As a reminder, the Noblegarden page is available in the Guides section. I've also included all of the information below for this year's event.

Noblegarden has received some changes over last year and is going to run for one week, beginning on April 26th, 2009. The basic mechanics of the egg hunt still exist, though things have been spiced up slightly and you'll be able to purchase items (or find them in the eggs) with [Noblegarden Chocolates] that you get from hunting eggs. Note that while the items can be purchased, you can find most of them in the eggs too, though your mileage may vary on the luck factor.

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Noblegarden Comes to Azeroth
The Noblegarden is now live on european servers and will be available in the US in a few hours. Before you read the "guide" you have to keep in mind that this event is very simple.

1. Brightly Colored Eggs are hidden in the starting town of each races: Bloodhoof Village, Brill, Falcowing Square, and Razor Hill for the Horde. Azure Watch, Goldshire, Dolanaar, and Kharanos for the Alliance. The eggs are only in this town and will respawn in a few seconds/minutes, it probably won't be enough during the first days of the event because a LOT of players will be camping them. They're hidden in different spots of the town and might be a little hard to find at first, but it becomes very easy when you know what you're looking for.

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Our sister site Joystiq pointed out last night to their readers that the BlizzCon 2008 beta codes were now being accepted, and we thought it prudent to pass the news along to you.

You can enter the code over at http://www.blizzcon.com/beta and enjoy the satisfaction that you'll get knowing in a few months (or less?) you'll be playing the beta of StarCraft II.

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Each week Arcane Brilliance sits around, thinking of things to put in this opening paragraph. Arcane Brilliance considers many things. Then Arcane Brilliance usually ends up going for the easy Warlock joke, because let's face it, Warlocks are pretty low-hanging fruit, and Arcane Brilliance is lazy.

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Noblegarden 2009 should be going live on the European realms in a few hours and then start popping up on realms elsewhere over the next day. Because so much of the holiday has changed and we've fielded a lot of questions from players about what's going on, we decided to write up a quick FAQ to the new (and vastly improved!) holiday.

Help! Where do I go to get started?

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In honor of Noblegarden, we're running a special-edition OverAchiever today, dedicated to what you'll need for the meta-achievement Noble Gardener. Should you finish, not only do you get a spiffy new title, but you also get to check off another set of achievements toward What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, the yearlong achievement-palooza rewarding a 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake.

Because Noblegarden has been extensively reworked, most of what you'll be doing this year is completely new, and some of this guide is going to be comprised of educated (or not-so-educated) guesses as to the difficulty of the achievements on the live realms, and tips on how to get them done. I'll let you know if I just plain don't know something or have to hazard a guess based on PTR information, but fortunately most of the holiday is pretty straightforward. We're only going to cover the achievements you need to worry about for the meta, as everything else you can achieve is really based on luck and doesn't count toward Noble Gardener.

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Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Patch 3.1 brought many welcome changes to the Fishing profession, including a Turtle mount and new Fishing daily quests.

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The seasonal revamped extravaganza that is Noblegarden is due to start tomorrow and the Blues have revealed a little more about the new week-long festival. Yesterday night Zarhym posted on the official forums, revealing some new details as well as linking to a revamped festival page on the official site.

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It's been over a week now since Ulduar was unleashed, and I hope that you've all gone in and had a taste of what Blizzard has emphatically called a "hard" raid. Harder than Naxxramas, at least. Aside from towerless Flame Leviathan, who was cruelly invented to trick players into thinking that Ulduar was puggable, the bosses -- heck, even the trash -- in Ulduar is a return to some good old-fashioned wipefests and headbanging against the wall. Of course, the world's top guilds were well equipped and prepared to clear all the way up to Yogg-Saron, but most guilds will struggle a bit.

Did I say a bit? Some guilds will struggle a lot, actually. While Ulduar still seems easier by far than the so-called guild killers, Blizzard has ramped up the difficultly nicely and many guilds will find it a challenge but eventually conquer it in time. So where do Paladins fit in with all this conquering business? Well, it depends on your spec. Fortunately for us, Patch 3.1 also introduced dual-specs, and if there's anything a Paladin should plunk 1,000 Gold on, it's to learn a secondary spec. Today we'll take a look at how healers fare in Ulduar two weeks in after the jump.

I was wrong. I said that raiding Holy Paladins wouldn't be feeling the pinch of the nerf intended to curb Holy Paladin dominance in Arenas, but apparently the mobility required for the Ulduar fights does make us miss those fast Holy Lights terribly. A Holy Shock crit followed by an instant Flash of Light is nice, but it won't top off anyone in pain-filled Ulduar. The limit of Sacred Shield to a single target also hurts because it always gave us a buffer in mobility fights.

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I think the in-game fixes should be ending soon, or at least not be noteworthy enough for the blues to announce every day. Last night there were only three announced, which we list after the break. But more interesting I think than the bankruptcy of Ghostly Philanthropists is the number of fixes announced each day, which is displayed in the nice graphic above.

There is a spike of fixes on April 21st, which was this past Tuesday. That is likely due to two reasons. First, patch 3.1.1 was released and many of the changes had to be done via a client side patch and by some realm maintenance. Secondly, there were not any fixes released during the weekend of April 18th, so a few days of bug-e-ness went by.

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One of the more time consuming set of achievements to get is the rare spawn killing achievement, if only because you need to compile information on every spawn, then head over to their spawn point and wait, then hope you grab the monster before someone passing through sees the Silver Dragon and gets the loot gleam in their eye.

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Gonna be a good one (but is it ever not?) on our podcast today -- Contributing Editors Lesley Smith and Alex Ziebart will both be in the virtual broadcast booth with Turpster and I, and we'll be talking about the biggest stories in World of Warcraft over the past week, including patch 3.1.1 and all of the fixes that have been dropping lately, server outages and how bad they've been, what things are like in Ulduar so far, what the new 5-man might be, and the crack-in-a-twinkie that is Peggle in WoW. That's actually a lot of stuff -- we better talk fast.

The show starts up at April 25, 2009 3:30 PM EST var date_span = document.getElementById("date"); var date = new Date(date_span.innerHTML); var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"); var weekday=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); var year = date.getFullYear(); var day_of_month = date.getDate(); var month = monthname[date.getMonth()]; var day = weekday[date.getDay()]; var hour = date.getHours(); if (hour > 11) { if (hour > 12) {hour -= 12} am_pm = "PM"; } else { am_pm = "AM"; } var minute = date.getMinutes(); if (minute < 10) { minute = "0"+minute; } date_string = day + ", " + month + " " + day_of_month; date_string += " at " + hour + ":" + minute + " " + am_pm; offset = -date.getTimezoneOffset()/60; if (offset >= 0) { offset = "+"+offset; } date_string += " in your time zone (GMT"+offset+")"; date_span.innerHTML = (date_string); over on our Ustream page, or you can just click below to find the embedded Ustream feed in the second half of this post. And of course if you can't make it to listen live today, don't worry, because the show will be recorded and available in its entirety (well, minus the preshow and aftershow that we usually do for the live listeners) on Monday as usual.

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digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/Video_teases_World_of_Warcraft_Vollee_client_for_iPhone';

I can honestly say that I would love to have WoW available on the go, for things ranging from checking my mail to browsing the auction house to leveling a death knight on long car trips. The iPhone seems like a great platform for something like that -- a pared-down but fully-functional WoW client.

And now we might be a little closer to that becoming a reality. Our sister site, Massively, just picked up a hot tip from Youtube, where someone has posted a video of a rumored Vollee port of World of Warcraft for the iPhone.

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Though not everyone 'fessed up to it in this week's WRUP, I'm pretty sure there's a simple, one-word description for what we'll all be doing this weekend: Noblegarden. Ulduar's been out for weeks now, but Noblegarden is going to be brand new this year. And while not everyone may admit to running around hunting colored eggs, the proto-drake that awaits us at the end of this long, strange trip is getting closer every holiday. So what does the WoW Insider team admit to playing this weekend?

• Adam Holisky: My girlfriend and I will be paying good money to take a small white ball out to a very flat field filled with holes and swing at the aforementioned ball with a very hard metal stick. I'll then come home and try to earn another thousand gold over the weekend.
• Alex Ziebart: Ulduar 25. Wednesday night we cleared up to where we left off last week, so we have Sunday night and Monday night free to kill new bosses. Very exciting!
• Allison Robert: The game is still crashing my computer too much to properly enjoy doing much of anything there. I'll be writing a special edition of the OverAchiever for Noblegarden while wondering if I'll actually get to enjoy the actual in-game event.
• Daniel Whitcomb: I'm plugging along on the Argent Tournament, and I should finish out my Gnomeregan champion status at some point this weekend. I'm also thinking of buying a pair of heirloom shoulders and powering my Druid through to 80, but I am torn between grabbing Feral or Healer shoulders, so I may just run heroics until I can afford both. Also, I'm getting into Wintergrasp some, if only to grab the Mammoth for achievement purposes.
• Eliah Hecht: I gave my Warlock a new spec (and Cold Weather Flying) as a level 77 present, so I'll be Incinerating my way to my fourth level 80 character.
• Elizabeth Harper: Noblegarden!
• Elizabeth Wachowski: I'm still running into the getting-disconnected-every-few-minutes problem, so I'll probably be playing Oblivion and watching my boyfriend accidentally blow himself up with grenades in GTAIV.
• Jennie Lees: I'm going to be playing a lot of in-game Peggle.
• Matt Low: Ool-doo-ar. Perhaps some sleep here and there too.
• Matthew Rossi: Between continuous bouts of bad news I'm running Ulduar -10, having cleared up to Yoggy in 25 man this week. Hoping for a full clear of 10 this weekend, and then we can start on hard modes. I'm also re-playing Jade Empire because I like to kick things in the face but society frowns on it.


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The members of <Cult of Reason> on Tichondrius had a particularly difficult first kill of Razorscale -- everyone in the raid was over 1k latency. So after the beast was down, they decided to use their kill shot to commemorate their victory over both the dragoness and the server itself. If only the real lag monster went down so easily. Thanks to Timothy for the shot!

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So here's the deal. We've been told we have more Argent Tournament content coming, that's a given. As late as a couple days ago, Blues were telling us, for example, that we'll definitely see more ways to earn Champion's Seals.

In short, come 3.2, it seems more than likely that we can expect the Goblins to be done building that coliseum, and the next phase of the tourney to be underway. So the question is, what exactly will we see?
I can't help but hope to see the return of the old factional armor. I've complained about this before, but I miss the distinctive look of many of the old faction-specific PvP armor sets, especially for plate wearers. It offered a distinct fashion and way to show off your factional loyalties if faction-based RP or Battlegrounding was your pleasure. Sure, it technically still exists in the level 60 gear, but that's level 60, and I'm pretty sure my Death Knight can't get a set at all.

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