This week I headed off to Bleeding Hollow's Horde side to talk with players about the biggest story of the past week: the opening up of the opt-in for the Wrath of the Lich King beta. The server was really busy, and in fact, someone's been busy in Orgrimmar there -- there are quite a few bits of corpse graffiti around, with names like "Pvpfails" and "Blizzsucks."

But nevertheless, I did find two willing victims interviewees for the column this week. See what we talked about after the jump.

Our very own Mark "Turpster" Turpin and Jennie Lees were invited to sit down with Xfire users and chat about their thoughts from the Worldwide Invitational. You can read the entire transcript, but we've encapsulated most of the goodies for you in this post.

Mounts and battlegrounds

Answering a question about water mounts, Jennie said that they don't seem to be in the works. Still, you can get your H2O kicks with the non-player-controllable boats in Lake Wintergrasp. Another questioner asked whether the flying combat mounts will take damage. Some of these combat mounts will have shielding to protect the player from damage, but the mount will take damage instead.

Killing Arthas

Consensus in the chat was that there is a lot of excitement around the idea of being able to kill Arthas, the Lich King, even if it takes up the same progression as Kil'Jaeden currently does in TBC. The hope is that Frostmourne will drop, but the consequences of getting the sword are not yet known. Will it corrupt the player and take away stats? Will players become the new Lich King if they pick it up? We'll have to wait and see.

That's just one of the questions awaiting an answer for us in the post-Wrath world. Another came from a chat question about whether there would be any future for the Warcraft franchise after Arthas is dead. From what our bloggers have heard, there's no standing still for the franchise. Turpster says, "I think a favourite King of mine might be making a return to a Stormy City!"

Everyone loves the new daily quests. They're fantastic! Fast, easy, good rewards. Spread across the world so there's always somewhere else to go if a spot is crowded. Absolutely awesome.

The location of a couple of these daily quests has caused some inadvertent hilarity, though. The close proximity of the Throne of Ki'jaeden quests to Doom Lord Kazzak has sent the Hellfire Peninsula death toll skyrocketing. I was waiting for him to spawn for a few days, just to see how quickly he'd be taken down by people scrambling for gold, due to the changes to his loot. Specifically, making it all BOE.

I was lucky enough to be in the zone at just the right moment and was able to hear his very cool opening speech. Accompanying that speech, though? The dying screams of dozens of innocent questers. Music to my ears! I flew up to take a closer look at the carnage, and I stumbled across my favorite little detail of the entire thing. There was a Nightmare Vine spawn at the bottom of the ramp leading up to Kazzak. Just inches within his aggro radius. One by one, herbalists would deviate from their quests and run up to that Nightmare Vine, only to die horribly to the Doom Lord. Well played, Blizzard. Well played.

Snippets of my chat log behind the jump!

theflamecrow on LJ had an interesting little occurrence: he was in Darkshore when he saw a flash in the World Defense channel that Darkshore was being attacked. The only problem? He's Horde.

Now, most people may think that Horde doesn't have a base in Darkshore that can do under attack, but in fact, they do-- it's the Dancing Troll Village. So apparently some enterprising Alliance had found it and started killing. But here's the bigger question I got from crow's story: does anyone really pay attention to World Defense?

I know I don't. But then again, I play on a PvE server, so odds are that anyone attacking a lowbie level like that is just a level 70 on a rampage. But even on PvP servers, do blaring Defense channels really mean that anyone cares? People will protect their guildies, and of course they'll join the fight if they smell blood (or at least someone they can beat in a fight). But do the Local and World Defense channels really point the way to a good PvP clash the way the developers surely intended? Or do they just mean chat spam, and that there'll be trouble if you try to speak to NPCs in that area?

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

Barrens chat. Someday, if WoW becomes popular enough, that phrase could become immortalized in the English language as a synonym for childish, pointless, and offensive blather. Whether it's public offers to cyber or waxing poetic about Chuck Norris' roundhouse kick velocity, if you've ever leveled a Horde toon in the Barrens, you've heard it all. It's one thing to put up with such nonsense for 10 levels. It's quite another to endure it day after day from members of your own guild. What if your guild chat was little better than Barrens chat? Today's letter is from an officer facing this grim situation.

Hi Scott,

Thanks for all the great articles at WoW Insider. You do a fantastic job!

I have a question for you that hopefully you have some insight on [. . .] I'm a member of a successful guild whose core members know each other in real life and have gamed as a group since before WoW. I've been with them since late 2004, and while we've had our ups and down as a guild, having a core like this has kept us alive through it all. I'm now an officer and a raid leader, so I have quite a bit of leverage in the guild.

We have never had any written-down rules about how you should play your character or act while in guild. We stress the basics that any guild should abide by [. . .] We're on a pvp server, and many of the members come into the game to unwind from their daily stress. As such, guild chat can be extremely vulgar. There was one instance a long, long time ago where a black member of the guild gquit because of a few guys BS'ing on gchat and using the 'N' word. I think that day has been forgotten. Gchat has been rife with some pretty controversial word use lately, and I've just been approached by one or two concerned guildies.

All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.

While many online gamers are famous for using "leetspeak," there's a certain portion of the community that places a great deal of importance on complete sentences and good spelling. Roleplayers, as a whole, are friendly and communicative, but nonetheless have special ways of interacting that other gamers may not understand.

As a new roleplayer, I remember having to figure a lot of these things out, although I was blessed to befriend many people who kindly explained things to me as well. The first and most important concept I had to get a grasp of was the idea of "in-character" versus "out-of-character" communication (usually abbreviated to IC and OOC), and in what situations the use of either sort would be appropriate.

It's fair to say that on an RP server where roleplaying is still the rule rather than the exception, anything in the /say or /yell channels should be "in character." That's to say, it should be phrased with good spelling and proper punctuation, and should only refer to happenings within the WoW universe. In situations where one must say something out-of-character in these channels, it is polite to at least couch your OOC words in double parentheses to clarify your meaning.

The latest uprising on the forums (seems like there's one almost every day now, doesn't there?) has to do with what seems to be an anti-chat spam measure on Blizzard's part. Players have discovered that multi-line messages don't work anymore, even in guild and group channels. Spammers are very fond of guild or group inviting folks, and then filling their chat window with ads for less-than-TOS-compliant activities, and Blizzard decided to cut those folks off at the pass.

Except that we kind of need those messages. Sure, lots of annoying macros use them, but so do legitimate healing and DPS meter addons. So Slouken says that Blizzard will change things, and messages like these "will be allowed in guild chat and private channels with 25 people or less." Which should cover most exceptions-- you'll still be able to show off the meters in guild and raid chat, but then again, you'll still have to be careful about what guild and raid invitations you accept anyway.

Thanks, Shilarva!

I can confirm for you that yes, patch 2.2 has finally fixed our Orc male shoulders. Finally, my Orc Shaman can hold his shoulders up proudly (ok, well, a little hunched down under all the weight, but still). I know lots of you readers are tired of hearing about it, but the saga is over: our Orc shoulders have grown back. Now I'll never mention it again.

Strangely enough, however, this change didn't make the patch notes, and when players ask why, Neth sounds a little tired of talking about it herself. She says that while the change did not appear in the official 2.2 notes, "one graphical item of which has been stated as being fixed many times now, does not make it less accurate." I've wondered before who exactly writes the patch notes, and yet again I find myself wondering what the method is behind their madness. Some patch changes, including some boss tweaks, are clearly not included on purpose. Some huge changes (like the DOTs affected by resilience change) get the smallest of mentions. And some small changes very much awaited by players, like the anti-AFK measures, get quite a bit of ink.

Now, I doubt that Blizzard purposely left the Orc shoulders change off the patch notes-- they probably just didn't think it important enough to include. But surely there are things that they do leave off of the notes on purpose, and some things that the devs might not think are big, but that whoever writes the patch notes chooses to emphasize. Whatever their method behind the madness, I can't see what it is at all.

Did you know that you can save your chat log in WoW? I didn't know how to until I read Mardraum's forum post today. Your chat log can be recorded in WoWChatLog.txt in the logs folder if you type /chatlog before the chat you want to record. If you want to record your combat or the current guild roster, use /combatlog or /saveguildroster respectively. Logging only works for that session, however.

If you want to automatically log all of your text, there is an add-on called Elephant (which I haven't tested) that will do just that and organize it all for you as well.

Here are a few of the benefits and drawbacks of recording your chat:

Pros

• You can use it as grist for your RP stories.
• You can record in-game interviews and events for blogging about later.
• It is a great way to record the minutes of guild meetings.
• You can record your intimacy sessions with your in-game love.

Cons

• Your significant other can find your intimacy sessions with your in-game love.

Ok, it's only one con, but it's a biggie.

Why would (or do) you log your chat?

I had a great time at the Stormwind Stampede yesterday (and pictures and videos from the event should be up soon). But here's a little tip we all picked up from running almost 500 Tauren around the world: to shut down all the yelling, you can just right click on the title of your open chat window, and then go into the "Channels" menu to shut down /yells just like any other chat channel. You can also turn off Guild chat this way as well, just in case your guildies start threatening to spoil Harry Potter, but you don't actually want to /gquit to get away from them. Unfortunately, turning off yell won't get rid of the big red text bubbles when people are near, but all you have to do then is just turn around.

Of course, /ignore still works, and my little level one Tauren now has a bigger /ignore list than any of my other toons, thanks to some rowdy spammers yesterday. And /leave General will get you out of Barrens chat (just as /join General will get you back in when you finally arrive in Ashenvale). And I don't have that much of a problem with this stuff (only when I group up with 500 cows), but if you're really tired of chat spam, Devnull might be an addon worth looking at.

It's not real complicated-- those of you who are experts at chatting (or have just been given a headache before by all the yelling) probably already knew it. But it was definitely a helpful little tip yesterday to sort through all the spam in the channels.

As we have noted before, the standard chat interface is not very user-friendly. One of the ways in which it doesn't work, is that all sorts of different text channels are crammed together into one window. This is particularly unhelpful when you're trying to maintain several different whisper conversations, as well as talk in your party or guild channel all at the same time. I used to have gobs and gobs of trouble with this, wishing that the chat interface were more like... an instant messenger!

Well now it can be. WoW Instant Messenger (or WIM for short) brings you the best of the Instant Messenger features out there and packs it into one nice addon. The main thing is just that it separates each conversation into a different window (or tab!) so that you can keep them straight and not miss any messages. You can set these windows to appear whenever a message comes in, or to wait for you to click on the icon, just like an answering machine. They also display the name, level, class, and guild of the person you're whispering with, and there are several buttons on the side, which allow you to do several things, such as add the whisperer as a friend, or find out where in the game he or she is at the moment.

So if WoW is not only a game to you, but also a place to meet up with your friends and just talk for hours, be sure to have this addon to make your social life a little bit easier.

Oh Illidan and Kael'thas, you two are so silly. The folks behind Azerothian Supervillians put together a fun little trailer for Xfire featuring two of Azeroth's most heinous masterminds.

But what they're planning is what we're doing-- covering every single second of BlizzCon. WoW Insider has teamed up with Xfire (yes, the use of "teamed up" was intentional there) to cover Blizzard's big event like it's never been covered before. If you haven't checked out Xfire's main BlizzCon page yet, here it is. And if you haven't gotten an Xfire account yet, do that too (it's easy and free), because on Thursday (tomorrow) at 4pm Pacific, WoW Insider bloggers (including myself) will be chatting live on Xfire. You'll have the chance to ask us about our official predictions for the show, check in with what we think of Anaheim so far, and tell us exactly, in chat-room person, what you think should be covered at BlizzCon.

Get on Xfire and get online (put the account "blizzcon2007" on your friends list) tomorrow, Thursday August 2nd at 4pm Pacific to chat live with WoW Insider from Anaheim. And of course, stay tuned all weekend for great BlizzCon open-to-close coverage, courtesty of Xfire and WoW Insider.

The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do:

• Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window.
• Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example)
• Add keybindings for various chat channels.
• Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target.
  
• Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message).
• Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names.
• Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about.
• Turn on chat logging.
• Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location.
• Copy text from the chat frame.
• Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.)

As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.

Many of you might be familiar with bash.org-- it's a legendary collection of quotes from IRC. Their top 100 page is a must-read if you've never done it before, but be careful, as extreme laughing will ensue.

And now, reader Furism sends us a note that he's started WoW Bash, a version of bash.org that collects quotes from MMO games, including many quotes from World of Warcraft. The site just started, so unlike bash, there's not tons of great quotes to read through (many of them are not very funny), but there are a few gems to be found, most of them on the top 100 page (which only has about 40 on at the moment). This one made me laugh. But the genius of bash is that it collects quotes from all over the IRC world, and so by bringing this page to you, dear readers, hopefully WoW Bash will gain some exposure and get some really good quotes on there.

And even if it takes a while, it's an excellent idea, and a great way to show off the hilarity (or usually stupidity) appearing in chat channels all over Azeroth and all the other online worlds. If you've got a screenshot of a funny quote, get it up there.