We all know (or at least I hope we all know) that World of Warcraft is a game -- an MMO set in an immense universe with countless quests to do and whole continents to explore. However, sometimes the big game isn't as interesting as the minigames you can find. Steam tonk wars? (Or other pet games.) Guild bank checkers? (If you haven't tried that one, it's a blast!) What do you think of Azeroth's minigames -- do you play them? Do you enjoy them? Do you make up your own to entertain yourself between raids? Tell us about them!

Guild banks are one of the banner features of patch 2.3, along with leveling improvements and of course Zul'Aman. We all know that you can store lots of things in them, although it might cost you. People are even making single-person guilds just to get to use the guild bank for storage. Come to think of it, why can't we have account banks, where we could transfer items and gold among our alts on the same server without having to use the mail? But that's not the point of this post.

No, the point of this post is a new use of the guild bank that has nothing to do with storage: checkers! Affix, from Tichondrius-A, has discovered that the bank is good for fun as well as utility. One player is using Netherweave, the other is using Arcane Dust, and they both seem to be having a good time (check the thread for more pictures). I have to say, this is the first time I've seen somebody playing a minigame inside WoW without AddOns or anything. Drysc speculates that chess would be somewhat viable, despite the fact that there is one row too few, what with the variety of item icons that exist. Tic-tac-toe should obviously work as well, though that's a fairly trivial game to not lose. Who wants to play guild bank connect four? Can you think of any other games that could be played within the default interface?

Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely love the tonks. I cackle with fiendish glee anytime one of my guild mates pulls out a tonk while we're waiting on the rest of the group to get to an instance. Tonk wars are no end of fun.

One of the things that has been conspicuously absent from the game for some time was more mini-games like the tonks at the Darkmoon Faire. Sure, you get the Battered Steam Tonk Controller as a quest reward in the Bone Wastes, but I already have a tonk. I had hopes when I did the Arcano Scorpid quest in Shadowmoon Valley... It seems like you should be able to battle them. But sadly enough, as a guild mate and I found out, once you've turned in the quest, you can no longer control the arcano scorpids. (We can only guess that it is still possible that you can battle them, considering they have attacks that only work on other arcano scorpids. But you'd have to never turn in the quest to be able to continue playing.) And yes, you can do the bombing run over and over in Hellfire, but without actually playing against another person, where is the challenge in it?

So, what we'd like to propose is for Blizzard to actually build in some form of mini-games. Not a true PVP thing, like dueling or battlegrounds, but something of a smaller and potentially sillier bent. Like giving folks control of the arcano scorpids after the quest is completed. That way you could play Scorpid Battle Mechs to break up the monotony of puking your guts out while searching for that one perfectly ripe Arakkoa egg. Or hey, how about making those non-combat pets useful and let us fight them against each other? I can just see it now... Magical Crawdad, I choose you!