In WoW social situations, combat and non-combat pets alike usually just take up space looking pretty. Hunter and warlock pets have many actions they can perform to help fight an enemy, of course, and for a normal gamer there's no reason they would need to do anything more. But sometimes, as a roleplayer, if you pat your pet wolf on the head, you might expect it to look up at you with those adorable puppy eyes; or if someone else pats its head, you might expect it to bite their hand off. However, with the emote system as it is, we can only type out custom emotes with our own character's name at the beginning of the sentence, never the pet's.

There's a way around this problem, which is actually quite obvious once you think of it, yet roleplayers rarely use it, so far as I have seen. If you write the possessive apostrophe-S as the first part of your character's custom emote, you can make your pet seem to do something on its own: "Isabeau 's pet wolf growls and bares his teeth." It takes a little bit more typing, and it leaves a space between your characters name and the apostrophe-S (since that's built into the emote system), but effectively it lets you roleplay two entities at the same time. Hunters and warlocks can use the PetEmote addon to help make this a little more streamlined.

Our reader Ellyndia, for instance, roleplayed a very introverted character that normally would not introduce herself to others, but using such custom emotes, she could have her Jubling walk up and interact with people first to get conversations going. Pets can reflect what your character is thinking but not saying out loud (by hissing or purring perhaps), or they can do anything that such pets in real life might do. Special non-combat pets such as the Children's Week kids, the interactive Animatronics, or even the magical Mojo, could all be especially fun to animate a little now and then. Certainly this technique would become very annoying if overused, but in moderation it can add a extra spice of humor, entertainment and even a touch of realism into the game.

Big thanks to everyone who came out and played with us, the WoW Insider staff, in our new guild on the Horde side of Zangarmarsh last night. I'm playing an undead priest named Mikril, and I had a good time questing around with a shaman named Gambu (he made a good tank). All told, we picked up almost 60 guildmembers in our first night, and even rolled a few people to 10 so they could run orphans around Azeroth for the last day of Children's Week. We'll continue to keep the guild running for some fun and casual gameplay, so If you want to join up, just roll a toon on the Horde side of Zangarmarsh and send a whisper to anyone in "It came from the Blog."

We are keeping it totally and completely casual -- I don't want to give up on my own usual characters, and you likely don't want to give up yours -- so there's absolutely no pressure to level up at all. We're just planning on making it a fun place to hang out once a week or so. While we will probably be around at various times throughout the week (I'll be working my way up to 19 so I can get a good WSG group going), our next organized game night will be Wednesday, June 6th at 7 pm EST. The Darkmoon Faire will be in Elywnn Forest then, I'm told, so we'll lead a Horde lowbie party into the Human starting area to run some tonk wars, shoot the cannon, drink some ale (and start some drunken fights with Alliance), and have a grand ol' time.

So mark your calendar, and in the meantime feel free to roll your own alt and come join us on Zangarmarsh. When you need a break from hardcore endgame raiding, or just want to come meet and greet all of us here at WoW Insider, we'll see you there.

Reader Baxmaniac (thanks!) sends along a little tip that Blizzard's event calendar page has been updated, and Children's Week has been officially scheduled for patch 2.1.

Usually, the event has appeared in the first week of May, so lots of players were wondering what exactly had happened to it-- were the children going to be abandoned this year? But though Blizzard hasn't given an official reason for the holdup, most likely it was because they're adding new Outland versions of the event, including all new pets (I'll be running to get my Metroid pet ASAP).

And finally, while Blizzard has not officially announced a date yet (do they do anything officially anymore?), the patch has been showing up on the background downloader, so it's a pretty good bet that 2.1 will be hitting tomorrow. By this time next week, you too could be carting little Dumbo the Elekk around Outlands.