Hey everyone.  We have put up a sticky thread on the General Raiding Forums outlining the guideliness for Raid Readiness and Preparation.  We would very much appreciate everyone who intends to raid taking the time to read over the guidelines contained therein.  This is considered required reading by raiders.  After you have read the guidelines, please post with your name so that we know who has read them.  These "signatures" will be used to aid in determining raid eligibility!

If you have any questions, comments or concerns ;), please feel free to post in that thread or contact an officer privately.  We appreciate all feedback, and will do our best to create solutions and address misunderstandings as well as we can.

Thanks everyone, and see you in Azeroth!

Throk has a new post about our raiding schedule for the fall. Let us know what you think.

Since it has been about a year when they have jumpped ship to a different server, I thought it would be nice to show you a few pics I still have of them. Probably not the most flattering but that is half the fun... Check them out in the photo gallery as well.

I saw this and thought it was pretty neat.

 

Click on Read More to see the video.

Our website is #1 on a google search! Just not the one I was expecting to see...

Two years ago, at the 2007 Game Developers Conference, there was a slip between two Blizzard employees that made it to the web. When Blizzard employees where asking each other what their current projects where one mentioned the renowned StarCraft 2 while the other one had a much more ambiguous name: Hydra. Shortly thereafter, news came up that Blizzard was hiring people to develop a new MMO unrelated to any of the current franchises they have currently released. A few months later, Diablo 3 was announced at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational. Is one of these projects codenamed hydra?

It’s hard to pin it down to be honest. It seems behind WoW or perhaps because of the financial freedom they have gotten with WoW, Blizzard has been surging with new projects. From SC2 and D3 to an updated battle.net and an elusive new MMO as well as a new franchise. With all this going on the one thing that stays in the back of my head is Blizzard has never confirmed any of these projects as Hydra.

Is Hydra the codename for SC2 because of the hydralisks? Is it Diablo 3 and they just do not use its codename anymore? Is it the new MMO and was the name chosen to give any hints on what it would be about? After all this time it is still as much as a mystery as it was in 2007 and there are still traces of Project:Hydra to this day at Blizzard's HQ.

 

I hate to be pessimistic (actually, that is not true) but I am starting to have my doubts that StarCraft will be released for sale before the year is out. I actually had hopes until just recently when I somehow snapped out of my imperceptive stupor. Its the end of July. A Blizzard employee, Dustin Browder, stated that they plan on the beta taking more than four months but saying they do not want it to last too long (I believe somewhere he used nine months as too long for a beta). This would symbolize that even if the beta came out today, it would push into December for the time frame they want for beta testing. Tie that in with Activision hinting to the Wall Street Journal that StarCraft will be pushed to 2010 does not help either. I really hope I am wrong, as I have been before. So much for thinking that I had at Blizzcon 2008 that the beta would be out in March...

To make this available to more people, I moved this post out of the forums and saved it as an article on the site. It is appalling how big of an epidemic account hacking is. That being said, here is the link to some sound advice to help prevent getting your WoW account hacked and/or stolen.

According to Kotaku, who actually got their news from the site But wait, there’s lore (which I have never heard of until now, that new masks have been for Halloween this year and some think it may be a hint of new playable races in the next expansion. That’s right, if you really want to stretch you can see that there is a possibility that Goblins and Worgens could become playable races in WoW because the other masks in the game are of playable races. Personally I feel this is really fishing for news hype right before BlizzCon. With fewer announcements than last year I would not be supprised if Blizzard would be attempting to hype up this years conference.