The beta realms have been even less stable than normal this weekend, which is a bit inconvenient when everybody is trying to test Naxxramas. Apparently the cause of the crashes has been pinpointed, and it's the Death Knight spell Unholy Blight (specifically Rank 2). It seems that whenever that spell was used, it would bring down the world servers. Perhaps it was mistakenly coded to surround the world servers with a vile swarm of unholy insects, instead of the DK's target.

So the devs have hotfix-disabled it; you will still see it in your spellbook, but it will have no effect if you try to cast it. A worthwhile trade-off for the servers staying up for more than five minutes at a time, I'd say. The other ranks, including the level 80 rank 4 version, are still available. The Storm Peaks and Icecrown zones were also causing issues, and will not be able to be hotfixed, so we'll have to continue to do without them until the next patch.

WoW Insider's own Mike Schramm recently talked with Tamara Chuang from the Orange County Register about the trials and tribulations of the recent BlizzCon ticket sales for an article she wrote concerning the debacle. Mike is in some good company, with executive editor of GameSpy.com David Kosak also contributing to the analysis of Blizzard's failure. Yesterday, Mike wrote an in-depth account of the problems we all faced obtaining tickets to the event.

The OC Register article makes a good point noting that some major events, such as the World Series, have had ticketing problems in the past. However, it is also pointed out that other sites such as NBCOlympics.com still stay up even under the pressure of lots of traffic.

With Mike Morhaime's apology late last night, and his offering up 3,000 additional tickets via a lottery, it will be interesting to see what this does to appease the fans in the long run. It is good to see that this issue is getting some wider coverage outside of the game and fan sites. While bad press isn't exactly good, it usually leads to things being better the next time around.

Some of my fondest memories in WoW are things that never really should have ever happened. I don't mean random happenstance taking the wheel of life from me, nothing like that. I mean glitches, bugs and things that the Blizzard devs really never intended to happen. Sure, some bugs are not so fun, like losing equipment you worked hard for or getting blocked in a raid because a boss isn't working right, but there have been a lot of really awesome ones, too.

Take, for example, the screenshot above. It probably doesn't count because it happened on the Wrath beta and of course there are bugs there, but it was the beginning of a night that made me laugh for hours. If you can't tell what's going on... I'm piloting an airplane, my buddy tried to hop in with me but his chair is floating a few feet over my head for some reason, and someone decided to park their siege tank twenty feet up a wall, inside of the wall. That pretty much sums up the current state of Lake Wintergrasp, in case you were wondering.

If that doesn't count, there's the time a few years back when some friends and I ran Zul'Farrak, and a basilisk we aggro'd threw us twenty feet backwards for some reason, into another basilisk that threw us right back. We cried tears of laughter through about twenty minutes of the two basilisks playing catch with our flailing bodies before we were coherent enough to try and figure out what the heck was going on.

Do you guys have any memories like this? Do you ever wish you could go out and do them again for the nostalgia of it all, or are you pretty content keeping it a one time thing?

Um, nerf Warlocks? With all of the talking we've been doing about Wrath of the Lich King lately, we haven't really mentioned the one thing players are supposed to be doing on the beta servers: finding bugs. Fortunately, Sneakthief found a very nice one -- when you combine the Warlock 51 point Affliction talent Everlasting Affliction with the set bonus from the Tier 5 Warlock set, you get an everlasting Corruption spell that goes up in damage 10% every time a Shadow Bolt hits. (He's beating up on a Servant of Allistarj, by the way, which is why the mob isn't dying.)

Extrapolate a few minutes later, and you've got 536 million damage ticking every time Corruption comes around -- which seems to be the cap, so I'm sure a math major can tell us just why that number's special. And all that damage happens to be, as Sneakthief says, enough not just to take down Kil'jaeden with one tick, but all of Sunwell combined. Of course, this is an easy fix (one way to do it would just be to put a cap on how high Corruption damage can go), but this is exactly what the beta is for: finding hilarious bugs and posting them on YouTube whoops, I mean fixing them.

Update: The figure in the video works out to be 2^29. Thanks, math nerds! We love you!

If you play a melee or physical damage class or spec that is not a Feral Druid, you have probably experienced this most excruciating of mechanics that is the leveling of class weaponry skill.

We all know the tale: You find a spiffy new weapon, you go out and use it, and find that your damage is abysmal. Then you realize it. Your skill with this weapon is 1! Thus, you're forced to go trudge off to find some grey or green mobs to solo and thwack mindlessly for a few hours until you can finally get some decent damage out of the supposed "upgrade" that you were so pumped to get a few minutes prior.

One of the ways people have made this strange little grind somewhat bearable is by using the servants out in the Blasted Lands. Because they can't die from normal weapon strikes, you can simply set yourself in front of one and swing away. If you're max level or if you have a self-healing proc or ability, you can spend a long time just wailing away mindlessly at the guy, leaving one eye on the screen while you do other things. Some people have even been so ambitious as to drag one of them to Stormwind for a skilling up free-for-all in the trade district.

Unfortunately, it looks like the ride's over. People are reporting that the Servants are no longer giving skill ups, even after 10 minutes of wailing away on the mob. There's no blue post confirming or denying the change as of this writing, but if it's in, it would seem to be deliberate.

Quite a few raiders, including some of our own here at WoW Insider, noticed one more big change to a raid boss that that came in with patch 2.4.3: Anetheron, the second boss of Mount Hyjal, was not dropping Towering Infernals on random players as usual. This made the battle pretty trivial for most raids by making it more or less a run of the mill tank and spank.

Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on how challenging you like your raids -- this was not an actual intended change. Vaneras and Bornakk are both reporting that Anetheron has been hotfixed and should start dropping infernals again. Sorry guys, no more free loot. Well, no more freer loot, at least.

While surfing the forums this morning, I came across a little gem of a thread protesting against Blizzard for the following:

1. Breaking "our" addons and mods.
2. Incorporating features from popular addons into the default User Interface, and thus breaking addons and mods. There's also a sentiment that Blizzard is "stealing" these ideas rather than being innovators.
   
3. Fixing "their" bugs which in turn breaks "our" addons and mods. The suggestion is that they don't care, or could take steps to prevent this.
   

As you can imagine, all sorts of responses cropped up, including the usual people who get into arguments with other posters, players in agreement, joking and sarcastic responses, and of course, an awesome string of blue responses.

Brad Justice (let me say that again, Brad Justice!) sent us a valuable tip about Titan Panel, and it's easily confirmed by a casual look over at the official forums. Let me explain. No, there is too much -- let me sum up.

If you use Titan Panel, you may see an unexplainable GM ticket open in the upper right corner of your screen. You may open that empty ticket, and then Abandon it. Your attempt will fail. But don't worry -- it's not your fault. It's Titan Panel. That ticket will linger there like some kind of horrific nightmare. But there's hope.

You can either simply disable the AddOn until they get the problem sorted out or attempt a "full UI reset." (A full UI reset is the process by which you basically delete the WTF folder, Cache, and Interface folders and more or less start all over again.) I personally went for the slightly less-intense "disable" option.

Anyway, good luck fixing it -- we just wanted to let you know this is what's up, since Titan Panel's pretty popular.

Edit: With a ninja-like quickness, Titan Panel has released an update which should help clear this up.

My friends and I discovered a nice little "bug" the other day. We were sitting around Ironforge with nothing to do other than to give a friendly ribbing to our Shadow Priest friend over that fact that she didn't have her Amani War Bear yet. We had our Mojo's out hopping around the feet of our Bears, trying not to get squished. We found out that if we blew them a kiss, we turned into a frog and our mounts grew quite a bit.

Obviously this is some kind of flaw in the model coding that allows this, but it's a fun enough and harmless enough bug that I can't stop myself from doing it every chance I get. More so, drink some Winterfall Firewater and pop Heroism for a real big frog on a bear mount.

This is definitely hilarious enough that I suggest everyone goes out and tries it at least once. Just leave my Mojo alone. He's spoken for.

When you decide to roleplay, a whole new world of imagination opens up to you -- soon you realize that all the World of Warcraft is a stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players.

Blizzard definitely cares about roleplayers. They listen to us and there's a special place for us in their hearts -- which is natural, because in many ways, their whole world has its own story and background which means a lot to them, and while all players get to see that story unfolding through their activities in the game, roleplayers are the ones who participate in that story by making their own stories within it.

The problem is that Blizzard and its roleplayers are on pretty different wavelengths when it comes to what roleplayers want to receive and what Blizzard wants to provide. Blizzard wants to give us more neat toys and perfect places to enjoy, with lots of lore and story behind them -- and while this is all very interesting and everyone enjoys it, most roleplayers are wishing they had more sandbox-like tools, spaces and items they can easily bend or shape in their own ways, to use for their own purposes.

Blizzard may care, but do they really understand? Read on for insights Blizzard may be missing.

Servers are coming back up, but it seems there's a bit of oddity about the end of season awards from Season 3. We've received reports that folks who should not have retained previous titles (Challenger, Rival, Gladiator, etc.) still have the honorary available. In theory, these titles were supposed to reset, and if you didn't re-earn the title in Season 3, you'd lose what you had from Season 2. That seems not to have happened.

We don't know if this is a bug or a surprise gift from Blizzard, but it's probably a safe bet that it's a bug they'll be squishing. It seems cruel to the hopefuls who may think they have a title, only to lose it if this gets corrected. But, we'll see what Blizzard does. At least Season 4 has started, and everyone will have the opportunity to try again.

Edit: While we realize that, per posting from Eyonix, new titles wouldn't be granted until next week, it had previously seemed that the title stripping would still happen at the end of Season 3.

Like Bigfoot, it's so elusive that photographs are rare, but some WoW players have caught a glimpse of what may be an upcoming PvP reward from Wrath. Or maybe it's just a bug. Or -- and I have a nickel bet on this one -- it's a nice little prank Blizzard's playing on us in return for our snooping around for information on the expansion. Whatever it is, though, it has left at least one footprint. We've gotten a few tips that upon inspecting a player's Tabard of Summer Flames, the Horde side reward from the Shards of Ahune quest, the tabard's tooltip describes a very different item called Tabard of the Victor. Even though the tabard's design matched the Midsummer quest reward, the description was quite different.

First of all, the Tabard of the Victor requires Level 80, which was our first clue that it was probably not meant for pre-Wrath eyes. The tabard binds on pick-up, provides 250 Armor, +20 Stamina, +10 to All Resistances. Upon equipping it, your resilience rating improves by 15 and it increases movement speed and life regeneration rate. The funniest part -- and what makes me think this could be a prank by our dear game designers -- is the tabard's use is described as: "Use: Show how heroic you are! (55 Secs Cooldown)" and the bottom line description is, "The Mark of a True Hero." It seems that perhaps the glitch was caused by an error in the cache because when it was cleared the tabard's description correctly matched the Summer Flames tabard.

[Thanks, Jagoex and James Vertovec!]

I've found recently in my raiding of the Sunwell Plateau (here after and forever more referred to as SPLAT) that there are a few places folks shouldn't go.

Kalecgos is one of them, that boss should just be wiped off the map. He's just that annoying. But baring that, there are these lovely little hedges placed around the instance. Don't go on those. If you do, you might just make your raid leader and Warlocks scream at you.

If you get on one of these hedges and step the right way, you'll find yourself stuck behind them (click the image above for a high resolution version), unable to get out. The only way to get out is for you to hearth, for a Mage portal to be placed behind the hedge, or for a Warlock to summon you out. All the while you've taken up a good couple minutes of raid time.

Mania wants to know (and so do we): can you train the bears in Zul'Aman or not? We at WoW Insider also heard a rumor over the weekend that the bears in Zul'Aman were trainable again (we heard that when the trolls riding bears split up, you had a short period of time to pick up the bear as a Hunter pet). But alas, all reports since then tell us that's not the case -- even if bears were trainable for a short period of time, they aren't now.

Which isn't too surprising -- Hunters have a relationship to wild animals, not trained ones, so the fact that you can't steal bears from the trolls falls in line with Hunter lore (although, if you wanted to make the case that the bears were actually pre-trained and that it would make them easier to train, you probably could, even if Blizzard didn't listen). And it's not like there aren't other bears to get in the game. Blizzard should definitely have some fun pets to get like this (as long as there's no huge gameplay bonus to be gained), but apparently Zul'Aman bears aren't one of them.

Of course, you can always go get your bear mount -- we've got a guide that tells you exactly how to do it. And hurry -- even those won't be available forever.

For some reason, the first evade bug moment I remember happened in Zul'Farrak. We were clearing the basilisk pulls before attempting Antu'sul (why is it that the optional bosses always have a couple of sweet warrior drops?) and the mage in the group wanted to skip the whole thing. Impatient, he decided to start nuking away from atop one of the hills surrounding the area and managed to pull aggro, but the basilisk couldn't path up to him (and to be honest I'm not sure how he got up there) and promptly went evade. He wouldn't come down because he rightly knew the mob would hit him, and so it took us a solid ten minutes of arguing before he finally came into the monster's reach so that I could taunt it.

I'm thinking about this because of the Isle of Quel'Danas dailies, specifically the quest Crush the Dawnblade. For some reason whenever I do this quest I run into Dawnblade Summoners who are evading. This puzzles me because I can't understand why a ranged mob is evading: it doesn't have to path to anything to hit it, just get into range. Is there some way a hunter or some other ranged class can shoot them but stay out of their range?