Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we pretend to be a gender we're not. When we discussed boys playing girl characters before, we all pretty much agreed that it was cool as long as there was no deception involved. Roleplaying = yay. Experimentation = good. Hiding your true identity in a non-roleplaying environment = uh oh. Unfortunately, for One Big Liar, what began as experimentation and a wee bit of roleplaying evolved into a full-scale reputation for being a "real girl." Uh oh, indeed.

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

• Fel Fire is a new warlock blog that just started up recently, and they've already got a good overview of the Auction House up.
• Larisa at the Pink Pigtail Inn is definitely one of those who doesn't think that Mr. T represents her game.
• Pwnwear examines the issue of tank numbers and balance in game design.
• Too successful in Trial of the Grand Crusader? Let Caer Morrighan help you out with a few surefire ways to fail the instance.
• PC Games Hardware nabbed a shiny new Radeon HD 5970 video card, and they ran benchmarks with World of Warcraft, among other games. 76 FPS? Yes please.


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A big, bad axe from Ulduar this week.

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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. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

Guys, you're driving me crazy here. As part of my spiritual promotion to Junior Queue Guy I pick up The Queue on Fridays now and that means I scour Thursday's Queue for questions to answer. You'd think, with one hundred comments on yesterday's post, that there'd be something juicy in there, but you guys are on some kind of vision quest here because you keep asking questions that are impossible to answer! I don't know if goblins start with the bow skill. The Cataclysm alpha's not even out yet. Be a pal, readers; ask questions that don't require an interocitor to answer.

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Our friends at Joystiq reported on this fascinating survey by GamesIndustry.com that broke down responses from 13,000 US and EU citizens about how they spend their gaming time. While they don't have specific numbers for World of Warcraft, the survey says [PDF link] that overall, 15% of gaming time is spent playing MMOs. US players spend about 14% of their gaming time on MMOs, while EU players range from 8% to 16% by country. In the EU, 14% of all players have played an MMO, and in the US, 21% of everyone playing games has played a massively multiplayer online game.

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Our November Guild of the Month contest is still ongoing, but today is the day we unveil October's winner. But before I do that, I want to tell all of the entrants that you shouldn't get discouraged. We get a lot of great entries every month, and if you didn't win in October, enter for November! If you don't win in November, stay vigilant and enter in December. This contest isn't going away.

October's winner, The Stonewall Family, is walking away with a $100 gift certificate from Swagdog, where you can pick up all sorts of custom guild apparel. Rather than trying to tell you about them myself, I'll leave it up to the guild to do it. Who knows them better?

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Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.
With the battle against the Lich King looming closer and closer on the horizon, the crafty craftperson is already getting ready to pepper the local auction house with crafted items. Guilds will need to slap on crafted items to quickly round out behind-the-gear-curve raid members, and the auction house will be the first place they turn to do that. The gear you build and prepare now will be quickly sold when it's time to fight Arthas.

More importantly, though, raiders are going to see a whole new tier of gear. That means the items they use to buff their gear is going to need replacing, and the prescient craftperson is going to be ready to meet that need.

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Castle in the Sky by Zimtower is a short, sweet and beautiful music video. It's somewhat referencing Dalaran as a castle in the sky, but is really more focused on the idea of a "happy place" where each person can revisit their own childhood. And yes, that's totally a reappearance from the fun gnome from Cloud 9.

It's a pretty short video, so I wouldn't recommend trying to read too much into it. However, Zimtower has done an amazing job animating his gnomes so that they actually line up against the song's lyrics. The video is beautiful, with a whimsical color palette that serves to magnificently reinforce the song's message.

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Ah, Kirin Tor rings. We've come to rely on these old standbys as gear that'll always be there for us. Especially if "we" are elemental shamans. But what's going on with them in Patch 3.3?

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Sock! Pow! Bong!

Sometimes the world needs a protector. Sometimes it needs a hero. And that's where I come in, sitting above the citizens of Dalaran watching over them; my Boy Wonder in short latex shorts running playfully behind me. The unsuspecting denizens of Azeroth go about their business unsuspecting of the world of crime around them, and that's why I'm here. Oh look, a mouse!

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Pilgrim's Bounty is a brand-new holiday that in 2009 will run between 1:00 am server time Sunday, November 22nd and 11:50 pm server time Saturday, November 28th. Because it's new and there's limited information available on it, expect to see this post updated extensively in the 24 hours after the holiday goes live. We'll have new information on quests, items, and vendor locations, plus screenshots of WoW's newest holiday.

As an FYI, Pilgrim's Bounty is not part of the yearlong meta What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, so if you fall short on any of the achievements below, you're not running the risk of having to wait another year for a crack at a violet protodrake. However, you will miss out on the Pilgrim title and plump turkey pet that are rewards for completing the Pilgrim meta.

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Icecrown Citadel Loot - November 20 Update
It's time for another update of Icecrown Citadel loot! I know there wasn't many updates about heroic modes in the past day but guilds are slightly more secretive about what happens here ... Information should be available at some point, but streams are harder to get.

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Okay, I admit it: waiting for Icecrown has started to drive me a little nuts.

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Ghostcrawler responded recently to a post asking about stat growth on items, and the results were pretty interesting. The player asked if Blizzard had any plans to cut back the stat growth on items before we reach +2000 spellpower, for example. GC had this to say:
"They're just numbers. We don't think it starts getting scary until the human mind literally has trouble processing the digits. If your new staff has 152,420 spell power, well, yeah that's a mouthful. But if your new staff has 4000 spell power, the only thing that can really be freaking you out is that 4000 is just a really big number compared to the 100 spell power you might be used to. Automobiles used to cost hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars too.... :)" Well, sure, but what about in Cataclysm? With all those stat changes you guys talked about at BlizzCon, there has to be some surprises on the way when we see our first glimpse of Cataclysm gear.

"Gear inflation is just part of MMOs, or at least the kind of MMO that we make. Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too. :)" Not too surprising, really; with the removal of spell power, we're gonna see a whole bunch of Int on items, for example, so the first time we see that Sunken City of Vashj'ir green staff, we're probably gonna have a bit of an "AaaaAAAH!" moment.

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