The remainder of the tournament will include a second qualifying round, followed by regional contests for a shot at the prize money. MLG Is preparing a $22,500 tournament as Blizzard works to make a place for WoW PvP as an Esport, without damaging the PvE game. I suspect that the second qualifying round on the tournament server will be much less popular than the first.

The WoW Insider team fell prey to scheduling difficulties with our Friday Night bouts, but should be back in the saddle this week.

Bornakk recently provided some news on the official forums that may be of interest to Arena combatants. While not giving a release date for Patch 2.4.2, he indicated that the patch will affect the Tournament realms when it goes live. Buffs, nerfs and item changes may have an impact on composition and strategy. He also announced that there are currently no plans to add the Stormherald to the tournament server, as "We haven't added any items that require a profession to use them." (Unless you count Heavy Netherweave Banadages and ring enchantments.) He said that such items may be added in the future. Original poster, Zanyu of Malfurion, believes that adding this item would balance out the presence of Rogues and Warriors in the Tournament. I see it as very unlikely that a change would be made while the tournament is active.

The arena tournament is live. You can still sign up for the tournament, but your team should be pretty close to stabilized. From this point forward any new additions, beyond team founders, to teams will come with a price of a 150 point penatly a pop. After May 6, you will not be able to adjust your roster at all.

If you plan on being competitive in the tournament, your team must complete at least 200 games between now and May 20, 2008. The ratings were all reset to 1500 after maintenance yesterday and the top teams are already flexing their muscles. The top three teams (as of this writing) are all over 2100 points. Outrageously Better Pros is on top at 2180 points, followed by Shadowplay at 2133, and godawful pmr at 2109. The top ten are equally split between Horde and Alliance teams.

Things are just heating up and the tournament will definitely be exciting and enlightening. The WoW Insider arena team will be back in action tonight. Manda, Zach, and I (mandy) will be taking on the world with epic Warlock-Paladin- Druid action. We'll see you in the queues tonight at 7pm PDT! Good hunting.

Sometimes I feel like Blizzard chooses a handful of random servers to Ice Block every few days – not letting players on, and giving a (hopefully) short window when the servers will be offline.

If you're on the unlucky servers of Agamaggan, Azshara, Baelgun, Dark Iron, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Greymane, Kalecgos, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Sargeras, Staghelm, Twisting Nether, Ursin, WildHammer, or either of the Tournamenet Servers, you're going to have at least two hours of downtime from 5:00 a.m. PDT until 7:00 a.m. PDT. Blizzard will also be doing rolling restarts across all realms this morning.

For those of you waiting to get your morning fix of WoW, fear not. There are several pieces of news and entertaining reads to catch up on.

New WotLK alpha screenshots – Did you know that WotLK is in alpha, and the first batch of new screenshots has been leaked? We've got them confirmed from an inside source and mirrored here for your enjoyment.

As a tank, I hate to pug. Our Warrior columnist Matthew Rossi agrees with me. Check out his enlightening piece for One reason tanks won't pug. And I hope the subject of his piece, Primula, enjoys his or her new found fame as one lowly ninja-looter.

Do you have a life outside of WoW? Not that I do, but if I did I would be a casual player and appreciate Robin Torres' advice from WoW, Casually: Finding groups fast. Just remember that they don't always have to be random pug groups.

Two pieces of Season 4 gear have been accidently enabled by a GM on the live realms. You can check out the new stats and have look at them. They remind me a bit of the Ori from Stargate, so I have to ask: Hallowed are the Ori, anyone? Hopefully the bosses at Blizzard are a bit more understand than the Ori and will let the GM that made this mistake keep his job.

And finally you can check out my new favorite column of the week, [1. Local] by Lisa Poisso. Lisa takes a look at all the comments posted on WoW Insider and rounds up the best of them for us to marvel over. I know that I've sent her a few lately.

Happy Tuesday everyone!

Vhiari has released some interesting stats about the Arena Tournament realm over on his Blogspot site. What he did is take the top 5000 (due to "Armory limitations," he says) personal ratings in each bracket, and then charted them according to classes. Keep in mind that this is the Arena Tournament realm (the live realm data is also available separately), so this is more an indication of what players are doing so far on the tournament realm rather than class viability in day-to-day situations.

But keep in mind also that Blizzard is watching the Tournament realm closely for PvP balance, so what we see here could have some hints into the future of Arena changes. Mages especially don't make out too well on the 5v5 chart, and Hunters don't appear to fare much better. Warriors, as you might expect, are off the charts, but comparably on 5v5, Druids aren't at that level. Rogue placement is a surprise, too, but Vhiari just says in the comments that that's more an indication of how many people rolled rogues on the TR rather than a signal that Rogues are rocking 5v5.

Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, the data is a little too fuzzy to pull off any serious conclusions (even if Mages aren't getting high ratings, this chart does nearly nothing at all to help us figure out why that might be), but it's an interesting look at what's happening on the TR so far.

[via WoR]

World of Warcraft has two distinctly different types of play: Player versus Environment and Player versus Player. The styles of play are dramatically different and there are few, if any, skills that cross over from one style to the other. WoW started out as a PvE game, adding in PvP content as the player base expanded. And despite the numerous PvP fanbois out there, the real game in WoW will always remain the PvE game.

There are a few reasons why I think this. First and foremost, you cannot progress in PvP without first completing a large potion of the PvE content. You start out at level 1 and progress up to level 70. You don't level up by PvPing against one another. You level up by fighting against the environment. Put simply, without the PvE there would be no PvP.

Secondly, PvP is an addition to the game. If you remove PvP from the game entirely, the game itself would not fundamentally change. However if you remove the PvE elements, the game would be nothing like it is. Everything would just exist like the Arena Tournament server. That might be fine for some people, and this is evident in the success of the Arena Tournament server. Even I enjoy spending a couple hours a week on there, but by no means would I want to just exist on a server where the only thing to do is kill one another.

After my weekly dose of Battlestar Galactica* the WoW Insider team will be logging onto the Arena Tournament Server for some hot arena action. What's hot about it you ask? Why our 3-11 record! Also hot is the spec I'll be going with - an actual honest to God Mortal Strike build.

In all seriousness, we've got a great team of people getting together that are starting to learn to play with each other. Our record will improve, and we'll have some fun while playing some great matches. So if you haven't already signed up for the Arena Tournament (it's only $20), go do so now and come over and fight your favorite authors!

Also, I'll be frapsing most of our matches tonight, so if you get lucky, you might just find yourself in a WoW Insider video.


So what are you waiting for? Grab your sword and fight the Horde!

What's a good way to earn Gold? Some PvP players seem to think that Arena point selling is a viable option. As detrimental it is to the spirit of competition and working for achievements, it currently does not qualify as a violation of Blizzard's Terms of Use. This small loophole has helped make it a rampant, although unsupported and unsavory, practice. It's an old practice that dates back from Season 1. There are a couple of ways by which players sell Arena points. One is through outright sale of a moderately ranked team. Players take a team to a decent ranking of, say, 1800-2000, and sell the team wholesale, transferring leadership of the team to the purchaser. Depending on the size of the team, costs can vary. A 1900 2v2 team can sell for maybe 900 Gold, while a 3v3 team can go for about 1,300 Gold, and a 5v5 will cost anywhere from 1,700 to 2,000 Gold.

The one caveat of team buying is that players will almost never get what they're paying for. The irony is that those who purchase teams are almost never equipped or skilled to compete at the level they're purchasing. These players often end up tanking their newly-bought team a couple of hundred points just to complete the minimum 10 games to qualify for Arena point gain. In this way, team purchases are an unwise investment unless players can competitively maintain the team's rating. In some dastardly cases, very high-rated teams are bought by win traders who use the purchase to inflate their team ratings.

I had the opportunity to play on the Tournament Realm with Amanda Miller and Adam Holisky on Friday night. Yes, we got schooled but we had a great time. As Amanda mentioned I rolled a Resto Druid, but I specced short of tree form. I was most interested in mobility. I usually heal arenas as a Resto Shaman. I really enjoy the mobility of the druid, and I'm afraid I would lose that in tree form. Take a look at my spec, for those of you who know Druid better than I, tell me where can I improve?

I absolutely love the tournament realm. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to play Druid, and it encourages me, and I may very well level one on my live realm. I think I will try a Warlock next. I've enjoyed the tournament server so much that I haven't even logged into my home realm. I would probably get bored with just playing WoW as an E-sport full time on an arena realm, but I've found the realm to be worth the price of admission.

Bornakk posted yesterday to let us know that the arena tournament practice phase has been extended until April 22nd. The practice phase is the part where you can get on with your team and learn how to play on the server, devise strategies, and generally get things sorted out before heading into the competition phase. During the competition phase, every win and loss with count for something, and will go towards you possible winning the area tournament!

Bornakk also has a blue post about the exact dates and rules of the tournament for each phase.

Of course, stay tuned to WoW Insider. We'll be carrying tournament news as it happens.

Last night, the WoW Insider arena team stepped into battle for the first time on the arena tournament realms, and it was immediately apparent that things were going to be quite different from our experiences on the tournament test realms.

For starters, there were way fewer people. I also noticed that, contrary to my expectations that everyone shelling out an extra $20 to play here would be a hardcore arena-goer, there were many people on just to have fun. General chat was full of people who didn't know where to go, how to allocate their talent points, and even people who hadn't formed teams yet!

Still, despite the fact the vendor areas had a drastically reduced population, the queues were amazingly short, as Adam points out. Often, I was reading that my team had joined the queue at the same time I was clicking to enter the battle.

V'Ming has freed himself from the duct tape and still thinks that gnome warlocks need to be KOSed. He shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas and dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.

WoW players are ravenous. The dust of patch 2.4 has barely settled and we are already looking forward to the next thing on the WoW calendar before the expansion lands - Arena Season 4. If Blizzard thinks we'd ever be content with their content rollouts, they are seriously underestimating the appetite of 10 million subscribers.

After Kalgan killed expectations of Season 4 coming with patch 2.4, the big question on the minds of many players, whether they're saving honor for S2 gear or waiting to replace their Vengefuls with Brutals, is: when is Season 4?

The servers are live and Blizzard's $120,000 arena tournament has begun. This is your chance to prove that your team is the best in the world, or at least among eligible participants. The first two qualifying rounds are divided into Asian, European and North American Regions.* You have to place among the top four teams in one of these rounds to qualify for the big bucks. Before you sign up, be sure to check out the official tournament rules.

Players must have their accounts upgraded to tournament status in order to view the tournament realms. Entrance into each of the qualifying rounds will run individual participants $20 USD. Qualifiers run from March 31-May 20, 2008 to June 3-July 15, 2008. Players may use user interface modifications in the qualifying rounds, but will be limited to the default UI and custom macros in the live stages of the tournament.

Tipster Mike posted an unusual tip: apparently, to take part in the 2008 World of Warcraft Arena Tournament, residents of this great and potent land to the north, this utopia on Earth, this... Canada (I'm sucking up to my wife here, okay? She's Canadian.) do not have to pay for the privilege. No, no transactions of anything so tawdry as money need stain their hands. Rather than pay to play in the tournament, Canadians must simply write a small essay.

No, seriously. Stop laughing. That's actually how they enter.

"Instead, Canadian residents may enter by submitting a 250 word typewritten essay comparing the video gaming culture in Canada to the video gaming culture in the United States on 8 ½ x 11 inch paper and mailing their essay to Essay Entry for The North American Blizzard Entertainment Arena Tournament, P.O Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623." It's in section four of the legal for the tournament.

2.4's not out today, but Blizzard threw a nice little consolation prize our way: A new Fury of the Sunwell preview page, complete with a trailer and a very spiffy looking wallpaper featuring Kil'jaedan rising out of the Sunwell while Kael'thas looks on, as well as an in-game cinematic trailer in which Kael'thas tells the story of the destruction of the Sunwell and speaks of his plans to reignite it and summon Kil'jaedan. if you're a bit unclear on the Sunwell Lore, this page explains it succinctly as well.

There's also a list of some of the new features, such as all the new daily quests, accompanied by screenshots. In what might be considered a bit of tease for WotLK, the screenshot for the Arena Tournament features a Warrior wielding the fabled Ashbringer (the corrupted version, but still!). It's also worth noting that we can add another Kralnor cookie to the growing list of them, the screenshot also features everyone's favorite staff-using Warlock.

Blizzard's done a great job with this page, although I have to wonder if this is a harbinger of more PTR time. It seems strange they'd only release such a well done preview page a few scant days before the patch goes live, but we shall see. It's fun to have some new eye candy to keep us occupied until the patch drops.