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.

A. On Wednesday, November 4, 2009, five (5) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before October 26, 2008 to receive one (1) “Charge of the Great Dragon Flights,” Stein, with an approximate retail value of $89.99;

B. On Wednesday, November 11, 2009, five (5) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 2, 2007 to receive one (1) set of PPK Gaming Glasses from Gunnar Optiks, with an approximate retail value of $59.00;

C. On Wednesday, November 18, 2009, seven (7) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 9, 2006 to receive a One ASUS ENGTS250 DK/DI/1GD3 video card with an approximate retail value of $149.99;

D. On Wednesday, November 25, 2009, five (5) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 16, 2005 to receive a prize package consisting of One (1) SteelSeries QcK Limited Edition Mousepad, One (1) SteelSeries World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse and One (1) SteelSeries Siberia V2 Full-Size Headset retailing $79.99, with each prize package having an approximate retail value of $194.97;

E. On Wednesday, December 2, 2009:
1) Three (3) qualified entrant will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 23, 2004 to receive a prize package consisting of One (1) ASUS ENGTX260/HTDI/896M Nvidia video card with an approximate retail value of $149.99, and One (1) Game Card redeemable for one (1) year of World of Warcraft game time with an approximate retail value of $155.88; and One (1) Autographed Onyxia Print with an approximate retail value of $19.99.

2) Two (2) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 23, 2004 to receive a prize package consisting of: One (1) ASUS Republic of Gamers 3D Vision enhanced laptop with an approximate retail value of $2,499.00, One (1) Game Card redeemable for one (1) year of World of Warcraft game time with an approximate retail value of $155.88; and One (1) Autographed Onyxia Print with an approximate retail value of $19.99.

(Emphasis mine.) How hot is that?! The full rules and eligability details are here at the official contest rules site. I’m actually pretty glad to see that some of the love will be given to old-timers who have had their accounts for ages like me, but then again, there are probably millions of us in each of those categories, so I’m not holding my breath to win anything. Even so, best of luck to all of you!

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!

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!

Well it’s finally happened: we said they were coming, but they’re finally here! Race Changes are now live on US realms! That means if you have you’re looking to change your human to a night elf or your gnome to a draenei, you can do it now – for a fee – $25.00 USD, to be exact.

You’ll be able to change your race to any other race in your faction that supports the current character’s class, and you can change your race again to go back to the original if you don’t like what you chose, but it’ll involve buying another race change – so it’s one way: make sure you know what you’re doing before you switch! Read the full FAQ here.

That all being said, it does come down to the whole notion of whether or not choices still matter in WoW – now you can change your faction, change your race, change your server, change your appearance – the only thing you can’t do right now is change your class. I wonder what’s next!

Blizzard just hosted its first ever #Blizzchat developer chat on Twitter! The @warcraft twitter account took questions from other WoW fans on Twitter and took time to answer them all in a nice huge blue-laden forum post, posting the questions and answers as they went along!

Among some of the questions, well, there’s the one above sadly (click the image above to embiggen) – it means my hunter will never have a level 80 druid to love. But seriously, the questions are fabulous and the answers, while not always forthcoming, are entertaining to read. Of course the thread dissolves into your standard WoW-forum behavior after too long, but the blue posts are more than worth it. It’s clear that Blizzard is planning to do this again and make more use of its Warcraft Twitter account in the future, but for the time being? We have some amazing questions and answers.