Really getting into this hunter-centric blog and I think a few of you might as well. Lots of great advice and tips regarding talents, pet talents, strats and more. Check em out!

See all those mods that say “offline”?  Those are mods that are hosted at Curse Gaming, who, together with WoWInterface, delivered a knock-down blow to WoWMatrix today by blocking it from directly accessing mods hosted by those sites.  The administrators Curse and WoWInterface issued a joint statement, wherein no punch was pulled, stating bluntly that WoWMatrix has:

no intention of ever becoming responsible, legitimate members of the community. Instead, they choose to continue to leech off the community. Well we, WoWInterface and Curse, have gotten together and between us we believe we may have found a solution to prevent them from pulling authors’ addons from our sites to redistribute without permission and stealing our bandwidth any longer.

Many popular mods that are hosted elsewhere, such as Auctioneer, Titan Panel and Deadly Boss Mods remain unaffected in the WoWMatrix delivery system.

So, this is not news to the WoW faithful reading this post, but 3.1 is live, and the servers are in a state of extended maintenance while Blizzard gets their poop together. What are you guys doing in the meantime? Excited for 3.1? Thoughts on some of the big changes coming? Let your voice be heard!

Looks great to me! And anything that features running dwarfs is good in my book.

Blizzard Community Manager Naethera posted the following message in the WoW UI & Macros forum this morning:

On March 20, we released the new add-on development policy to the public as an ongoing effort to help ensure add-on integrity, safety, and quality for the community. Since that time we have been in touch with many UI development communities on what the policy means to them and the continuing development of these add-ons. We would like to announce further that we are providing a sixty-day grace period beginning at the time of the initial release of the policy for UI developers to comply with the new policy. After May 19th, Blizzard Entertainment will begin to enforce the Add-on Development policy, and developers found to be in violation of this policy will be contacted directly.

Three observations about this -

1. Blizzard is going forward with the policy.  Any question that they might back off from it is answered.
2. Between now and May 19, addons can beg for money in-game all they want.  We wonder if they will?
3. Apparently, addon writers are expected to read the UI & Macros forum at worldofwarcraft.com to hear about such things from Blizzard.  It’s front-page news on all of the non-Blizzard blogs, but strangely buried under a dozen other stickies at the source.

For months now, I’ve been posting a link to one of the websites belonging to Steve P., better known to Instance listeners as Buxley, and that link has been invalid.  It’s time to fix that, and make it up to Buxley by visiting his Ask Buxley archive here.

You can also follow Buxley’s blog where he talks about television shows such as Lost, 24 and Fringe here.

Give the man some love.  He’s funny.

Blizzard published a page full of advice on how you can get some of the more accessible of the 749 achievements that are currently in the game.  It’s not bad, but it could be huge, if someone was to write tips for it.

They appear to think you can help.  To do so, all you have to do is click on the button at the bottom of the page that says “Submit Strategy”, and send Blizzard your suggestion for getting an achievement.

As we discussed on The Instance #141, Blizzard was nominated for six MI6 Video Game Marketing awards at their conference in San Francisco this week.

Blizzard won all six categories.

Full results here.

Blizzard poster Xemafir announced today that, coming with the 3.1 patch, you will now be able to exchange back vendor purchases made with “alternate” currency.  Your ability to do so will remain for two hours after the purchase, and in exchange for this excellent bit of code, you will no longer be allowed to petition a GM when you accidentally spend 25 Wintergrasp Marks Of Honor on an Anvil Of Titans when you meant to buy a Flow Of Knowledge.

If you haven’t looked at the under development 3.1 patch notes lately, they’re right here.