Hark! Let loose the long-lost WoW blogger of QJ! And heralding my comeback to MMORPG coverage is the equally hot topic in the World of Warcraft community yesterday. Because in that faithful maintenance day, brave Lilpwny of Chromaggus asked a hundred thousand dollar question: are Blues in player-created Guilds?

Truth be told, they are. Community Managers, aside from Game Masters, have often clued that they do play the game as normal players and have participated in many an instance of raids, PvEs and normal grinds. Eternally burning Nethaera herself had revealed that she played a priest a while back, and this time around she's confirming her membership to a guild:

Yes, we play in guilds. Yes, most people don't realize we're even a Blizz Employee in their guild. Yes, I've been in vent for Raids for things like Kara and Gruul. I haven't for a bit though since we've all been so busy with Comic Con and then BlizzCon, but I'll be getting back to some semblance of 'normal' play again soon. It's pretty much the same for everyone on the team.

Plenty of other personalities play World of Warcraft, including geeky ScreenSaver Leo Laporte and a good slew of developers from Bungie, but running the gauntlet with community personalities at your side is a thrill on its own. They've even expanded to PvP guilds and regular guilds across unnamed realms. But if there's truth not going to be told, it'll be just one thing: identities.

"Nope we can't [reveal our character's names]. I'm sure you can come up with many reasons why we can't," said the candle lit community manager and that's just how things will have to be. More on interesting WoW community buzz as they come a-trollin' by.

Here's another video update of the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King. This time it's all about the place where dragons go to die. Yes, it's that spooky, and yes, you'll be able to frolic through its barren, snow-choked wastelands once Wrath of the Lich King swarms its way into stores.

In this video, we see a bit of concept art before we get to the in-game tour. Unfortunately, while we don't get to see the dragon graveyard - Dragonblight is named that way for a reason - we do see a forest that's pretty unnerving. Who knows what sort of beasties we'll be coming across there? Maybe a ghost dragon or two?

Content's the name of the game in expansions, and Wrath of the Lich King looks set to deliver. Enjoy the video!

More often than not, gamers would likely jump into the fray first before giving any thought about it. When it comes to the more serious aspects, gamers often would raise priorities of thought first above all else. So we could probably forgive World of Warcraft players if they took minor aspects of the game - like guild naming - less seriously than they should have.

 

But Blizzard might not take too kindly to that. Again. Steaky of Barthilas created a new guild called ROFLCOPTER which is in direct violation of Blizzard's Naming Policy for pets, guilds, characters and Arena team names. More appropriately, it fits in the section of "Leet" or "Dudespeak":

Contain "Leet" or "Dudespeak"

This category includes names which:
* Consist of language existent only in online communication (i.e. Roflcopter, xxnewbxx, Roxxoryou)
If a player is found to have such a name for their character, guild, arena team, or pet, he/she may:
* Be prompted to select a new name for the character upon next login

An unworthy name doesn't have too dire a consequence, but smelly Vrakthis wanted to point out one thing: your guild name may be changed, only if a Game Master reviews a petition you send in and decides if your name needs a change or not. Emphasis on "may."

So while a hidden and obviously serious punishment looms over repeat violators, it's still not certain if you'll be able to keep your guild and simply have its name changed, or completely lose the guild and be forced to create another one again. So just in case, hop on over to the Read link below to absorb Blizzard's "guidelines" in World of Warcraft's naming conventions.

Paladins are basically a hybrid class that mixes melee and casting abilities. Mostly paladins are known to have a raid role of healer, having strong buffs and healing abilities.

The Holy talent build is littered with buffs (mainly for casters) and healing skills. Here's a calculator for all the healing values you need to know kindly created by Nex from the IGN Vault. It has fields for your healing gear, mana per five, and mana pool plus crit chance not including Holy Talents. Cast times are also included, so you can calculate how many times you can heal in a fray.

Actual mana cost is also included as paladins have abilities to regain mana and gear that helps mana regen. Average heals, healing per mana, healing per second, and healing to OOM are also included. Oh, and by the way, the calculations are done for level 70.

Download: [Paladin Healing Calculator]

There's a slight fuss going on at the WoW Forums as of late regarding the rumors surrounding the "Consortium Gem" quests and rewards. Some people have already accomplished the quests, some don't even know where to begin. There are even issues regarding how the gems are delivered.

We at QJ decided to investigate further. This is what we've discovered. Since the launch of The Burning Crusade, a quest was available at Nagrand that rewards you with one gem every beginning of the month. The gems that you get will depend greatly on your reputation in the Consortium and in general. Any reputation at neutral and above sufficed.

The Consortium, as you may already know, is one of many organizations in World of Warcraft that thrive on business. They have a reasonable stake on Outland and have been working on consolidating material and people for purposes of trade. And for the business to propagate against hindrances, they hire people with...special...skills to complete a couple of quests for them.

The rewards for Consortium Gems start at the reputation level of Friendly, otherwise you either get Crystal Fragments from the Oshu'gun diamond or Pairs of Ivory Tusks from wild elekks. The gems themselves got better the higher your reputation is with them.

Where can you find this quest? Well, you'll have to start out in Nagrand. Head directly over to Garadar (or Telaar). You can't miss the NPC conveniently named Consortium Recruiter. The quest, "[66] The Consortium Needs You!", begins that long chain of quests, which you can find below:

• [66] Stealing from Thieves/More Crystal Fragments (Neutral)
• [66] A Head Full of Ivory (Neutral)
• [67] Obsidian Warbeads (Friendly)
• [67] More Obsidian Warbeads (Friendly)
• [68] A Heap of Ethereals (Friendly)
• [68] Another Heap of Ethereals (Friendly)

These reputation quests allow you to gain fervor with the Consortium and are repeatable. So when do the gems come? Complete the "Membership Benefits" quest and they will come at the beginning of every month straight from Gehze (the Consortium NPC you meet at Aeries Landing). Do you get mailed or do you have to pick it up yourself? You might want to pick it up yourself because mailing does have some issues right now.

The reason why some players haven't received any envelopes with gems stashed inside is because Blizzard had some issues regarding the envelope sending. Players should be reassured that they are working on it, and it should eventually be sorted out. As Ommra said, "There was an issue with the first month's mailing of gems and they were not sent. This is being corrected and they should be sent every month."

Once again, we're all a little smarter about it now.

Here's a brief heads-up for the gamers over at the World War II Online MMORPG: Game dev KFS1 has just hit us with a new game dev update over at the boards. This one will be talking about two important game features: the Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE), and the Office-In-Charge (OIC) System.

First up is the TOE, which in a nutshell manages the game's brigade spawnrate. What makes this special is the fact that TOE will eliminate the "supply everywhere" effect that KFS1 mentions, and introduces an ordered way of spawning specific equipment - sort of like a streamlining of what stuff is supposed to pop up as per brigade.

The bad news: Don't expect to see this feature popping up in the holidays - the system's still undergoing heavy tweaking, and may be released much further down the road.

Now, on to the other focus of this report: the OIC system. To be specific, a simplified version called the Brigade Officer system, which will be available during the holiday release. As KTFS1 explained with regards to what it does:

The core of this simplified version is to rework of the basic HC management systems which currently operate on several different voting principles. Instead we are using a simple Propose/Veto (P/V) system. For instance, currently the /attack command to place objectives requires players to vote on the objective. Under P/V one player proposes it. If someone objects, a single veto will cancel the proposal. However if no one objects the proposal automatically goes into effect after a configurable period of time (probably a minute).

And there ends this brief heads-up on what's been cooking on the dev's side for the holidays. For the dudes who'd like a full sit-rep of the details for the dev discussion, catch the read link.

A couple of days after we came to know of the online romance that ended happily ever after, life partners Rhovan and Delora are still in our heads. Good for them, they might be playing World of Warcraft in bed, in the kitchen or wherever they wish. However we can't help but wonder how the two managed before they got married. Maybe an SMS message saying:

"I'll be on Runetotem. I'll see you when you get there."
"Okay. I love you... Oh wait! I forgot to pay for character transfer..."

At any rate, it might have caused some problems one way or another. Then the idea of sharding comes to mind, which leaves WoW scattered across multiple servers. It has been argued before that this actually is a sign of financial constraint and poor game architectural design. On top of that, many are complaining that the current set-up hinders socialization.

Blizzard Entertainment recently patched the European servers that make them incompatible with the U.S. servers. A small, persistent voice inside suddenly gets bigger and wants to explode: "What ever happened to MASSIVELY in MMORPG?!" Don't look at us because we don't know either.

Actually, there have been several proposals across the WoW community to solve the impending problem. Free transfers, for one, will make a lot people happy. But at the same time, that risks in-game economies, game queues and Blizzard needing more time to maintain and keep servers. There was a suggestion even to create a super server, much like a super continent, where in everybody can see everybody. We hate to burst your bubble, but that last one definitely sounds Utopian at this point in time.

We guess we'll just have to wait for the day when all will be well once more in Azeroth. Who knows, The Burning Crusade could be the answer to all of these. Anyway, we guess we'll just go back to Second Life for now and create millions there.

World War II Online (known in Europe as Battleground Europe), an award winning MMORPG, now offers a 14-day free trial for players who can't get enough of PvP action on a WW II 3D environment.

In this MMO, you can play as pilot fighters and bombers, command tanks and trucks, captain and crew naval vessels or fight on the field as an infantryman or paratrooper. The map of the game includes all of Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as parts of southern Holland, far western Germany, northern France, and even southeastern England.

Fight for the cause of the Allied or Axis forces. Some of the best features of the game include:

• Thousands of online players sharing a single world
• Live campaign with a victorious force
• Full PvP in first person
• Huge game world measuring more than 350,000 square miles
• Character advancement and career paths
• Strategic systems driven by player missions and command
• Growing list of 90+ historically accurate weapons including aircraft, tanks, trucks, rifles, machine guns and more!
• Groundbreaking physics and damage modeling

The promo is a joint effort between Playnet and MMORPG. Check out the link below for details on how to avail of the free 14-day trial.

Texas game developer Cornered Rat Software has announced its "Welcome Back, Soldier" promotion for World War II Online, a first-person shooter MMO that recreates the battlefields of Western Europe between 1940-1942. (Historical notes: most ground fighting by U.S. and British forces outside the Pacific was confined to North Africa until the invasion of Italy in 1943, and the fiercest ground fighting during the period of the game was between German and Soviet forces, culminating in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1941-42. Poland, France and the Czechoslovakia fell rather quickly during 1939 and 1940, while the Battle of Britain was primarily an air war. Outside of those, I'm not exactly sure which battlefields they're referring to...)

The WBS promotion starts on 22 June, at which point 300,000 accounts will be re-activated over a two-week period. The  original game was released in 2001 as World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Later, the game was updated and released in Europe as Battlefield Europe.

"Its been a roller-coaster ride beginning with one of the earliest MMOG launches to growing and supporting a fiercely-loyal player community all the while trying to continue the innovative and unique approach to development that's seen WWII Online stand alone as the ultimate PvP MMOG available",  says Al Corey, Executive Producer for publisher Playnet. "We're so proud to stand up and say that we're still here and thriving after 5 years. This promo is just a small way for us to say thank you to the thousands of players, past and present, who helped make it possible."