If there's one thing you can take away from this week's GW downings, it's that most guilds are ready for Icecrown. We're seeing lots and lots of guilds finishing off the Trial of the Crusader, and quite a few of them are even starting to nab the Tribute achievements. For endgame raiders, Icecrown can't show up too soon.

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The Guild has come to the end of season 3, and it's all come down to this. Codex is facing off what's left of the Axis of Anarchy, Riley has appeared to ruin Zaboo's game, and all of the other issues this season come to a head as the showdown reaches its conclusion. And being that this is the season finale, there's a few surprises in the mix as well, and a shocker of a finish. You can watch the show over on MSN (which is now calling itself Bing), on the Xbox Live and Zune marketplaces, or right after the break below.

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You are cordially invited to party like a Pilgrim tonight with It came from the Blog! Here are the details:

• When: 11pm EST (8pm PST, 9pm Server time) Wednesday, November 25th
• Where: Meet at the Ruins of Lordaeron (Undercity) on Zangarmarsh (U.S.)
• Who: Any Horde character of any level. No mounts required.
• How: Ask Robinator, Robinella, Robiness or any It came from the Blog Lurker or above for an invite to the guild.
• What: We will be gaining some Pilgrim's Bounty Achievements: Food Fight!, Sharing is Caring and Pilgrim's Paunch.


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The @warcraft twitter account has been posting a few carefully taken pictures of something the past couple days, and today it's been reveled what the object is -- a Pandaren Brewmaster Figure that you can buy from the Blizzard store. The little guy is "on sale" for $50, and there are limited quantities available. Everything is first come, first serve, so if you want one I suggest getting getting it quickly.

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Achievement Wh0re is a new song by Gigi and Nation. (Nation was once Abandonation, but I'm not sure if the label change is purposeful, or just a hip contraction.) The video was created by WoPairs, who shows an excellent eye for character portraiture in this piece.

The song is dedicated to those who seek out achievements to the cost of all else. I'm not much of an achievement guy, so I found the send-up of it to be pretty amusing. I guess I see how some folks are really into them, but achievements feel like one really long grind to me.

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Blizzard is offering, via email, select inactive accounts the chance to return to the game with free seven days worth of game time. These emails are what appears to be a special unannounced promotion for those that have left Azeroth, coinciding with the five year anniversary of WoW.

We can confirm these emails are legitimate, the links and headers all point back to blizzard.com servers. And indeed a blue over in the Customer Service forums has more or less confirmed that it's legit.

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After trying to entrap her Thanksgiving dinner with a cleaver, a polearm, a guildmate's Fireball spell, a carefully constructed gnomish engineering device, and an errant feral druid in cat form, Nayuki of Demon Soul finally had to admit defeat. The turkey was simply smarter than she was. Her only hope for a decent holiday meal was to wait until the turkey's back was turned, and then blindly stab away with her knife. Surely that would work.

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For our final contest celebrating World of Warcraft's 5th anniversary we have four, count them, four novels from Pocket Books' WoW fiction line to give away. Well, two novels and two compilation books. So whether you're a Christie Golden or a Richard Knaak fan enter for your chance to win one of these great lore-filled books.

The contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), and everyone who enters must be 18 or older. To enter, leave a comment on this post before Thursday, November 26th, at 12p ET (noon), and please be sure to use a real email that you check often to enter, so we can contact you should you be one of the winners. You may enter only once and a winner will be selected randomly for each one of the following prizes:

• Arthas:Rise of the Lich King retail value of $25
• Night of the Dragon retail value of $16
• Warcraft Archive retail value of $17
• War of the Ancients Archive retail value of $17


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The players on the Emberstorm and Whirlwind battlegroups have had a rough week. A massive power outage, huge network issues and other problems have forced them away from their virtual homes to find refuge elsewhere. Some have joined the It came from the Blog guild on Zangarmarsh, where we have had two impromptu server outage parties. The picture above is from Tuesday night's shindig.

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It's day three of our World of Warcraft 5th Anniversary giveaway extravaganza and we're celebrating it by giving away 3 codes to Scourgewar TCG deck loot card, Tiny. This summons a mini mount that doesn't increase your run speed, but, well, it looks damn funny. Draenei on a pony? Tauren on a raptor? 50 charges of fun in every code!

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Invincible - Lich King Flying Mount
Yay! Finally! Patch 3.3 introduced a handful of new mounts and one of them is probably one of the most interesting ever added to the game : Invincible.

Who's Invincible? Let's ask WoWWiki: Invincible was the steed of Arthas Menethil, both in life and death. He was the skeletal steed that Arthas rode throughout Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

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There are more server outages hitting this afternoon, unfortunately impacting the same realms that were down for around ten hours last night. The Seattle datacenter was hit with a nasty power outage yesterday, but we currently don't know the reasons for the current downtime. There are no blue responses yet, but my gut says there's some lingering damage that will need to be dealt with this afternoon.

Then again, we might be lucky and they'll be back in ten minutes. Who knows with these things? Keep an eye on WoW.com and we'll keep you posted should we hear anything. If you're not sure if you're part of one of these battlegroups, the full list is behind the cut.

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