Yes, it's time once again to award one of you with the soon-to-be coolest gaming headset around just for performing the not-so-arduous task of... leaving a comment on this post. Commenting on a blog probably isn't your job (though most of you probably do it at your job -- no comment about that), but it could score you some nice swag anyway today, in the form of the beautiful Creative World of Warcraft wireless gaming headset.

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Blizzard's new Dungeon System (with built-in cross-server LFG) coming in patch 3.3 seems to have all of its bases covered, even tiny niggling details that are not yet covered in the patch notes, as this post by Zarhym proves.

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Sound files in Patch 3.3 uncovered over at MMO Champion have got players all abuzz. In particular, lore-nerds who have listened to the sound files and put them together in the most reasonably coherent fashion are going nuts over the possibilities and implications. Tissue-sniffling, underpants-changing nuts. The kind of nuts that happen in Twilight Zone episodes. So understand that clicking on any of the links below are on a Need to Know basis. That means it's full of spoilers.

No, seriously. It has so many spoilers that unsuspecting players can explode just by clicking on the Read More link below. It's that dangerous. The sound files are so revealing, so incriminating, that every agent sent by SI:7 to safeguard them has been removed from active duty and sent to the loony bin. They're so volatile that even Ragnaros got burned when he read the rest of this post. So juicy that it cost Lady Vashj an arm and a leg -- or six arms and a tail -- just to listen to them.

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Some stories of drama on the realms aren't directly guild-related, but they're just too good to pass up. The one above is just such a story -- one of our tipsters was just flying around Azeroth one day when a conversation in General caught his eye. One unlucky Time-Lost Proto-drake seeker ran into his very own Griftah, and ended up with 425 less gold and a very "unusual" toy item.

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Icecrown Raid Difficulty Functionality
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)In the upcoming patch we are adding a new feature to the Icecrown raid instance that allows the raid leader to change the instance's difficulty setting on a boss per boss basis. The way the raid leader chooses to switch is the same as now, by right-clicking on the character portrait. The difficulty settings can be changed from inside Icecrown Citadel, with some restrictions. For example, you cannot change the difficulty in combat or during certain events specified by our design team. To enable the ability to change the raid difficulty to heroic, you must first defeat the Lich King on normal mode, as doing so unlocks the heroic version of this raid instance. There is no heroic version of trash; meaning changing the difficulty will only affect boss difficulty.

We chose this particular functionality because we didn't want to use the Trial of the Crusader method, and have four versions on a raid of this size. We felt the Ulduar method of having to know a certain trick to do on the boss was difficult to communicate and tied too heavily to achievements. We might eventually convert Trial of the Crusader over to this new system but Ulduar and Naxxramas will likely never change.
PUG with the Blues
Now comes the time to be a forum hero and fraps how you wiped because of a Blizzard employee.
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)Come join the fun on the PTR and instead of getting the PUG blues, you could end up grouped with a blue. Members of the Development Team (including the encounter designers themselves) and the Community Team will be on the PTR to test out the new dungeon system and want you to come join in the fun. Join us tomorrow, November 4 beginning at 4 PM PST. (PST Time)

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Introducing the Pet Store
<Hides in a shelter before people get a chance to comment>
Quote from: Nethaera (Source)Today we’re pleased to introduce the Pet Store for World of Warcraft, a new way for players to obtain in-game pets to join them on their adventures in Azeroth. Two brand-new companions are now available for purchase exclusively at the Pet Store in the online Blizzard Store: Lil’ K.T. and the Pandaren Monk.

Make a Difference: Pandaren Monk Charity Pet
Enter the Pandaren Monk, ( http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000763 ) a martial-arts expert who’s here to help celebrate the upcoming fifth anniversary of World of Warcraft. He may be cute, but he’s proof that even the softest of critters can overcome the hardest of circumstances. For every Pandaren Monk that finds its way to a player’s side between now and the end of the year (December 31, 2009 at 11:59 PDT), we’ll donate 50 percent of the $10 purchasing price to the Make-a-Wish Foundation in an effort to brew up a little hope, strength, and joy in a child’s life.

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Blizzard has announced that they are conducting urgent maintenance on several realms. Though the official Warcraft twitter account announced it would only go on until noon PST (the tweet was about account maintenance), the in-game and forum messages state that they do not know how long the maintenance will take. They expect to have more information by 12:30 p.m. PST / 3:30 p.m. EST.

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New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.

Want to add high-powered functionality and high-octane style to your interface and controls? Add-ons, dear readers. You need add-ons. Also known as mods, add-ons can be such powerful upgrades to your gaming experience that some players consider them mandatory beyond a certain level of play. You can get add-ons that show you how much threat you've built as a tank, add-ons that show how much DPS you're doing relative to other members of the raid, and add-ons that show you who needs Dispel Magic now. There are add-ons that let you reconfigure and move your hotbars anyplace on your screen, add-ons that show you how much gold you have on each of your other characters, and add-ons that point the way to the area where your quest objective awaits ... Sweet stuff, indeed.

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digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/Blizzard_launches_real_money_in_game_pet_store'; In a surprising and stunning move, Blizzard has just launched a real money online in-game pet sore. You spend real money, you get an in-game pet. This fully brings Blizzard into the world of microtransactions -- even if the cost of $10 for one of these pets isn't exactly micro.

While these are just vanity items, one has to wonder how far Blizzard can take this microtransaction model with the largest MMORPG game being played today. They already offer (and offer quite successfully) realm transfer, name change, character re-customization, and race and faction change services. This appears to be the next logical step for them to take. Could the next offering being in-game vanity outfits? A valid question that only time will answer.

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15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

I've wandered around inside the fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan, and I'm not at all certain I'd feel safe wandering around in her version of WoW. As it turns out, though, Kiernan plays WoW much like many of the rest of us do - smacking the "brain off" button at the end of a long day, tooling around various zones with a significant other, and somehow finding ourselves utterly embroiled in the microcosms that are the lives of the characters we spend so much time with. So an interview with Kiernan turned out to be a long, WoW-centric turn that she attacked with relish. "Truthfully, I think it's one of the most interesting interviews I've done lately, if only because I spend so little of it talking about writing," she blogged. We think it's pretty darn interesting, too.

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Blizzard is once again changing the way in which we trigger heroic modes of encounters. First there was Sarth, where you left up mini-bosses. Then there was Ulduar, where you (sometimes) triggered a particular event by defeating or leaving up particular bosses or objects. Then in the Trial of the Crusader you had four different raids to do depending on your difficulty setting.

Now in Icecrown Citadel, Blizzard has appeared to reach a final solution of sorts -- potentially even going back and changing the way hard modes in Trial of the Crusader are triggered. Difficulty (hard mode on/hard mode off) of the upcoming Icecrown Citadel raid in patch 3.3 will be set on a per-boss basis.

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You know how like Michael Bay wanted Transformers to be a story about a boy and his car? Or how John Carpenter made a film about one teen's dangerous obsession with a murderous car? Well, the World of Warcraft version is about to come to life -- or unlife -- when patch 3.3 finally goes up. MMO Champion has uncovered model files for Invincible, the Lich King's personal steed. As the datamining suggests -- "Invincible - Summons and dismisses the flying undead horse Invincible. This mount changes depending on your Riding skill and location." -- players might actually have a shot at obtaining what is, in my humble opinion, the most badass pixel-by-pixel mount in the game. Ever.

The horse has some serious lore to it, too. As many players have already discovered, Invincible has an unearthed grave in the game located near the Balnir Farmstead in Tirisfal Glades.

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

Today's listening music for the Queue is Spider Pig. Don't ask why. It just is.

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Mellow Halloween is the creation of Downbeat Ink, who says that the video's spontaneous, improvised script is why they called it "mellow."

The video's pretty short, but it's got a couple gags in it. I liked the "creepy mask" joke, though I've always thought all the Hallow's End masks are pretty creepy. There's a short spook at the end, which is probably the main gag of the video.

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Want to be cool, yo?

Want to bask in some blue goo?

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Halloween is over and we're headed towards Thanksgiving, which means it's the time of year that charities everywhere ask you to open up your hearts and wallets and support some good causes. Azeroth United, the recently-formed community for WoW players, just revealed the prizes in their "Hearts, Hands, and Voices" charity giveaway. They're officially supporting Child's Play (they got mentioned on the main website), and your donation there (of $10 or $20) will get you into two tiers of giveaways, featuring prizes of all kinds from all over the WoW community. Sounds like a great chance to both support a good cause and maybe even win some free stuff.

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It's no surprise that I chose a picture of a dragon today -- my copy of Dragon Age is sitting on top of the television, enticing me with its siren song of Biowareness. Must ... resist ... Xbox ... until article is done! Anyway, Pathemavan of <Forsaken Descendants> on Malygos suffers from a distinct lack of the usual night elf overly high self-esteem. "From the day Blizzard announced the new paid race change feature, I was elated that my dream of having a gnome druid might finally come to pass," he writes. "Needless to say, I was quite upset to see that Blizzard didn't share my love for the potential of cub, meerkat, and shrub-form druids walking around, since they wouldn't allow me to make my druid into a gnome. Left with no other alternatives, I decided to bypass the GMs entirely and petitioned Ysera the Dreamer for a race change. She (being a huge fan of gnomes herself) was more than happy to oblige."

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It's no secret that certain things (and even whole zones, in their current state) are going to go the way of the dodo when Cataclysm arrives, and both players and developers have talked a lot about the changes in Azeroth and environs beyond. By contrast, today I'm interested in hearing about what you don't want to see eighty-sixed -- the quests you'd miss, the factions or NPC's you hope will cling to life, the dungeons or raids you don't want to see go gentle into that good night.

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