2009 is coming to a close, and with it, "the aughts," which means we're about to get flooded with list after list of the best of the decade. It's been a raucous ten years for gaming (some, including me, might call it the best ten years in gaming so far), and Crispy Gamer is the first to step up and try to pick the best games we've seen so far. In their Game of the Decade showdown, World of Warcraft is still in the running, up against Bioware's legendary Knights of the Old Republic RPG, as the latest post has readers trying to pick the final four choices. If you think our game is more deserving than KotOR (note that this isn't the MMO, it's the old RPG with your friendly meatbag hater droid, HK-47), you can vote for WoW over on this page until Tuesday at 6pm.

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Looks like we're in for a long maintenance period with a great reward for our patience this week, folks. Blizzard announced their window for this week's scheduled downtime on the official forums, and given its length, we'll be seeing Icecrown tomorrow after all.

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We've gotten confirmation from our sources that patch 3.3 is set to go live tomorrow. We should be seeing the downloader get the rest of the files after the downtime begins (which hasn't been announced yet). There are no new patch notes just yet, however those should be coming shortly.

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The Darkmoon Faire is in Elwynn Forest this week, and that means it's time for another It came from the Blog event. The event will be in three parts:

The run to Elwynn: We will be running from Orgrimmar to Elwynn using a path I plotted out for maximum lowbie protection -- also, photo opportunities.

Hogger Fist Fight: This is not a level 1 Hogger raid. That's so 2007 (ok that link does not go to a level 1 Hogger raid either, but you know what I mean). All levels are invited to this event, but we will be removing our weapons, and not using spells, so we can punch Hogger and his buddies.

Darkmoon Faire fun: We'll buy frog pets, shoot ourselves out of cannons and even turn in stuff if we've been collecting it.

Here are the particulars:

• When: Saturday, December 12th, 5pm EST (2pm PST, 3pm Server)
• Where: Meet in front of Orgrimmar on Zangarmarsh (U.S.)
• Who: Any level Horde character
• How: Just send a tell to Robinator or any It came from the Blog Lurker for a guild invite.

If you have any questions about our WoW.com guild in general, please see our FAQ. There are more event details after the break.

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World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

Here's a type of craft we haven't seen much of before: a hammered metal bowl that simply bellows "For the Horde!" Talk about taking blacksmithing to a whole new level ... We visited with Blazecheetah, the bowl's maker, to find out more about the crafting behind his creation. His play-by-play on its creation is an intriguing peek behind the scenes, if you've never been exposed to metalcrafting before.

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Our podcast was live on the air as usual last Saturday, and the show is now up for your listening enjoyment. Artist Mary Varn was aboard to talk with us about her comic and her Warcraft career, and Matt Low of World of Matticus also jumped on to chat with Turpster and I about the latest WoW news, including the impending patch 3.3, the recent server outages, and the Taiwanese player who picked up all of the achievements in the game (which, probably not entirely concidentally, is the subject of Mary's comic today).

And of course we answered your emails as well. For those of you wondering about our Podcast Awards nomination, voting has ended, and the winners are supposed to be announced next Saturday in a ceremony online. We'll keep you updated -- remember, if we win, we'll be giving away any prizes we get to one lucky listener, and we'll be recording a Warcraft bedtime story for all of you to download. Cross your fingers for us!

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Patch 3.3 deployed on live servers this week
The information isn't official yet but Patch 3.3 will be deployed on live servers this week.

• Patch Notes - Patch Notes, Talent Calculator
• Icecrown Citadel - Icecrown Raid Gating, Ashen Verdict Faction, Achievements
• Icecrown Citadel - Items - Icecrown Raid Loot, Shadowmourne, Tier 10 Armor.
• Icecrown Citadel - Entrance - Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship Battle, Deathbringer Saurfang
• Icecrown Citadel - Plagueworks - Rotface, Festergut, Professor Putricide
• Icecrown Citadel - Crimson Hall - Blood Princes, Blood-Queen Lana'thel
• Icecrown Citadel - Frostwing Halls - Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, The Lich King,
• Icecrown 5-Man - Icecrown 5-Man Loot, The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection, Achievements
• Loot Lists - Icecrown Raid Loot, Icecrown 5-Man Loot, Ashen Verdict Faction
• Quests - Shadowmourne, Quel'delar, Quest Tracking, Weekly Raid Quests
• Miscellaneous - Arena Season 8

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

Listening Music: Royksopp's Remind Me. We were emailed last week by Kohl, who politely recommended some listening music for Blood Sport this week. I was planning on featuring another kind of chill electronica, but Kohl just happened to recommend Royksopp among Hybrid and Kosheen -- so enjoy the beats, Kohl. If you'd like to contribute listening music to the column, please make your recommendation in the comments below. If you want to reach me on a personal level, you can hit me up at colby <at> wow.com.

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Azeroth United, the internet media community for all things World of Warcraft, has been holding a charity drive for Child's Play since November 1st. Hearts, Hands, and Voices has already surpassed their initial goal of $5000 and is now hoping to reach twice that by their end date of December 13th. Sunday, our very own Mike Schramm played Rock Band for 9 hours -- until his fingers hurt -- to raise money for the drive. Also, you can blame Syrana for all your troubles on Twitter and help raise money for the charity, just by tweeting.

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You lucky European ducks may just have finally gotten that one thing you can hold over the heads of those Americans with their superiority complexes. The official online Blizzard store is now offering, exclusively for Europe, a set of Frostmourne-themed merchandise. Enclosed in a special box, the set contains one Frostmourne hilt keychain and one insulated metal mug with Frostmourne's runic engravings on one side.

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column about husband/wife guild leaders who were using the old double-roll scam in a new way now that loot doesn't bind to a character for two hours. I also mentioned in that column the new trend in raids, particularly PUG raids, of offering gold for an item that someone else has fairly won.

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I've been tangling with the tough issue of tanking again lately -- I have finally leveled up my paladin to 80, and ideally, the plan is to jump in as a dual specced tank and healer when patch 3.3 hits. All LFG all the time, eventually headed to higher level raiding. But Honor's Code has a good post up this weekend about the trouble that many tanks are facing lately -- they say that while there's lots of tanking to be had in the early endgame (every 5-man and heroic group out there needs a tank), the available positions narrow down as you get farther up. By the time you're reaching Icecrown (which I would like to do someday), there are so relatively few guilds raiding there and so few serious tanking spots within those guilds that you either have to be a really great tank, know someone who's in charge, or be ready to switch off to another spec or alt when necessary.

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Warning: This video involves some not-safe-for-work imagery. That includes a scantily clad female, as well as more artistic nudity near the end.

In order to really "get" this piece, you're probably going to need a little back story. First, there's this wonderful IRC channel where many of the superstars of machinima hang out. It's a little bit random chat, it's a little bit artist's studio, and it's little bit of a lot of other things.

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If the quest for bigger and better loot leaves you craving still more, maybe you need a guild that takes things to the next level: a shot at WoW loot you can wear in real life, too. Enter The Swag Dogs, a brand new guild created by our friends at SwagDog. The Blizzard-approved apparel specialists have created a family-friendly guild where players can make new friends, get in on raiding groups on the ground floor -- oh, and get a shot at free WoW swag and BlizzCon tickets.

You'll recognize SwagDog as the folks behind those sweet guild tabard-style T-shirts you've seen on recent posts here at WoW.com, including our recent WoW 5th anniversary T-shirt giveaway. The SwagDog crew are pretty good people. They sponsor our WoW.com Guild of the Month contest, giving out a $100 SwagDog gift certificate to the winning guild every month.

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It's time again for another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that loves mages and all things magey. Take this picture, for example. That's a mage right there. If I'm not mistaken, she's getting ready to do something magey. Like plant a Fireball deep in the fertile soil of a warlock's grill. Arcane Brilliance loves everything about that.

So apparently patch 3.3 could literally drop any moment. I'm not even kidding. It might have happened while I was typing that last sentence. I don't know. More likely, though, is that it will come (as per the usual deployment-method) during the upcoming Tuesday maintenance. This means we've only got a little time left before we can enter Icecrown Citadel and begin the patch-long process of shaking its inhabitants down repeatedly for loot. I, for one, cannot wait to place an Arcane Missile or five directly up Arthas' frosty tailpipe.

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Patch 3.3 has been out on the PTR for quite awhile now, and we've seen a ton of changes that will significantly alter the way the game is played. Everything from the new Dungeon Finder Tool, to the highly anticipated confrontation with Arthas.

The sheer amount of content is hard for anyone to keep up with, and we've been steadily updating the WoW.com Guide to Patch 3.3 with everything we've written about the patch (over 250 articles now). This weekend we went through and did a large updating, sorting through a few things and polishing it up.

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Here we see an excellent example of an undead warlock in the wild. After being chased out of her natural habitat of dark basements and abandoned crypts by maurading dwarves, she attempts to camouflage herself among the flowers and lilypads outdoors. Unfortunately, the distinct lack of bright colors in the warlock's wardrobe will prove her undoing. Her brown outfit and white skin makes her easy prey, and seconds after this picture was taken, she was eaten by a grue. (Thanks to Chuffchuff of <Kids Next Door> on Hakkar for the pic!)

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Sunsmoon on WoW_ladies makes an uncomfortably accurate observation concerning legendaries -- people tend to get a little nuts around them. Anyone doing Tier 6 back in the day doubtless remembers the fistfights over who was going to get a Warglaive, WoW players worldwide were in shock at a rogue getting Thor'idal over two hunters, and the annals of classic WoW are rife with nightmare stories of /gquits over Bindings of the Windseeker and arguments over Sulfuras going to a druid. Nowadays (as someone on my realm remarked in a moment's pique), of the six Val'anyrs that have been assembled on our server, only one remains in its original guild. A reasonable person might be forgiven for thinking that the little orange text accompanying what's usually a decent weapon with a great proc is a lot more trouble than it's worth.

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This discussion over on WoW Ladies has me thinking that we probably need to do a post on something I don't think we've ever covered before: screenshotting. Sure, they're everywhere -- almost everybody sees tons of screenshots every single day, and occasionally, you can even win some real-life loot for taking one. But I don't know that we've ever actually covered the mechanics of how to take one. So let's do that now.

First and foremost, taking a screenshot is usually bound to your "Print Screen" key -- whenever you're playing the game, just hit that key on your keyboard, and a screenshot (in JPG format -- it used to be saved in TGA, but Blizzard changed that a while ago) will show up in the /Screenshots folder inside the World of Warcraft installation on your hard drive. Of course, on a Mac keyboard, there is no Print Screen button, so I have mine bound to the "Home" button instead -- you can rebind it to whatever you want in the options menu. And that's just the basics -- it gets more complicated from there.

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Blizzard has posted a Dungeon Finder Tool Mini-FAQ this morning. The Mini-FAQ is a nice rundown of some of the more important facts that need clarification. It's more or less a polished up version of the questions Zarhym answered over the weekend.

As we talked about last week, patch 3.3 should be coming out tomorrow if there has been no major additional problems.

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It's time for a last batch of blue posts before the patch (Yeah, still unconfirmed, I know)! The final version of the menu should be up within a few hours and you'll have everything you need to survive this patch.

Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staffPvP starting gear in Cataclysm easier to obtain?
The fourth question, about the availability of starter gear in PvP, is something we are working right this moment on improving for Cataclysm. Players tended to view the Lich King starter gear as either tedious or a distraction while at the same time they were able to get high item level weapons from PvE. Those two factors contributed a lot to the very short matches we had in the first season.

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All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

Roleplaying is a journey of trust you take with strangers. You may now and then start out with a group of people you know in real life, but for the most part, the people you roleplay with have no idea who you really are, or why you are sitting here at the computer. You can tell them if you want to, but most people don't ask. Roleplayers tend to keep personal details private, and don't intrude on one another's space.

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