On Friday there will be WoW relevant panels about the UI, classes, and artwork. On Saturday there will be panels about WoW PvP, raids & dungeons, a general Q&A session, and more class panels. The opening keynote is set to being at 11:00 a.m. PDT on Friday morning.

There are a lot of interesting attractions and events that'll be going on in addition to the slew of vendors that'll be there. There will be several large hands on gaming areas, a charity auction (hopefully some cool things will be presented – we'll be sure to let you know what's there when we find out), a developer signing, some archery, and Blizzard trivia.

WoW Insider will be covering the event in force. We'll be covering everything we can with live blogging, images and video from the floor, and several other great features. Lots more to come this week!

Read on after the break for a quick look at when all the WoW related events will be happening.

The opening announcement on the game is currently letting us know that realms will be down for maintenance tomorrow from 5:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. While the realms are going to be down, we are not expecting patch 3.0.2 to drop.

Earlier last week it was announced that 3.0.2 would come when season 4 ended. Season 4 was announced to end on October 14th, and thus we are all expecting patch 3.0.2 to come on October 14th.

However if for some reason it starts raining cats and dogs and the patch does drop, we'll let you know. But I wouldn't count on it.

I realize now that the debate about Arenas will never end. A lot of you don't like it -- this is apparently the wrong blog site to enthuse about it. But the fact is that Arenas are a big part of the World of Warcraft today. Some would say too big, but I personally think it fits its niche rather nicely. There's a lot of room for debate on this, and reading through everyone's comments in past columns, it's easy to see that there won't be any resolution to it.

Well, we're not talking about that today. This column is for people who like Arenas. If you're not a big fan of the format, you can skip right to the end of the column and post your well thought-out arguments about it (a lot of you are very impassioned about the matter, and I'm greatly impressed) or you can skip to another post as we've got a lot of good reads elsewhere around the site. No, this column is for those Arena freaks, the guys who get giddy when the queue pops up and get an adrenaline rush when the gates open.

The next Arena season is going to be fun. We'll have ten more levels to slog through and a lot of experimentation to do before we settle on a PvP groove and find out which specs and playstyles actually work for us. At the end of it all, when we finally hit Level 80, a new era of Arenas will begin and there'll actually be three tiers of gear to reward every level of play. For anyone who's ever stepped foot into an Arena and liked it, it promises to be the best season yet.

Here's a good question from our email (it's ask at wowinsider.com, if you've got a question for Ask WoW Insider). It's about PvP gear, and what to do about it in the few weeks left until the Wrath launch. We know now that Honor and marks are not getting wiped for sure, so Treecow wants to know what to do:

My question is this, now that Wrath will be out in 6 weeks or so, does it really pay to get the S2 gear? Is it worth getting, even if it's going to be replaced within the first couple levels in Northrend, just to make those couple of levels easier? Or should I keep running quests and dailies? Or is there something else I should be doing that I haven't even thought about?

Thanks,
Treecow
70 Druid on Thrall

If you ask me, dailies are the way to go at this point (and if you haven't gotten your rep up in some factions, dailies should help there, too), simply because gear will get quickly replaced and gold will always be useful. Not to mention that there are battleground dailies to do every day if BGs are what you'd rather play.

But on the other hand, I'm mostly a PvE-er, and who knows -- doing the PvP to buy PvP gear could be worth it in the long run. You might even get more gold out of selling items you'd normally be equipping in Wrath. Readers, what do you say to Treecow?

Previously on Ask WoW Insider...

Hagiel, the guild leader of Warriors of Time on the Moon Guard server, is having a birthday this week (happy birthday!), and to celebrate, they're hosting something that sounds awesome: bare naked boxing duels. This Thursday, October 9th, at 6:30pm server (which I believe will leave you enough time to still come out to our meetup later in the evening if you're in Anaheim), they're all meeting in front of Orgrimmar, and it's fight club time. To fuel the festivities, we hear there will be beer and treats also -- let me tell you, if you've never gotten drunk in game, taken off all of your clothes and weapons, and gotten in the ring with just your fists, you're missing out.

Seems like it's always the Moon Guard folks holding all of these fun player-run events, seems like. If you're running an event or you know about one going down on your server, feel free to drop us a tip, and let us know also if you make it to these things. We're always interested in seeing pictures or videos of player-made events going down. And good luck to the fighters on Moon Guard Thursday night, because you know what they say: If this is your first time to bare naked boxing, you have to get naked and box.

Ghostcrawler stopped by the beta mage forums the other day in order to address the issue of resists and immunities on the part of certain bosses. The problem here is that are sometimes special bosses in one raid instance or another that require players to temporarily put aside all the normal gear they've been working so hard to get and put on special gear just for that fight. For example if the boss is a fire elemental, then perhaps they all have to get a separate set of gear with fire resistance on it, and put it on when they get to that boss -- without it they don't have a chance of success. For other boss fights, they may find that the boss is immune to one type of damage or another, and this requires them to respec to a different talent build, or else play a supportive role whereas before they might have been the star damage dealer.

There are clear reasons why many players don't like these mechanics. Who wants to go to all the trouble of collecting a whole set of gear that you use only for one fight? Who wants to let that gear take up all that bag and bank space? Who wants to be shut out of their favorite talent build or sit somewhat on the sidelines just because the bosses they're fighting are immune to their prefered style of damage?

So Ghostcrawler comes in with the developer's logic on this issue: They don't want the raid instance to be a simple thing where you just move from one boss to the next boss, to the next, and so on. They want to break it up a bit so that different bosses require not only different strategies, but different gear, and different abilities, too. This adds a bit of anticipation, of having to get ready for the challenge rather than just stumbling into it and accidentally getting it right on the third or fourth try.

Autumn in the World of Warcraft is a time for celebration. A mere two days after the two-week drinking binge that is Brewfest ended, the Darkmoon Faire arrived outside of Thunder Bluff this morning to hang around awhile. When it departs for another month-long hiatus on October the 12th, you'll only have to wait until the 18th before Hallow's End begins.

If you are Alliance, all you need to do to participate is hop a boat to Ratchet and ride/run west. Alternatively, you can approach it from Darkshore, although you'll have to run down through Ashenvale and into the Barrens, so it might be a long walk.

Here is a rundown of some of the festivities, quests and prizes available:

1. We've created a comprehensive Darkmoon Faire deck guide that will help you pick up one or more of their amazing trinkets.
2. Learn all about the Darkmoon Faire's ticket reward system. Yes, they have prizes!
3. Check out what the various vendors have to offer. From exotic foods to unique drinks, herbs and potions to rare gems, you might just get away with a steal.
4. There are tonk controllers!
5. Visit Sayge to have your fortune told!
6. Are you a blacksmith, leatherworker or engineer? Do you collect non-combat pets? Stay tuned this week for our Collector's guide to the non-combat pets of the Darkmoon Faire, and this Friday's Insider Trader: A Crafter's guide to the Darkmoon Faire.

38 days from now, Wrath of the Lich King will be released, and hundreds of thousands of people will be chomping at the bit to roll Death Knights, WoW's first new class. Blizzard knows this as well as anyone, so they've posted a FAQ on DK character creation. If you've been following the news for months, there is little new here, but it's good as a recap, because these questions are, indeed, very frequently asked. So go on and brush up if you have questions about what races can be DKs (all of them), or whether you can make it the opposite faction of your existing characters (yes, unless you're on a PvP server).

There is, though, one bit of news in this post. When Wrath launches, you will only be able to create a DK on a realm on which you have an existing character of level 55 or higher. Wryxian, that maverick crocolisk CM, promises that in the future, the option will be opened up to create a DK on any realm, provided you have at least one 55-or-higher character somewhere. The previous plan was to make this the rule at launch (55+ = DK on any realm).

The only reason I can think of that they would make this change is that they were having difficulties from a technical standpoint; maybe it's non-trivial when trying to create a character on one realm to check that account's characters on other realms. Anyway, I doubt this will affect anyone too much. I for one am certainly going to make a DK on my main realm before I branch out to realms that I don't have any high-level characters on.

Xalit is entertaining himself before the expansion by crafting some macros, and he's come up with a pretty clever one that will count the number of times you cast a certain spell. He's got a few different versions (including one that pushes the total out to "say" occasionally), but here's probably the most helpful:

/cast Water Shield
/run i="Water Shield" if ws==nil then ws=0 end t=GetSpellCooldown(i) if t==b then else c=0 end b=GetSpellCooldown(i) if b==t and c==0 then ws=ws+1 c=1 end

Which will both cast Water Shield for you (obviously, you'll have to change the name if you want to count casts of a different spell), and then use:

/run SendChatMessage(ws,"SAY")

To kick the count out to the Say chat channel. Naysayers among you may say "well that's pointless," and they're kind of right -- it doesn't really matter how many times you cast something, and the macro doesn't do anything else for you besides update a variable to keep track of that number.

But it is interesting to see just how many times, say, you pressed the Fireball button during the raid last night, and maybe there is some use for this information somewhere (maybe checking the frequency of use or viability of certain spells or trinkets?). Might be a good macro to have when you want to know more about what you're casting.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

Starting up a new raiding guild is never easy. There's a lot to think about and plenty of competition for those raid-quality players. It's not easy even under ordinary circumstances. Now try doing it while you're on deployment in the U.S. military! That's what this week's reader is facing.

Dear Scott,

I've been playing since about a year prior to the release of BC and been through many guilds which time and time again failed to meet my expectations of what a raiding guild should be, mostly centered around the lack of motivation. I'm in the military and 6 months ago was put on deployment so I've been "WoWless" for the last 6 months or so. While out here I made friends with some fellow players and after a few conversations I asked if anyone was interested in starting a guild. They liked the idea but no one wanted to spearhead it, well this sounded like opportunity knocking.

This is cool, but pretty technical -- if you don't know your USB from your Firewire, it might not make much sense. But the guys at TGDaily were apparently playing around with a Fusion-io solid state hard drive at E for All last weekend, and to show off the drive, they loaded up thirteen World of Warcraft windows in just 36 seconds.

Normal hard drives, like the one in your computer (unless you've already shelled out a ton of cash for an SSD) have discs in them that spin, and they take time to find the information stored on them -- that's why, when you double click your WoW icon, it takes a few seconds (up to a few minutes if you've got a slower computer) for your WoW window to load up. But a "solid state" hard drive doesn't have discs or moving parts -- it's essentially one big block of memory -- so it's much, much faster in terms of retriving information. And what's going on in the video on their website is that they're pulling so much information from the hard drive that WoW is installed on that it's taking only seconds to load up thirteen windows' worth of WoW.

Of course, how fast all of those windows actually run depends on a lot of other things in the computer -- you'd need a lot more than just an SSD to have the video power to run 13 separate 3D windows at the same time (though TGDaily says they weren't breaking the bank at 5 instances running, they just didn't have any more accounts), not to mention the bandwidth that would come from 13 different connections. But just the startup is interesting enough -- eventually these SSD drives will become cheap enough to be used all over the place, and information will be almost instantly accessible from wherever it's stored on your PC.

As a whole was as WoW players are a pretty tough crowd to please. This is probably because of the diversity of the player base as well as the variable goals that we set for ourselves. We range from casual PvPers to hard core raiders. We all have our fair share of complaints, but judging by the games massive popularity, it seems Blizzard has done a decent job of responding to the competing demand of its subscribers.

Amgusrex of Moon Guard is concerned that play in Wrath of the Lich King will not be challenging enough. He feels that Blizzard does a disservice to players by nerfing the difficulty of content with progressive patching. His post is pretty inflammatory, calling others cry babies and pointing toward a "massive population that is bad at video games." Taking a look at the Original Poster's Armory profile, I have to assume that he is not posting on his main, because if he is he still has to over come many challenges himself before declaring the game "easy mode."

Reader Thomas pointed us to this forum post by Tigole, which contains some fun news for battleground fans, even if it is a little early in the design process to really expect anything yet. Tiggy basically says that while Arenas have gained some station in the world of PvP, the focus will eventually shift back to battlegrounds -- Blizzard would like to make BG content that "could be of higher quality with a higher degree of accessibility." They're still working on that competitive BG idea, and they want the focus to go back to the solid Horde vs. Alliance idea that's at the foundation of Warcraft.

Additionally, they're planning to let us queue up for the BGs from anywhere in the world (which, no doubt, would increase participation from both factions), and Tigole also suggests that eventually they may offer XP through battlegrounds, giving players yet another way to level up (twinks may not like that suggestion, but these changes are a long way off anyway).

This last change there -- offering players a way to level up with PvP -- is seen by many forumgoers as a direct stab at Warhammer Online. That game makes a big deal out of offering battleground-style PvP, and letting players choose it as a way to completely avoid PvE and earn XP and levels. So it may be that Blizzard saw their launch, and plans to turn back in that direction to compete. Which isn't a bad thing for us anyway -- as good as WoW is, some slightly-more-serious competition will only make it better. Being as I'm a BG fan, Tigole's hints that BGs are coming back is music to my ears.

Hi there, and welcome back to Ask a Beta Tester after its little Sunday break! If you're new to the column, then just 'welcome' instead of 'welcome back' and if that's the case allow me to explain! Have a question about the Wrath beta? We have an answer! Probably. Just ask in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer you in a future episode. Now, let's get started!

CactusHam asked...

I noticed on the Description of the Shaman's Maelstrom Weapon (and maybe its in other places as well, but this is where I saw it) that in addition to requiring axes, maces, staves and daggers it also requires "One handed Exotics, Two Handed Exotics" as well as "miscellaneous". I'm curious about what seems to be a new weapon type? Is this a new weapon type? If so, what classes can use "exotics"? And what exactly is an "exotic?"

Exotic weapons are unique NPC items. If you've ever used something like WoW Modelviewer, the Exotic category contains things such as Maiev's huge chakram thingy or whatever it is. It's not something players will ever get their hands on. It's sort of like the armor sets you see on Wowhead and Thottbot that have the listing of which races can wear it, and races such as Fel Orc and Naga are listed. That doesn't mean we'll get playable Fel Orcs and Naga, it means if they're putting together an NPC that uses those racial models they can use that armor to play dress up with. Fel Orc did technically come into play at the Netherwing Ledge, but meh. Yeah, that's right. Meh.

The Rumpus Machine is the latest offering from Oblivious Films, of The Grind fame. It's the story of what happens when an easily-frightened dwarf and his friends stumble upon a "metal pig" which seems to grant their every wish. It's not a follow-up to The Grind storyline, but rather a new, self-contained story. It's kinda like what O. Henry would have written if he'd only lightened up a bit. The moviemaking here is top notch and the storytelling is quite funny with everything from sexy dancing girls to throwback dungeons. Make sure you stick around throughout the entire credits roll for some final jokes at the end.

Drew "Drewbie" Syring from Oblivious tells Moviewatch that Macheath made this film for the BlizzCon machinima contest and, for you Diablo III fans, "yes, that is really the real Deckard Cain who was kind enough to lend his voice talents to our production." How'd they manage it? Just watch it, you'll see.

[Via Vimeo]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...