The OC Register has a great breakdown of what Activision said on their earnings conference call today. Perhaps the biggest WoW-related stat to come out of the call is that the number of subscribers to the game has apparently leveled off: they're holding steady at 11.5 million. Which is nothing to cough at, but it's what we were told four months ago, and if, as Ghostcrawler claimed, the numbers are still going up, then they're going up very, very slowly. Morhaime says that numbers are growing everywhere, but that China will be a main focus of growth this year as Wrath of the Lich King releases there soon.

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Upper Deck has released the first expansion to the WoW minis game, called Spoils of War. The new set of figures introduces legendary lore figures like Jaina and Kael'thas into the mix, and they can now jump onto the gameboard with player characters and duke it out in the streamlined Arena-style turn-based battles. The new set also contains Action Bar cards, which can modify your characters and party's abilities before a battle (like casting a Wrath of Air totem to modify all of your team's die rolls). And finally, the new expansion also brings items into the mix, so there's one more medium in which you can wield Sulfuras, the Hand of Ragnaros. (And no, unfortunately, real life isn't one... yet.)

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Nick Markham is a student at Chapman University , and he recently dropped us a tip about something special that happened there. Chapman University is fairly close to Blizzard's Irvine headquarters, which could be why they were able to take the time to drop by. One of their film classes had a treat when six members of the Blizzard cinematic team came by to give a three hour presentation about what they do, how they do it, and other miscellaneous film-related issues. So what's the news?

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

Do you ever get the feeling that WoW is like some sort of purgatory? That you're trapped in an endless loop of hellish deviations intent on consuming the very soul from which all things good and pure spring forth from? That this game is indeed nothing but the true game which ends all games, and like Sisyphus or John Locke you'll be stuck pushing the boulder up the hill towards a higher level for the rest of your life?

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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.

This week's Two Bosses Enter deathmatch definitely's got that boom, boom, pow. Now, we know you're not fond of The Oculus. We do know. Nonetheless, we're asking you to set aside your prejudices and consider this week's explosive contestants on their own merit: Drakos the Interrogator of The Oculus versus Salramm the Fleshcrafter of The Culling of Stratholme.

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With all this talk about the Curse client and WoWMatrix, it's easy to forget that another major player is entering the scene soon (™): MMOUI Minion, from the people at WoWInterface. According to the Wowhead preview of the forthcoming client, the target date for open beta testing is May 17, 10 days from today.

• Will work on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Has an option to auto-update, set to "off" by default.
• There will be a premium version, but the only difference will be that premium users don't see ads. In contrast to the Curse client, the non-premium version of Minion is not crippled, and will have an update-all button and full download speed.
• If an author enables donation requests, they will show up in the updater.

Most interesting to me is the module system that the client will support. There's going to be an API in Minion so that anyone who wants to can write plug-in modules; for instance, Curse could write a module that would let Minion users update addons from Curse in Minion. They could show their own ads, and make their own decisions about whether to enable/disable "premium" features for the module. Security concerns for third-party modules are addressed here.

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One of the interesting things about new content is the transitional period as you clear the new bosses and start gearing up. Pictured alongside today's column is an illustration of that process, as Tier 7 blends into Tier 8 and Calamity's Grasp is paired with Vulmir.

Myself, I've mostly been screaming "Why won't you drop" again, as I so often do (I have terrible loot luck) at various healing rings, trinkets, necks, and shields. Having recently healed my first 25 man since I switched from resto to elemental in SSC, I've also found that I hate spirit with a passion.

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The last few days I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out why I'm not particularly enjoying Patch 3.1 when I'm doing something besides raiding Ulduar. I should be enjoying it! When I first checked it out on the PTR, I was extremely excited about it. The Argent Tournament especially. The whole jousting deal, the Arthurian themes, the potential for story progression, the whole thing. It looked great! Unfortunately... I'm finding it pretty boring.

The Argent Tournament feels lifeless. Completely and utterly lifeless. I say it all of the time, but patch 2.4 was my favorite patch of World of Warcraft thus far, no contest. Patch 2.4 brought me more joy than even the Wrath launch. Not only did it have content for absolutely every aspect of the game, but it also actually changed the world. Storylines progressed in an in-your-face way. Sure, patch 3.1 moved the Ulduar and Yogg-Saron story forward, but would you know it if you didn't read fansites or watch the patch 3.1 cinematic? What's different? What indicator is there that something new is happening in the Storm Peaks?

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This is an interesting little system -- unfortunately, it's probably a little too complicated for most people to use, but the functionality is intriguing. WoWHorn is an open source application that basically monitors your achievements on the Armory, and will Twitter about it when you earn a new one. To get it up and running, you'll need the application itself of course, and you'll probably also need Ruby installed if you don't have it yet (OS X has it already, I believe, and Linux may as well). I don't think you'll need to input your actual WoW password (the program should be able to look up your info with just your character name and realm), but you will have to punch in your Twitter credentials if you want it to tweet for you. Once you've got everything working (and you'll have to ignore the errors, I got quite a few), you should see a tweet pop up in your feed whenever you get new points ingame.

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If you're a follower of the "Illegal Danish" series, you've probably already encountered Puff and Lilpuff. The elf and gnome are two key characters in Myndflame's comedy, and they make for an interesting pair. In order to help reach out to both their fans and the machinima community, Myndflame is launching a new audio-based series based on the character, called The Adventures of Puff and Lilpuff.

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This week saw the influx of the first batch of iLevel 232 Furious Gladiator weapons into the community. They're awesome weapons and just about the most accessible iLevel 232 items in the game. Available for a mere 50,000 Honor and 1,400 Arena points, the first tier of Furious Gladiator weapons require an 1850 team and personal rating. This is a rather easy rating to obtain in the 2v2 format but slightly more difficult in 3v3 and 5v5 because of several factors including the population competing in the respective brackets.

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Selserene tipped me off to this really cool little video. This is the Avenger trailer by Dtbn. The full movie is probably going to be released sometime in late summer, and is described by the author as being "action packed."

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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.

The results of this week's Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves deathmatch didn't show much insanity – just plenty of old-fashioned whuppin', as Herald Volazj laid the smack down on Novos the Summoner in a reader poll landslide.

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Call me a lore noob (and that's fine, Alex will heartily agree with you), but like Loregy.com suspected, I had never before heard of Jarod Shadowsong. We pretty much all know about his sister Maeiv, thanks to her little tirade against Illidan and the big part that played in the last expansion. But Jarod might be Azeroth's biggest unsung hero. And considering that all of the rumors point to the next expansion diving into the Maelstrom and/or the Emerald Dream, not to mention an eventual showdown with Sargeras, he could also play a very important part in Azeroth's future.

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"So, my ward, tell me what you've learned here today. Actually stay at a flag to defend after you assault it? Don't fight pointlessly in the middle of nowhere? And definitely don't follow that mage off the cliff, no matter how low his health is? Excellent. You have learned well, young Salandria. Now can you run around like a demented chicken for a while while I hide behind this bush? I'm trying to get someone close enough to mind control."

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I hit level 80 after only finishing a handful of quest zones in Northrend. Since then I've been running Heroics and dabbling in Naxx raiding. But this week I decided to go back to solo questing for a bit and started the much-loved Sons of Hodir introductory quest line. Now, I see what everyone is talking about. It's a quest chain not to be missed.

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Arena Rating System & Requirement Changes
Quote from: Crygil (Source)The current arena rating system allows more players to have higher ratings in the 2v2 bracket when compared to 3v3 and 5v5. We are preparing an in-game update that will be improving the rating system of the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets to allow all three of the brackets to have a similar number of players able to achieve ratings on par with what’s currently possible in our 2v2 arena bracket. As a result, we are changing the personal and team rating requirements for the item level 239 weapons from 2200 to 2350, but keep in mind the tooltip will continue to show the requirement as 2200 until patch 3.1.2.

As a result of the above improvements, this change will prevent an excessive number of players from reaching much higher ratings and acquiring the highest grade of weapons in-game. The increase in rating requirements is designed to keep the number of players able to obtain these arena weapons on par with the number of players who are able to obtain the same grade of weapons from Heroic Ulduar.

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Warning: this post contains links to sites that use some pretty strong language at times and several links are also NSFW.

Recently we received an e-mail from a reader asking what to do about “auction house griefing”. The reader said that any time he placed an item for sale in the auction house a certain other player would undercut him almost immediately. Our advice was to basically ignore the competitor and press on with normal trading. If that doesn’t resolve the issue after a few days, simply move your auctioning business over to an alt for a few weeks. Without an audience, or participatory ‘victim’, you remove a key component of the griefer’s game and render them irrelevant.

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