It’s really that simple.  Today, I’m giving two beta keys to the writers of two haiku about WoW.  You may post your haiku in the comments here or on our Facebook wall.  Please only enter with one haiku, the best you can contrive.

My bare dwarf feet on

Cool dewy grass feel just right

A fine hunter’s day

I will be convening a panel of judges when this contest is closed for entries, which will be at 9PM PDT (midnight eastern) today.  So you have six hours to give it your best shot! Good luck!
Note: Please don’t post your haiku someplace other than the comments on this blog post or our Facebook wall, if you want it to be judged.  Also, please note that we will be checking to make sure the winning WoW haiku are original before awarding the keys.  Thank you!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to patronize The Instance fan page on Facebook.

On that page, I have just created a new photo album called “WoW In Real Life”.  Now it’s time for you to get creative.  Post one photo to the photos page that fits the description:

“…your WoW things juxtaposed with real-world things, or just real-world things that remind you of WoW.”

It could be a picture of your collector’s edition of WoW on a snow sled.  Perhaps your FigurePrint on vacation in the city.  Perhaps you have an actual pet pig named Hellboar.  We will select one photo at 8PM PDT today.  It will be a photo that is funny/weird/beautiful/catchy.  You have four hours.

Good luck!!

We’re happy to announce that every day for the next 25 days, The Instance will give away two keys to the World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test, courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment! As we build up to our landmark 200th episode, we want to give you the chance to beta-test and be among the first to experience the coming cataclysm.

Every day, starting tomorrow – Friday, July 23rd – Scott and Randy will each give away one of two unique codes that unlock your access to Cataclysm. To win, you’ll want to follow Scott and Randy, as well as Instanceshow, on Twitter. They might give away a code on The Instance Facebook page any day of the week. You never know when Randy might announce a giveaway in The Instance forum, or Scott might give his daily code to a random person in the live chat room during a recording of one of the show. If you want to win, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled, and your mournes frosty.

Start looking for Scott and Randy to each give away one WoW:Cataclysm beta code per day, and good luck! We’ll see you in the game.

Curse.com, a portal that offers many tools for MMO players, has purchased MMO-Champion.com from Major League Gaming.  MMO-Champion.com is one of the most popular World of Warcraft news sites boasting more than 7 million unique visitors and over 80 million page views a month.  The site is popular for it’s simple design and Blue Tracker as well as providing many sneak previews of upcoming changes to WoW.  MMO-Champion’s founder and administrator, Fabien Bonte, will be joining Curse as a full-time employee and maintains that “99% of the decisions on the site” will still be made by him.  While Curse has been a leading provider of MMO tools and resources since being founded by Hubert Thieblot in 2005, some gamers will also be wary of the deal since Curse, along with WoWInterface, led to the downfall of WoWMatrix.  Here is the press release as found on MMO-Champion.com:

San Francisco, CA – July 19, 2010 – Curse, Inc. announced today the purchase of the #1 World of Warcraft news site, MMO-Champion.com. The site was bought from Major League Gaming for an undisclosed amount.

MMO-Champion is a natural fit for Curse which already possesses the largest repository of add-ons available for MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games such as World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and Runes of Magic as well as extremely popular forums for Runescape, Aion and Final Fantasy XIV. The World of Warcraft news site attracts 7 million unique visitors and more than 80 million page views per month (Google Analytics WW, June 2010). The combination makes Curse the #1 MMO destination online.

“The acquisition of MMO-Champion markedly sets Curse apart from the competition,” said Hubert Thieblot, CEO and Founder. “Not only does the addition solidify Curse as the largest MMO destination on the web, but it plays a central role in delivering a complete Curse MMO solution. Curse is now the ultimate resource for MMO news, forums, databases, and add-ons.”

Gamers and advertisers alike will benefit greatly from MMO-Champion’s purchase by Curse. In the next few months, visitors can expect an updated page design and improved user experience. To insure the site’s strong content offering will not be compromised, Fabien Bonte, the site’s founder and administrator, will be joining the Curse staff as a full-time employee. Advertisers can take advantage of Curse’s extended reach into the core MMO market, making MMO gamers easier to connect with than ever. For more information about Curse and MMO-Champion, please visit www.curse.com.

While the acquisition of sites is nothing new, patrons of the site may fear that things will change a bit too much for their liking.  One of the major draws of the site currently is the ease of finding information as it is basically a blog featuring the days news in full layout on the front page.  A redesign as well as the addition of premium content may hurt the sites fan base but some features may be getting an upgrade as well, so time will tell if the move is positive or not from a gamers perspective.

A TON of you guys are in this! Huge thanks again to William Doran for shooting and editing this video!

Lightwell – Maybe the dumbest spell I can think of.  The idea is not horrible but in today’s raiding environment does anyone have time to stop their rotation for a moment to click on something for a heal?  I know when I’m dpsing or tanking the last thing I want to think about is healing.  That’s what the healer is for.  I’ve got a great idea.  How about we put a little Shadowwell on the ground and the healers can click on it to dps things?  Dumb right?  Right.  Also, why in crap does damage break the heal?  The only time I could see something like this really being useful is during a high damage AoE from a boss except with that wrinkle, it’s completely useless in those scenarios.  According to Blizzard’s placement of the talent in the Holy tree, they must have assumed it was as powerful as Power Infusion or Shadow Form.  Whoops.  I don’t know a single Holy Priest who takes this talent and that is all the evidence I need.

Blizzard doesn’t appear to be dumping this spell and are even requiring that Holy Priest take it to get the Chakra talent.  If they’re not dumping it, maybe Lightwell could be a spell you cast on a player who then heals everyone around them for certain amount over 6 seconds which would add to a Holy Priests existing AoE healing abilities.

Dampen/Amplify Magic – I know, we use Amplify Magic on the Saurfang fight.  I’m aware of that.  However; one fight does not make a spell useful or necessary.  I also don’t know a single Mage who is excited when I remind them to please “give amp magic to the raid please”.  They all have the same reaction, “Ugh”.  Dampen Magic is especially useless unless you are in pvp and there are no healers which usually means you will be failing no matter what you do.  I do think the idea is solid but in practicality it comes up so rarely that these spells are often completely forgotten about by many Mages.

We already know that Blizzard is planning to dump these spells and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but if we were to keep them maybe make them into more of a defensive cool-down rather than a 10 minute buff.  I could definitely see the use in a combo spell that lessens magic damage taken and ups healing and lasts for say 6 seconds.

Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite/Counterattack – Hunters are not a melee class.  Yet we get three, that’s right, three different melee attacks.  Absolutely the wrong way to teach a new Hunter that they should be shooting things from afar.  Wing Clip is useful since Hunters need to get away from close up enemies but other than that I think it’s time to face facts.  Hunters do need to be able to do some damage to people within melee range but to have three types of attacks is bit odd.

I love the idea of giving Hunters pistols to use in melee range.  While you could use the same ranged abilities there would be a damage penalty that would encourage Hunters to get back out to range while not forcing us to keep melee abilities on our action bar.  If you’ve ever played a Hunter you probably know how many abilities are already there and this would allow Blizzard to drop some lame abilities.

Mind Soothe/Soothe Animal – Druids don’t get Soothe animal until level 22.  By that point you should just be going Cat Form and Prowling.  Priests can Mind Soothe which I guess could be useful while questing but if you can’t kill a mob reliably you got bigger problems than Mind Soothe can fix.  These seem like spells that sneaked in there because Blizzard need to give players something new around level 20 and ran out of ideas.  Dumb spell with almost no uses at all.

I do like the idea of these spells upping the targets vulnerability to other spells though.  I’ve heard of Priests using Mind Soothe on the Instructor Razuvious fight but I admit I have never confirmed that it really works.  Imagine though that a Priest could use Mind Soothe to refresh a Shackle or a Mind Control or a Druid could use Soothe Animal to refresh a Hibernate or increase the length of a Cyclone.  I could see some use in that.

Now you get to tell us what you think.  Leave a comment with any spells you hate or think should change or tell me how wrong my analysis is.  Now’s the best time to talk about these kind of things since the future of World of Warcraft is still being…well crafted and many spells will be dumped and overhauled.

On our top bar above, you’ll now find a new page called Music, where we are cataloging every song we feature in The Instance, so you don’t have to! We know how much you want to be able to listen to your favorite WoW-related parodies and assorted songs that are submitted to the show, and we want there to be a one-stop-shop for you.

There is a long way to go before the page is complete, but if you’d like to help, feel free to comment there, or join us in discussion on this topic here.

Enjoy!

Big News Of The Week

Blizzard Rolls A One

In a move that surprised some people, amused others, and mainly invoked a summer hurricane of nerdrage, debate, and more nerdrage, Blizzard announced on Tuesday an attempt to bring accountability to their subscriber-only discussion forums by identifying message writers by real name. What followed, and what followed that, and what now follows that…

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

Believe it Or Not, Other Things Are Afoot

Lost in all the real name kerfuffle, Blizzard speculated this week on changing the fundamental way you define what sort of mage or hunter you’re playing, by condensing talent trees in the game at some point in the possibly near future. On Wednesday, Zarhym announced a wholescale revamp that they would like to do… in a huge post in the forums.

Sending Things To Yourself, Only It’s A Different You

In another fun little tidbit, the new Blizzard community manager Lylirra popped up this week in a thread speculating about cross-realm functions to say the following,

“Adding the ability for players to be able to mail Bind on Account items cross-realm is something we’ve discussed on more than one occasion.  We understand that players would greatly appreciate having the option to send heirlooms, for example, to lower-level characters on different realms, so we’re exploring the possibility. It’s definitely on our radar! Due to the necessary infrastructure changes that would need to occur before cross-realm mail can be integrated, though, we have no immediate plans for adding this functionality as of yet.”

Town Cryer

Roger, aka Deafwolf, from the Aegwynn server writes: I have attempted to contact Blizzard through their website in the attempt to learn about sponsorship. I currently ride a road bike in charity events, criterium races, and distance races. I’m purely an amateur, but I believe I can offer good visibility outside the game. Who do I contact and how do I reach them about my request?

Cataclysmic Drop Of The Week

Go Raid Some Trolls!

This is the ninth in our limited series, wherein we’re highlighting things for you to do in WoW that you might not ever get to do again after the Cataclysm. It’s Zul’Gurub!

Additional show content provided by Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz, James “Acuzod” Jefferies and the outstanding Instance Community.

Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and SquareSpace for sponsoring this episode.

- The RSS Feed
The MP3 File
- The iTunes Subscription
The Zune Feed

In a huge victory for the thousands of posters to the Blizzard official forums over the last few days Mike Morhaime posted a response to the recent uproar about Blizzard requiring Real ID names on the forums:

“I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

And there was much rejoicing.

Blizzard ignited a huge debate in their forums with an announcement on the official forums.  Around the time of Cataclysm’s launch all posts made on the forums will use Real ID names which are also of course the real names of the posters.  At the time of this writing there are multiple threads on the US and EU forums, some with over 1400 pages and counting.  Some of you may know as listeners of The Instance, Scott and Randy are not known for their fondness of the official Blizzard forums but what does this mean for future of the forums?

I see several good and bad points that may come from this.  Just like most things in life the outcome will not be black and white and will fall somewhere in between but one thing is for sure; Blizzard is moving forward with this change.  Let’s discuss both sides of the arguments for and against.

The Good:

• Trolls will be forced to do their trolling in the light of day – while many people on the forums are posting with their main characters names displayed, many posts (and especially the negative ones) can be found with a level one alt listed as the author.  People love to say the nastiest things imaginable when they can hide behind the internet’s veil of anonymity and this may clean up the Blizz forums quite a bit.
• Spammers and gold sellers will have a tougher time harassing people via the forums – It’s not the most used vehicle for gold sellers and spammers but it is out there and this change will probably curb that significantly.

That’s really all the good I can find.  Please let me know if I missed anything.  Now, some of the bad.

• People will become much more exposed to other players that they may not want to be exposed to – Let’s be honest about this.  In a world of Facebook and Twitter most people are relatively exposed already, but some people (like myself) have segmented their online persona  and have different circles of friends in the many social networks available.  Now if someone were to google my real name they may find out that I am a heavy WoW forum poster (I’m not actually) and while someone like myself certainly doesn’t mind that, there are people who will.
• The children – I hope that parents aren’t allowing their kids to run around on the net unsupervised but I’m sure that some are.  These kids will become a bit more susceptible to creepy people.  If you are a parent, just don’t let your kids use the internet in dangerous ways.
• Mistaken identity – There are a lot of people with common names in the world.  Even with a way to differentiate these people, unobservant folk will mistake people for others quite a bit.  Some sticky situations will arise from this surely.

There are much more repercussions to discuss but I’d love to know what you think.  Does the good outweigh the bad or vice-versa?  Does it affect you?  Do you give a crap?