This one’s a little old since the content is pre-Wrath and from when Burning Crusade was new stuff, but it’s still hilarious, especially if you’ve played through BC and enjoyed it. I particularly like the gnome who gives the environmental report. He clearly has better things to do with his time, and uh…I guess I don’t blame him.

That’s right folks, the Night-Elf Mohawk Grenade is active in live realms – pick one up and give ANYONE, regardless of their race in-game, a night-elf mohawk. And we’re not talking about taking their existing hair and making it a mohawk, we’re talking about making their heads a night elf with a mohawk, Mr. T style.

The video above is a commercial for World of Warcraft that features the grenade and features Mr. T advertising the in-game item that only he could market. You’ll have to visit a mohawk grenade vendor outside of one of the starting zones to get one, but once you’re all stocked up you’re ready to party in your next raid or battleground! Personally, I love the things – I’ve seen some hate for em, but then again, haters are gonna hate no matter what, so I say sit back, relax, and lob a mohawk grenade at ‘em.

On that note though, I love how his first target is a gnome. Hee! They’re just such easy targets!

I first heard the story (and snagged the headline, since the story makes for a better headline than it does a story) from an excellent post at WoW.com on the matter – apparently the folks at Warcry managed to sit down with Rob Pardo of Blizzard to talk about what he thought some of World of Warcraft’s biggest mistakes have been. One of the notable mentions? Arenas:

We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction.

I don’t think this is quite as controversial as WoW.com and a lot of other bloggers do, and I also don’t think it’s as huge news as everyone seems to think it is, personally. I played on an arena team for a while there in season 2 and 3, back when it was still fun, and while I agree that 2v2 matches were horribly mismatched, I thought the strategy involved with 3v3 matches and the chaos that was your average 5v5 match was fun to participate in.

The downside of course, as Pardo explains, is that Blizzard had to keep balancing classes around one another so everyone had a relatively fair shot to participate in arenas in some regard, or else classes and specs would completely get left out for them. This is a concern that a lot of players raised over the course of arena seasons, and Blizzard did a really good job of trying to make changes so the classes could match up with one another, but in the end there’s just nothing you can do about it.

Pardo points out that the dichotomy to the game – whether World of Warcraft is a cooperative PvE game or a competitive PvP game – is difficult to manage and it’s almost impossible to balance classes and encounters so they can be both at the same time without obviously tipping their hand as to which direction they think the game should lean.

Personally, I think that Blizzard could have done just as well to spend more time balancing the classes for PvE as long as that’s the majority of the player base, and allow PvP players to carve out their own niche. It might be painful at first as a number of PvP players will whine and complain, but the truly skilled players would find a way around some of the obvious class imbalances and others would simply get by playing teams of the preferred classes instead.

It’s kind of a backhanded compliment to the people I used to play arenas with to suggest that the best thing Blizzard could do for arena PvP in World of Warcraft is to ignore it: they’d probably be the happiest making the game work for them instead of being handed changes by Blizzard, and of the arena players that would whine about class imbalances, they’d eventually get shouted down by players who managed to make skill their ultimate competitive weapon, but in the end, Blizzard has a choice – they can spend more development time on the PvE elements of the game that really draw in new players, or they can spend development hours tuning classes for PvP, which is great for people who enjoy it but it’s not adding to the core elements of the game.

The post RPG Nostalgia: What Got You Into RPGs? was inspired by a shared topic post at the Blog Azeroth forums. The beauty of the shared topics is that several other amazing bloggers from the World of Warcraft community weigh in on those topics as well and share their experiences.

I shared mine, now go read theirs!

• Triv, of the blog Raid Naked, and the one who originally suggested this amazing shared topic, whipped up an excellent post, and reading it I see he is totally right there with my love of MUDs of all shapes and stripes. But perhaps most importantly? We share a mutual love of Dungeons and Dragons! Thanks for dropping in and commenting on my post, Triv!
• Naithin of Tank N’ Tree shares an excellent post about his history in MMOs heading all the way back to the original Asheron’s Call! Prior to that, he was known to play games that I loved just as much, like Descent and Mechwarrior 2!
• Kirei, of A Gamer of Sorts, has a love of RPGs that’s deep seated and rooted in some truly amazing games that may sound old school, but maybe it just feels that way because I’m getting old: Mario World and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have to admit, Mario World has some amazingly RPG-esque elements in addition to the classic platforming action we all know about – the whole opening up zones and moving between them, saving up special items and then going back to areas you’ve been through in order to get more goodies – nice call!
• Rajjs of The Angry Alt had some choice words describing her gaming history, most notably that she picked up a love of RPGs from her mother, who was an avid MUD player! Way to go, mom! It was all downhill from there, eh Rajjs?
• Ophelie from The Bossy Pally dropped in on my RPG nostalgia post to point out that couples that WoW together may not always stay together, but they at least have some fun when they play! Her RPG first loves are games like Final Fantasy VII and the venerable, amazing, glorious Might and Magic – a game that I remember loving when I played it as well.

What a great run around the WoW community on this one, and an amazing shared topic! Head over to the posts linked to read the perspectives of the other bloggers!

Looking to do a little research and determine if someone’s a loot ninja before you invite them to your run? Maybe you’re just as afraid of PUGs as the rest of us and you want to make sure that you’re not grouping with someone that everyone else on the server already knows is going to make your run miserable. Thankfully you can run their name through WoW Jackass, a community-fueled site where players report loot ninjas, bad tanks, horrible healers, hapless DPSers, and other all around assy players who are known to steal nodes out from under you when you’re mining or tag all of the quest mobs in the area just because they see you coming.

There’s a flip side to this kind of site though – because it’s all community generated information, you have no real guarantee that the person listed is the jackass or the person doing the listing is the jackass – there are always two sides to every story. So keep that in mind when you go hunting for jackasses – it’s one thing to be a ninja known across the server, it’s another thing to read someone’s personal account of when another player wronged them. But if you do come across some genuine jackasses, it’s worth getting their names up there so the rest of the world knows to avoid grouping with them.

Over at the Blog Azeroth forums, an interesting question was posed: what got you into RPGs originally? What was your first RPG love? Maybe your first MMO love?

This is an amazing question for me, because multi-player role-playing games and table top RPGs and I have a long, rich, and mixed history. What about you? What’s your history and love affair with role-playing games? Shout it out in the comments!

And yes, I’ll bare all, don’t worry, just behind the jump:

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Over at the venerable WoW.com, they had huge news that I think is worth sharing, partially because I highly reccomend everyone head over there and read the result of that news, and partially because it’s a huge deal for a very good friend of mine: Kelly Aarons, also known as Cadistra of the Webcomic WoW, eh?, is joining the staff of WoW.com and will be working on a weekly comic just for the site!

The comic is called Byron: The Tauren Rogue, and heralds what is sure to be one of the signs of the apocalypse: ninja cows. Verify we are living in the endtimes.

I’ve mentioned Kelly several times before: in my WoW people to follow at Twitter post, again when she conceptualized what a Tauren Paladin might look like, and again when she started submitting recipes for Nourish! The Azerothian Menu. Okay, I probably mention her too much – but her art is amazing and congratulations are in order – head over and take a look!

Can you believe it’s been five years since World of Warcraft was released? I’ve been playing since back in those wholesome vanilla days, and while I was in the beta I waited a bit before I picked up the game proper…not too long though, maybe a couple of months-so I could play with my then-roommates, and I’ve been playing ever since. A lot of people I know have come and gone in that time period, and tons more people have signed up to play with the release of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, but Blizzard is about to celebrate World of Warcraft’s 5 year anniversary with a massive sweepstakes event in which just about every WoW player is entered.

So what do you have to do to enter? Nothing, as long as you have an active account that’s in good standing – you’re automatically in!

And what do you win? Every week Blizzard will give away some prizes to a few lucky players. Check out the prize listings below.

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See this little guy? Isn’t he adorable? He’s Mini KT, the Littlest Lich – and he can be yours for the low low price of $10 USD. That’s right, I said $10 DOLLARS, not 10 gold, and he’s not the only pet you can get in-game for that amount of money.

Remember back when we noticed that interesting new pets were appearing in the source files of the game? I was intrigued by the Pandaren Monk pet, but WoW.com also noticed a Core Hound Pup along with Lil KT up there a while back on the PTRs. Speculation ran rampant that they were potentially collector’s edition pets for Cataclysm, but now we know their true purpose: Blizzard will sell them in-game, through their Blizzard Store online, and likely through Battle.net at some point.

If you drop the ten bucks on the Pandaren Monk, half of that purchase will go to the Make-A-Wish foundation, which is a pretty good reason to spring for it.

In any event though, this is Blizzard’s first dabblings in micro-transactions in World of Warcraft, and it’s gotten more than a few people pretty riled up. Many other MMOs that have gone before WoW (and likely those that will come after) that used micro-transactions to get more real money out of the players who are subscribed, and most free MMOs use micro-transactions to get money out of players who can sign up and play for free, but if they want the best gear or a custom avatar or better graphics, they have to shell out a little cash.

The argument on both sides of this is immense, loud, and pretty empassioned: some people herald micro-transactions as the end of World of Warcraft entirely, both as a popular game and as a professional, high-quality one, labeling micro-transactions as the mark of MMOs that are on the decline. The other side sees this as another fantastic way that players who are willing to pay for it can customize their characters, and look forward to other potential options like special RP clothes, custom avatar appearances, and more.

Personally I can see the logic of both sides of the equation, but I have to call attention to the fact that Blizzard has essentially already given players what they want for real money in-game in the form of faction changes, race changes, server transfers, and so on. Even appearance changes (which cost in-game money, not real money) came at player behest. I’m completely on-board with the thought that only MMOs that need money or are moving to a “free to play” model currently make heavy use of micro-transactions, but World of Warcraft certainly isn’t there, and it’s certainly not on the decline.

So the moral of the story? If you don’t want to spend real money for an in-game pet, don’t buy one. If there are enough people who agree with you, it’ll be unpopular and Blizzard will shut it down. If on the other hand there’s a demand for it and people love the idea, it’ll grow in popularity and more items will likely be added to the store. In any event, it’s likely not the end of World of Warcraft as we know it – that’s going to happen in Cataclysm.

A while ago I mentioned the Azeroth United Hearts, Hands, and Voices for Child’s Play Charity. On November 1, Azeroth United officially launched their HHV Charity Giveaway to start ramping up donations for Child’s Play!

To donate, head over to AzerothUnited.com or directly to the Hearts, Hands, and Voices for Child’s Play Charity page and click on the “Chip In!” widget to donate! The goal is $5000, and all of that cash goes directly to the Child’s Play charity, which donates the gift of video games to terminally and chronically ill children.

As part of the giveaway, every donation of $10 or more to the HHV campaign has a chance to be one of ten lucky winners and score some of the following gear in the Filled Hearts Giveaway, presented by sponsors of the charity event:

* Curse Networks – Get your hands on one of these great items: mouse pad, USB flash card that are super slim and fit in your wallet they are the size of a business card! OR a Premium Curse Subscription for 12 months
* Azeroth United – Snag one of many assorted WoW TCG Loot Cards
* Geek Girl Diva of Entertainment Earth: $25 Gift Certificate
* J!NX Clothing Company – $10 Gift Card and J!NX Keychain

Every donation of $20 or more to the HHV campaign is entered into the Exclusive Helping Hands Giveaway where one lucky winner will walk away with some of these fantastic prizes:

* Rawrcast: World of Warcraft Podcast – 60-day World of Warcraft Game Card
* Sideshow and Syrana – 30-day World of Warcraft Game Card and 2009 Blizzcon Authenticator
* Unbearably Hot – Custom, one of a kind, handmade bracelet themed after the Hearts, Hands, and Voices charity event. Sure to be a Blizzcon conversation starter!
* 3point.com: Warcraft Stein – Artwork by amazing World of Warcraft illustrator James Zhang.
* Raid Warning Podcast: Steel Series World of Warcraft Gaming Mouse
* SwagDog: 3ea. $100 Gift Certificates and Weekly 25% Off Codes for all contributors. You can get your code from your favorite Azeroth United Unity Member.
* J!NX Clothing Company – $25 Gift Card, Talking Murloc Plush Toy, and J!NX Keychain

There are some awesome prizes in the mix, and of course, donating money to an amazing charity that does a lot of good work. Head on over and chip in today!

If you thought FigurePrints were awesome, you’ll love Print Warcraft – a site where you can log in, create custom artwork using your World of Warcraft characters, and then have it printed out in poster or print form.

Don’t get too excited though – the site is a great idea, but it essentially lets you take your character based on screenshots and imports of what your character looks like and put them in front of a group of standard backgrounds or other screenshots, all in the WoW in-game art style. Don’t expect any of the beautiful imagery we’ve come to expect from any of the WoW comics, the loading screens, or even the WoW trading card game.

The idea is solid – you can get posters and prints of your character with their name superimposed on a logo plate and the horde or alliance emblems on it, and for a pretty reasonable price at that – a 12×18 print will run you just shy of $18 USD, and a massive 40×27 wide poster will cost you about $30 USD. The pricing is good, although I can’t speak for the quality of the product. In any case though, they make for great custom posters that you can hang anywhere in the house.

That being said though, I personally would take a different approach. Many of us, myself included, love our World of Warcraft characters, and wouldn’t mind a poster or a small print of them hanging on the wall near our computers – in the past though, I’ve turned to the massive WoW fan art community of webcomic artists and players who love the game just as much as I do to help me out. Find yourself a Webcomic or a fan artist you know who’s done World of Warcraft related art in the past, and ask nicely if they’re taking commissions.

That way you get art that’s not only truly personal and likely one of a kind, but even if you pay more for it you get something really unique and special for you and your character – something you won’t have a hard time framing. And, with any luck, you’ll make friends with an artist who may very well be happy to take your commission fee and your support.

Don’t get me wrong though – I’m not dissing Print Warcraft at all, but I am advocating the huge WoW fan art community, of which many of its members are really talented, exceptional artists – my friend Cadistra being one of them (although she’s so busy I doubt she has time for commissions, but maybe someday!) – there are tons of artists out there willing to make you something really special and unique that’s real art you can hang on your walls, instead of a high-rez screenshot. If you’re looking for something you wouldn’t be afraid to hang on your wall in your college dorm room or that you wouldn’t be heartbroken if it got beat up a bit though, Print Warcraft all the way!

So Windows 7 has been out for a couple of weeks now, and most enthusiasts who are really familiar with Microsoft’s new OS have been running the beta and the release candidate for months now to get a feel for it and shake out any issues the new OS may have. But there is one community that’s been somewhat absent from the discussion: the World of Warcraft community!

Granted, Windows 7 isn’t really fundamentally different from Windows Vista, although I think everyone would agree that it’s an improvement – so there’s no reason to believe that if you’re running WoW under Windows Vista that it won’t run just as well in Windows 7. Players making the leap from Windows XP to Windows 7 who are forced to wipe and do a full install may have a little more heartburn though, but it should still work without issue.

How about you, dear readers? Any of you upgraded to Windows 7 full-time and have any stories to share? Was getting World of Warcraft running, patched, and your favorite add-ons installed a breeze or was it a horrific trial that you’re just waiting to tell everyone about? Shout it out in the comments.

I’ll follow this post up shortly with more experiences with Windows 7 and World of Warcraft as I hear more from you and the rest of the community, and get hands on myself!

The way you look for an available group in World of Warcraft now is clunky at best, and still relies on people having back-channel discussions outside of the LFG system in order to find other players to run dungeons with them. It essentially relies on people queuing up for dungeons and sitting there until someone speaks up.

Right now on the PTR Blizzard is testing a new system, one that allows you to drop yourself or your group into a Looking for Group/Dungeon/Raid system that will automatically match you up with other people to round out your party. The beauty of the new system is that it’s far more passive, and allows you to essentially make yourself available and the game will find someone to match up with you – you can even drop yourself in alone, choose your role, and the system will find a group for you if you’re by yourself and looking to PUG something.

On the up side, that means that it’ll be even easier for people to find PUGs and for casual players to dip their feet into deeper waters than their guilds may currently be swimming in, but on the down-side the lack of that back-channel discussion may lead to this tool forming groups that instantly fall apart as soon as someone deemed undesirable joins the group, or PUGs that fall apart quickly because of an undesirable deviate or a loot ninja.

Over at WoW.com they have an excellent discussion thread about this, and point out that some of the other enhancements to the system involve the limitation of certain classes to roll on certain items (for example, melee characters can’t roll on spellpower gear) and the ability to disenchant an item straight from the need/greed roll screen if everyone passes on it.

Add to this the fact that the new LFG tool will automatically teleport you to the instance you’re queued up for when your group is assembled and you have what looks to be an exciting addition to the game, and one that will make it even easier to find and assemble a PUG for just about anything. But is it necessarily a good idea? What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

Icedragon, of the blog Druid Main, has a little problem. See, she can’t draw.

So she’s looking for a little help filling in the gaps on her site with some artwork, and she’s holding an art contest to draw in some submissions and reward the artists who take their time to support her and enter the contest! She says:

All of my images are done via Photoshop and using digital models from the WoW Model Viewer, but they’re not as high-grade as they could be in terms of digital/artistic quality. Most of my work is for banners, logos, emblems, etc but no “artsy” pieces. Seriously, I cannot draw anything for myself other than stick figures, and stick figures just aren’t good enough for this post (see right)! So I’m turning to my readers and any artistic folks that want to get their creativity groove on.

Artists of all types and stripes are invited to enter, and the full rules are over at the contest announcement at Druid Main. All of the winners will find their artwork posted on her site, but Icedragon promises that of all of those entries she’ll choose a grand prize winner, an Arch-druid winner, if you will, who will be the lucky recipient of a 60 day World of Warcraft gamecard she happens to have and is willing to get rid of!

And yes, frankly – I can’t draw either, but if I could, I’d probably enter myself and keep this quiet so I’d increase my odds of winning. But alas.

So if you’re an artist, love or play World of Warcraft, or a WoW-related artist, head on over and enter the contest! The deadline for entries is November 5th!

Now that we have race changes, faction changes, server changes, appearance changes, and so on, one topic I’ve been thinking a lot about is whether or not Blizzard would ever allow us to copy our characters to new realms. I’m not referring to character transfers, where you take a character, uproot them from one server and then land them in their destination – I mean copy, duplicate a character that’s currently on one realm and make a copy on another realm.

It would be a paid service, of course, but I could see it being in exceptionally high demand with two classes of people, both of whom would make Blizzard a lot of money:

1. Entire high-end and raiding guilds that are focused on progression who would be more than happy to duplicate their characters on as many servers as their core raiding team has money to do in order to achieve world-firsts and titles on as many realms as they can.

Clearly this would make Blizzard a ton of money – a lot of high-end progression guilds have real money behind them, as we’ve seen with entire guilds that do faction changes or server transfers, but if you tacked a $25 or $30 USD fee to a character copy you might see some guilds do it two, three, or four times before their ranks run out of actual cash. Or alternatively, they’ll keep doing it every so often as long as they can raise the money in the interim. Blizzard could mitigate this by capping the number of copies for a character, or putting a relatively long time-limit between copies, like 3-6 months.

2. Casuals who want to try their hand at raiding or join new friends on another server in new guilds without being forced to roll alts and start leveling from scratch on those servers.

Sure, they could just roll death knights, but don’t we have enough of those already? Also, don’t we already see people rolling DKs on servers where they’ve made new friends so they don’t have to level to 55 but also don’t have to transfer their main that’s happily at home on another server, possibly in a guild where that person already has friends?

I’ve seen more DKs join my guild because they came to spend time with a friend on our server than I’ve seen character transfers, and I’m personally in the same boat – I have friends who play on two different servers than the one my main is on, and while I love my main to death, I’m bored on my server. I don’t want to leave the friends I have on my server, but I also balk at having to level up to 80 from scratch on another server. It would be great if I could copy my 80 hunter to another server, join my friends’ guild there, and just move on with life, without having the pressure of pulling my main out of my guild on my current server and leaving my friends there with alts.

Granted, this crowd of people may make Blizzard less large sums of money, but probably more money over time than the previous group. If you could copy your 80 to a new server where, for example, you just met a coworker who plays WoW and could use your class in their weekend raiding guild, wouldn’t you? Especially if you could still leave a copy of that same 80 on your current server in your current guild that raids on weeknights?

Is this a good or a bad idea?

That being said, this idea also fosters laziness that some people say is running rampant in the WoW community. No one apparently wants to level or experience the game pre-level cap anymore, so if Blizzard allowed something like this, would it just cheapen the leveling experience? Would someone level to 80 and then just copy their character around instead of rolling new classes and trying alts? Also, the disincentive to this is that you could save yourself the fee entirely by just leveling a new character on the server you’re considering playing on – it may take more time, but it at least doesn’t cost money.

Also, this just marches down the path of cheapening choices – you made a choice to play on a server, should you be held to it, and punished if you want to move, either financially, through only having one of your character on each server, or by being forced to level on any future server you choose as home?

I’m of multiple minds, obviously – I admit the example of my 80 main and the two servers I’d love to play on is real, and my personal conflict about not wanting to pull my main out of my current guild is also real. I could fix the problem easily by just rolling new characters on those servers and leveling them, but part of me wonders if I’m the only person who’s had this thought – and if I’m not, are there enough others who are willing to pay money to make this idea worthwhile to Blizzard?

What do you think? If Blizzard allowed you to, for a fee, copy a character to a new server, leaving the existing one intact and just making a duplicate, would you spring for it? How many times would you make the copy? What if there were a time limit between copies? Let us know in the comments!