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.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of being a gamer girl is learning to deal with rampant sexism, without becoming defensive. Just like racism, sexism should not be tolerated, but how do you address it without making the problem worse? Smurphy from Burning Blade brought this up in the forums. Nethaera's response was to shut the thread down before a dialog could really begin on the subject.

Although the majority of WoW players are men, there are a number or women who do enjoy the game. Women are often important contributing members of guilds and raids. Perhaps a little known fact about gamer girls is many of us don't like to be hit on or given special favors like spots in raids. Nor do we like to be called honey, baby, or sweetie by complete strangers. We would very much like the same treatment given to our male counterparts. Women do truly enjoy the game, and should be able to feel safe and comfortable in the online environment.

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

Every once in a while I get an e-mail where I think, "This person has to be pulling my leg." At first, I thought the e-mail below was one of them. As I read on, however, the author's heartfelt anguish over the decision she has had to make convinced me that there really is a guild leader out there doing this. Judge for yourself:

Hello there,

I'd love your opinion along with your readers opinions on an issue going on in my current guild. I'm an officer of a Horde guild that is still relatively young (3 months) but very dedicated. We transferred from other servers in order to form an off-hours raiding guild. Things were going very well until several weeks ago when I looked at our guild forum and was shocked to find the GM posting character accounts for sale and urging other guild members to buy them! And if that wasn't bad enough a week or so later he decided to buy a current guild member's account for himself and his girlfriend (another officer and the purchased account's owner supposedly wanted to stop playing those characters).

Tech community Slashdot is going mad over a little present Blizzard apparently included with patch 2.3 this week: a brand new version of Warden (the program Blizzard uses to check for hacks, bots, and keyloggers) that they say effectively gives Blizzard total control over our computers. The technical stuff is a little hard to understand, but apparently Warden is what's called a "polymorphic program"-- that means that it actually hides from anyone looking at it exactly what it's doing and which files it's changing with a random code. Obviously, Blizzard wants to keep the program's activities secret from attackers-- if a hacker knows what Warden does, then he can more easily avoid it.

In previous versions of Warden, this randomization was "easy to predict," but Slashdot is saying that the new version effectively hides from even the user exactly what Blizzard is doing on your computer. Now, there is no clear reason why Blizzard would want to do anything bad with your computer-- odds are that this new software is the most effective version they've yet developed at making sure you can play the game without fear of hacks or keyloggers, and that's all they want to do with it.

But you should know that, according to "Captain Kirk," who wrote this article, Blizzard effectively has access to anything and everything on your computer, and can now edit or retrieve information at will without even you knowing what has happened. There's no reason not to trust Blizzard-- they're a high profile company with a long reputation of developing great software. But if a wayward employee at Blizzard wanted to steal your private information from your computer, or install a virus or malware on your PC, we're being told that this program will let them do it without your knowledge. You agreed to this-- it's in Section 14 of the Terms of Use-- and so it's up to you whether you trust Blizzard with your computer or not.

WoW Insider has contacted Blizzard and asked them to clarify the situation if necessary-- we'll let you know if we hear anything from them.

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.