we have to give the Prophet some nice ruined archways and overgrown jungle. So on one side, we have the Lich King's view portal, covered in ivy, with a tree or two and some nice, exotic plants, slowly giving way to her altar of sacrifices.

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X Cross says that he created Breaking as a way to overcome his fear of Blood Elves. It's his first music video, which makes this solid, satisfying movie an impressive feat. ("Music" is the operative word there, since X Cross has obviously done other work.) I'm not sure I understand what he means by fear of blood elves. Maybe that's why his first video, Kippo's X-Mas, didn't feature that waifish mainstay of modern machinima. (I think gnomes would have been a wiser choice anyway, even if the model selection was based on some secret belfophobia.)

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About Us Page Updated

We’ve updated the About Us page to answer some of the questions we’ve received about our service over the past few months.

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ihatemostthings' friend found something fun in the new(ish) game F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Apparently, wandering around in the game, you can come across a little terminal that has some familiar code to anyone who's ever raided with a more-than-enthusiastic raid leader (NSFW). You can click the picture above to see a closeup view of what the screen says.

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It was inevitable that someone would down Yogg-Saron pretty quickly, and less than twenty four hours after the patch went live European guild Ensidia have claimed World First on the Death God. Given the non-linear progression into Ulduar, a lot of other guilds were able to pull off world firsts on other bosses. It also seems that Ensidia was focusing on clearing Ulduar in normal mode, as none of their kills were done on hard mode. This means we're unlikely to see Algalon downed this week (not by Ensidia, anyway).

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Mounts are one of the best parts of World of Warcraft, especially the flying ones. Over the course of levels 30-80 we collect a bunch of them (so many that there's even an Achievement for it -- don't forget to check out our guide) and everyone has one or two tied to their action bars that they use every day. I've got two: the Big Battle Bear) and a Zhevra. But in an ideal world, we all have a list: the Ashes of Al'ar, the now removed Amani War Bear, the Spectral Tiger, the Deadly Gladiator's Frost Wrym ...

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Yogg-Saron World First Kill by Ensidia
That's it. Ensidia just killed Yogg-Saron in 25-man! More information and Loot to come!

• News Post @ Ensidia.com
• IRC - irc.quakenet.org #ensidia (Webchat)


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Update (4:20AM PDT): Ensidia just killed Yogg-Saron, making them the first guild to kill him.  Congratulations to them!  Loot: Earthshaper, Shawl of Haunted Memories, Mantled of the Wayward Conqueror, Mantle of the Wayward Vanquisher, Fragment of Val'anyr.  Visit their IRC to congratulate them!

Yogg-Saron Encounter Details

The Yogg-Saron page is now up with details on the encounter known so far. Check it out and stay tuned for further updates!

Yogg-Saron Screenshots

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We’re big believers in efficiency and saving time whenever possible so we enjoyed being able to ghetto hearth pre-3.1. The mechanics of the ghetto hearth trick are explained thoroughly over at the hearthstone page on WoWWiki for those not a familiar with this form of WoW transportation.

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