A lot of people have been on the unfortunate receiving end of a recent bug that has been plaguing MMORPG players in Blizzard's World of Warcraft. The MMORPG company giant has been getting a lot of flak lately due to the steps they should be taking to fix the notorious Battle Grounds bug so many PvP savvy players have been complaining about.

However, there may just be a small silver lining to this annoying little problem. While there hasn't been any official word on when the bug will be fixed, Blizzard poster Aeus has listed some easy steps on how to deal with the issue in the meantime:

We are aware that some players might currently be getting stuck at the end of combat in the Battle Grounds. A solution is being worked on and we will let you know when we have more information. Until a fix is made available there are two possible workarounds:

1. Close the client and restart the game.

2. Do /afk at the end of the BG; this has proven to work for some players as well.

Knowing how bugs just pop up everywhere in any new gaming patch, we'll all just have to sit tight and be a little patient until the boys at Blizzard find a more permanent solution to this problem.

We know a lot of people (about nine million, give or take a couple of thousand) are waiting for news about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, the Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK). Well, we know who gets to visit Northrend first: the beta testers.

Blazith from the WoW Europe Forums expressed what you probably are or aren't hoping - which one you are depends on whether or not you were a beta tester for The Burning Crusade. The player hoped that those who tested TBC will be chosen to test WotLK too.

Blizzard poster Aeus came by the said thread and posted a reply, "I haven't heard of or seen a plan yet, but I don't think we'll base the next beta key give aways on the previous ones."

Will we need to go through a number of contests again? That isn't going to be pretty. Anyway, we'll keep a close eye on those WoW: Wrath of the Lich King beta keys when they become available.

Aeus certainly knows how to tease the World of Warcraft-playing masses. He recently posted some comments that should certainly please owners of the incredibly rare Spectral Tiger mount. According to what he posted, there's a good chance that we might see upgraded looks for the spectral tiger mount in the future.

The comment came about in a post where Drennity of Aszune felt underwhelmed by the current looks of the Spectral Tiger mount. Aeus replied, "I may have heard rumours about the look being somewhat upgraded in a future patch." He further noted at a later point in the post that the said "rumor" also mentioned that such a look upgrade would occur before the next expansion.

In the comparison on the picture to your right, Aeus described the differences between the Blizzard's rendering and the current render of the mount: "The one with black armour is the current one. But in-game it looks a bit weird in certain places. It seems it will look better with more of a homogeneous colour to it."

Hopefully, Aeus won't tease us with just rumors, and add a bit of a date to that, not only to the spectral tiger mount upgrade, but also to the future patch that introduces new content to the game.

World of Warcraft's European chapter appears to have experienced some down time recently among its realms. As Aeus reported over at the region's WoW Forums, players have been reporting connection problems to the following servers (listed in alphabetical order):

• Ahn'Qiraj
• Bronzebeard
• Chromaggus
• Dentarg, Drak'thul
• Emeriss, Executus
• Hakkar
• Khadgar, Kul Tiras
• Mazrigos, Moonglade
• Scarshield Legion, Steamwheedle Cartel
• Talnivarr, Trollbane
• Xavius
  

On last report, Aeus dropped by the thread to announce that the connections problems appear to have been resolved. And while we don't have any confirmation of this, we think this may be connected to the recently reported realm exploit over in North America. The said exploit was causing the local realms to crash, and was reportedly affecting EU's territory as well. Of course, this is just speculation on this author's part. Drop back in case Europe's connection status gets an important update.

As much as World of Warcraft is an excellent MMO video game, there are a few annoying things about it simply because if its very nature. MMORPGs deal with real people and it is not totally impossible that you will meet people who will either PK you or disturb your raiding sessions.

Given that premise, it is a great thing that Blizzard decided to implement an in-game tool that allows players to ignore others players. However, the more intriguing thing here is why there's a limit to this "ignore list". Is it a technical issue? Or is it something else? Blizzard forum moderator Aeus explained:

Since this is a massive multi-player game, we really value the social aspect of it. It is hardly ever necessary to permanently have someone in your ignore list and I think limiting the slots will make every player a little more conscious of whom they're blocking and why and to not turn this game into a FPS.

Well, that is a good explanation but we hope Blizzard thought of all the other players who create WoW accounts not for fun and progress in the game but to pester other people.

While using mods or addons for World of Warcraft is always a welcome way to make gameplay easier, there will always be risk that some of these mods violate Blizzard's Terms and Conditions (as was the case with WoWGlider). This was the topic of an inquiry made by Orinakarr over at the WoW Europe Forums, regarding the Gatherer mod.

For the guys haven't heard of it, Gatherer is a tracking tool for herbalists, miners and treasure hunters. Quoting the wowui site, here's a full explanation of what it does:

The Addon does not track like a tracking ability does, rather it 'remembers' where you have found various items in the past. It does this whenever you gather (perform herbalism, mining or opening) on an item, and records the specific map location in it's history. From then on, whenever the item comes into range of being one of the closest 1-25 (configurable) items to your present location, it will pop up on you minimap.

Getting back to the subject matter, Orinakarr wasn't sure of this mod would give players an unfair advantage during the game - as this counts for a clear violation of Blizz's conditions. Spokesman Aeus dropped by a little later to explain that the addon was clean:

Gatherer just sees where you are when a skill is triggered and adds an icon to the map. As far as I know it consists only of the "standard" Addon files like .lua, .toc and .xml. No executable files are involved. So knock yourself out.

So there you have it. We hope guys also using this addon will breathe a little easier, knowing they don't risk getting banned for using it in gathering resources.

 

If your character uses a lot of skills or spells in World of Warcraft, you can expect that when you hit level 70 the screen will be cluttered with many buttons. The question is now posed: How does one optimize the hot keys to ensure minimum clutter on the screen as one plays the game?

A poster named Illai on the WoW Europe forums dished out some very good tips to address this. According to Illai, most of the healing spells were keybound to the numpad while deciding between various types of spells were handled though modifier keys (*###/control/alt). You could also follow Blizzard Poster/ Forum Moderator Aeus suggestion of using qUserKey. It's a mod which lets players bind hotkeys to spells and macros without the need to have them on a bar.

Another method you can try is to trim down the skills you've been using. Just select the most efficient ones that are used in special cases and assign a button to it. Be sure to keybind the more common skills you use to ensure that they will always easily accessible. If any of our readers have any tips on button optimization, feel free to share them with the rest of the WoW community by posting it below.

 

There's a little oddity regarding naming characters in World of Warcraft. If you make a character name with a capital letter in the middle, it will automatically be converted to smaller case. This was brought up in the forums and the thread has created quite a stir.

Now if you take the time to check out the manual, you will find that some pictures show characters with letters in the middle of their names capitalized. So some players pointed this out, at which point Blizzard Poster/Forum Moderator Aeus gave his theories on the reason for this implementation in a post.

I'm guessing it's easier to change one line of code that restricts the use, after the manual is already printed, than to re print the entire batch of manuals. And I'm guessing no one noticed in the re-printing for T.B.C. ...or no one thought it would be of such importance that it should be a vital change.

I don't know about most of you, but I'd have to agree with the other players regarding not allowing capitalized letters in the middle of the name. We don't need multiple permutations of popular names spread out among characters. After all, can you imagine running an instance with four characters named Legolas, just with different letters capitalized? That would be chaos.

 

Heads up, PTR fans! You may want to start playing your mains later today because there's going to be some downtime later today to introduce an internal patch to the public test realms.

Blizzard poster Aeus informed the public of the maintenance time, saying:

We will be performing a maintenance on the Public Test Realms on Wednesday, July 18th, in order to apply an internal patch. This is not a client patch, so players will not be required to update anything on their end.

We expect this maintenance to start at 18:00 CEST and last for two hours, ending at approximately 20:00 CEST. During this time it will not be possible to log in to the PTRs.

Folks who want to further explore what else the PTRs have to offer will have to wait a while, it seems. Ah well, it gives you more time to work on earning that Netherdrake, right?

 

It has been reported that some servers in World of Warcraft have been suffering from "performance issues." The servers that were affected included Auchindoun, Ghostlands, Hellfire, Karazhan, Nagrand, Shattered Halls, Sporeggar, and The Sha'tar.

Blizzard Poster/ Forum Moderator Aeus quickly addressed this problem on the WoW Europe Forums saying that they have "pinpointed the cause and in the next couple of hours we’ll be working on resolving the issue in the background." It was also great that the Blizzard team who handled this problem was very efficient in getting everything normalized on the estimated time that Aeus gave.

Of course, it's natural that some players were asking for one day free credit, such as the one given to the players on the servers which went down some time ago. We'll see how this will shape up.