"I won a contest from the Tauren Think Tank podcast and scored my own Lil' Ragnaros," writes submitter Marconin of Just Wipe It on Draka (US-A). "I was overjoyed to add this guy to my collection ... until I summoned him. Being a gnome, I'm used to things and people towering over me. I'm not used to my pets dwarfing me! I heard you can use him as a cooking fire, but I doubt I'll ever find out for myself. There's no way I'm getting on my tiptoes with a frying pan. I have standards, you know."

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Filed under: Around Azeroth

Previously in Community Blog Topic, we talked about the punishment of funsuckers. Conversely, last week we talked about rewarding players who are known for good behavior.

MrandMrsWoW voiced on their blog what many people in the comments were saying: good behavior is its own reward. They go on to list their reasons why well-behaved players should not be rewarded:

• WoW is not school, and should be treated as such!
• Good behaviour is a basic human principal and should be a given (whether it is or not is a separate issue)
• Rewarding people for being polite will only encourage more scamming of the system
• I can't think of a fair way to instigate a reward system: for LFR? For LFG? For guildies? Should we vote? How do we vote?
• What is 'well-behaved'? Not swearing? Saying hello? Not ninja-ing loot? I can't see a fair way to judge it.
• WE SHOULD NOT BE REWARDING GROWN ADULTS FOR NOT BEING NASTY TO EACH OTHER!

The World of Warcraft may not be school, but there are plenty of school-aged players who could use some guidance in the correct direction of becoming well-behaved adults. It's not WoW's job to parent them, but offering positive reinforcement by peers is not necessarily a school-only thing. With employee of the month awards and merit bonuses being used in the working world, rewarding good behavior is a commonplace tactic used by adults for adults.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Virtually every player eagerly embraced the advent of facts, figures, and formulae driving the game when they first began to trickle through to the player base some years ago. We scoured forums, fan sites, and data-driven websites like Wowhead. A way to tell which gear worked best for your character? Sweet. Community managers and devs who actually explained and discussed game mechanics? Utterly amazing. It was a brave new world and an entirely new way to play. Gone were the days when players murmured longingly of eloquently named pieces whose names evoked the epic locations they came from. Now, it was all about tiers. We argued endlessly over the correct numerical sequencing of armor sets –- remember the etymological debate over "Dungeon 2" vs. "Tier 0.5"?

A little bit of knowledge about how to tinker under the hood is absolutely a positive and helpful thing. Today, we expect free access to ability and spell mechanics and a point-by-point road map to gearing up. But at some point, overachievers that we humans are, so many numbers can make the game feel more like a checklist of benchmarks than a storied progression of fantastic encounters and arcane gear.

Whether or not all the analysis gets under your skin, it's easy to see how this emphasis on precision and analysis evolved. The question is, do you think that this is merely a subjective matter of roleplay immersion in the fantasy aspect of World of Warcraft, or do you think the attitude actually reduces the game in spirit and heart? Do the vistas and horizons of Azeroth ever seem uncomfortably closer when every step is paved with a formula pointing to your destination? Where do we stand on the balance scale of pre-analyzing and measuring how the numbers stack up vs. gaining a feel from experience for how things work in the world of Azeroth?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

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Filed under: Hotfixes

@phxtich We had to disable the healer balance system as it had a bug that only revealed itself with live numbers of users.

- Holinka (@holinka) May 22, 2013

Holinka later confirmed that this issue was the one that was causing some players to experience very long queue times for random battlegrounds, an issue that had cropped up in several places on the official forums. His tweet said that players, both healers and DPS, were becoming "stuck" in the queue.

As a result, the system has now been temporarily disabled. This means that teams with unequal healer numbers will reappear, so don't be surprised that the system is not working. Bugs do happen, and as I'm always going on about, PvP is a rare thing on the PTR. So it's no surprise that, when big new features like this go live, they might not withstand the strain. If you want to stop these problems, don't QQ, get on the next PTR and make with the stabby. You'll be doing yourself a favor! And while you're waiting, WoW Insider has a guide on helping the healers you do have in random battlegrounds.

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Filed under: PvP

Community Manager Crithto took to the forums, asking for feedback about changes to the mechanical and elemental pet battle families. As of right now, elemental attacks have both an offensive and defensive advantage over mechanical, making it imbalanced compared to the other families. Blizzard proposes to change which families both types of pets have an advantage against:

One set of changes proposes:

• Critters would replace elementals in taking less damage from mechanical attacks
• Dragonkin would replace critters in taking less damage from elemental attacks
• Elementals would replace dragonkin in taking less damage from flying attacks

and the other:

• Elementals would replace aquatic pets in taking less damage from undead attacks
• Aquatic pets would replace elementals in taking less damage from mechanical attacks

The second set of suggested changes would require less alteration to the current system and therefore has my vote. Do you have an opinion? If so, take advantage of Blizzard's request for player input and cast your vote in the forums.

The full text of Crithto's post is after the break.

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Filed under: News items

Work Warning: Lots of cursing and vaguely adult themes. A touch on the adult side.

Ian Beckman is a man who delivers. Whether it's a surprising range of comedic voice acting or solid graphics that deliver the funny, his machinima always serves up more than a few laughs. Guards 3 continues to lampoon COPS in this wild World of Warcraft.

I like how the small vignette turns into a larger story, and I'll admit the final bit was my favorite. Whether that's because I harbor my own angst about the king, or just because it was the most straightforward joke, the utter defeat of the villain serves as warning to anyone who gets a name wrong.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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Filed under: WoW Moviewatch

So now that we've had a bit of time to play with Patch 5.3: Escalation on the live realms, what do you think of it? Worried about how nerfs or changes are affecting your game? Annoyed by bugs that made it live? Love -- or hate -- the new scenarios, battleground, or arena? Still getting used to the PvP changes? Into the story -- or frustrated that the alliance is just coming to the horde's rescue? Let us know how you really feel in the poll and comments.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

You've probably heard the term "WoW clone" applied to nearly every MMO out there, because as WoW borrowed ideas from older games like EverQuest, so newer games borrow from WoW. And any game with WoW-like features -- by which we mean nearly any MMO -- might get branded with the label "clone," no matter how good it is. However, some of these myriad WoW clones strike us as particularly... well, let's call it familiar.

Now don't get us wrong -- these aren't bad games, and every game builds on its predecessors in an attempt to make something better. But if you're looking for something that's distinctly different from WoW, none of these are going to fit the bill. However, any of them may be an entertaining change of pace or just an amusing venture into what some of the other MMOs on the market are doing.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

Tricks of the Trade is a strange ability for rogues. Why would we sacrifice our own damage (by spending energy) to boost the damage of someone else? Aldriana and Pathal have both spoken out against TotT's misguided benevolence and its boring mechanics. Rather than being a situationally-useful ability that we pull out when the time is right, TotT has become a set-and-forget chore that we just auto-cast on the second-highest DPS in raid.

Lore issues aside, Tricks of the Trade is a pretty good ability. Used properly, it can greatly accelerate the rate that tanks pick up aggro, which makes dungeons and raids just a bit easier. While it's a DPS loss for the rogue casting TotT, it's a net gain for the raid's DPS, and that's a sacrifice that we'll have to make. It's also incredibly potent in PvP; granting an ally a 15% damage boost is a pretty big deal.

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Filed under: Rogue, (Rogue) Encrypted Text