Some of my fondest memories in WoW are things that never really should have ever happened. I don't mean random happenstance taking the wheel of life from me, nothing like that. I mean glitches, bugs and things that the Blizzard devs really never intended to happen. Sure, some bugs are not so fun, like losing equipment you worked hard for or getting blocked in a raid because a boss isn't working right, but there have been a lot of really awesome ones, too.

Take, for example, the screenshot above. It probably doesn't count because it happened on the Wrath beta and of course there are bugs there, but it was the beginning of a night that made me laugh for hours. If you can't tell what's going on... I'm piloting an airplane, my buddy tried to hop in with me but his chair is floating a few feet over my head for some reason, and someone decided to park their siege tank twenty feet up a wall, inside of the wall. That pretty much sums up the current state of Lake Wintergrasp, in case you were wondering.

If that doesn't count, there's the time a few years back when some friends and I ran Zul'Farrak, and a basilisk we aggro'd threw us twenty feet backwards for some reason, into another basilisk that threw us right back. We cried tears of laughter through about twenty minutes of the two basilisks playing catch with our flailing bodies before we were coherent enough to try and figure out what the heck was going on.

Do you guys have any memories like this? Do you ever wish you could go out and do them again for the nostalgia of it all, or are you pretty content keeping it a one time thing?

No David this week, I'm sorry to report. No, you're stuck with me. Before we get rolling, I'll establish my 'cred', so to speak. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1981, when I was ten years old. You can scroll down the page at the Acaeum till you hit the eight edition: that's the set my mom bought for me at a local department store. To this day I still remember the Erol Otus cover. From there, it's been a long, rambling flirtation with the genre, from AD&D to the Hero System (Champions mostly) to Steve Jackson's GURPS to the various FASA offerings (mostly Mechwarrior and Shadowrun, I liked Earthdawn but no one else wanted to play it) to Chaosium's Pendragon and Call of Cthulhu lines (and Stormbringer, the Elric RPG) to the present day, with d20 system games like Mutants and Masterminds and Arcana Evolved ans well asWhite Wolf's Exalted setting being in my current pile.

As a result, when I first got into World of Warcraft, I was under the impression that you were expected to role play your character. My poor human paladin (who I had decided had been sent to the order as a child because his parents didn't particularly care to feed yet another mouth after the war, and who was frankly too slow to grasp book learning to make a good priest) quickly learned that any attempt to discuss epic adventure, make comments about how boring life at the Abbey had been, or even treat kobolds as anything other than copper shedding piñatas to be beaten until the glittering candy came out would be treated with extreme derision. I didn't know about things like roleplaying servers back then.

shaw_na_na over on WoW Ladies has a problem: she's unlucky. She's been /roll-ing and /roll-ing in instances, but on a number of runs through ZF, she's grabbed nothing but an alchemy recipe. I've been on bad streaks before (mostly because of droprates, not rolls, actually), but never anything that bad.

So how do you get better rolls? If you're going to be all scientific about it, you don't. Blizzard has gone to all kinds of trouble to make sure that random rolls are as random as they come. They've even put measures in the game to make sure players can't spoof rolls-- roll "emotes" are yellow, not orange, and rolls are generated by the server, not the client software.

But if you want to be silly about it, there are a few methods. Some players swear by keeping Lucky Charms in your bag (while it would be awesome if that worked, it doesn't). Others say higher intelligence helps rolls, and have special gear just to use for good rolling (again, that won't work either, but it makes me laugh). And still other players believe the /rolls are set to a certain time-- they'll roll on the hour or minute just to try and catch the server on a particularly high random seed. Doesn't work either, but don't tell that to the players who swear by it.

Here's what I do: whenever I'm on a particularly bad streak of rolls, I warn the group that I'm "clearing out my bad rolls," and then run /roll a few times. You'll get a few low numbers (34, 20, 52, 30), and then you'll get a higher number (something like 84 or 91). At that point, you stop rolling, and then the next roll, you'll win the loot roll. Again, according to science, that's not supposed to work (and it probably doesn't, except in my head). But believe me-- my characters have become better geared more than a few times because I "cleared out the bad rolls."

Relmstein's got a great roundup of the new instances coming in the Burning Crusade, including the lowdown on two instances that won't show up in January, but will likely appear in two releases after the expansion.

The Black Temple, it seems, won't be available when the expansion hits-- Blizz says they want to "polish" it before release. Relmstein says that's fine, because it will take players a few weeks to get to level 70 anyway. I'm not sure that's true-- you should never underestimate how fast players can eat up new content, but I do think that the other new instances will be more than enough to at least keep the majority of players interested for a while. The other instance we'll have to wait a bit on is Zul'Aman, a 10-man instance that's Troll-based like Zul'Gurub and Zul'Farrak. Of course I knew that there would be lots of new 10-man content in BC (the highest dungeons will have a limit of 25 players), but the thought still gets me excited-- UBRS is one of my favorite instances in the current game (and relatively easy to get a group together at any time), so more 10-man content will be very welcome to see.

Finally, Relmstein takes a look at instances and areas that still haven't opened in the world. Hyjal and the Island in the middle of the map we already suspect will open in later expansions, but there's a few instances that might be closer-- specifically Uldum in the south of Tanaris (a Dwarf lore instance like Uldaman) and Gilneas near Silverpine Forest. There's no plans yet for either to open (Blizzard has acknowledged that they want to, but probably aren't currently working on either), but considering that instances are many players' favorite part of the game at large, it's extremely exciting to think what swirly portals we'll be walking through soon.

I don't have much to add to this "I've been around so long I've seen" thread-- it's a pretty good read on its own. But even though I haven't been around that long, relatively speaking, I will say that I've been around so long that...

... I remember when Warsong was just a hunting camp, and not a graveyard for millions of PVPers.
... I had to ask a guildie in Ironforge to help me find a group for ZF when I was in Tanaris.
... I know there was a time when you could queue for a battleground at 19, and level to 21 before you joined the instance.
... I remember when dying actually cost you experience points (no, wait, that was back in Dark Age of Camelot)
... I remember when Chuck Norris was just a guy on a TV show, and not a supreme Godlike being.

Ok, maybe that last one was never true. Nickelplate (a player who posts on page 4) gets it right when he says he remembers "when people lived life at a slower pace and the idea of feeling nostalgia for things that happened only 2 years ago was laughable," but a little nostalgia for nostalgia's sake never hurt anybody, Nickel. This game has changed a lot over the past few years, and considering it's all going to change again pretty soon here (when the next patch, and, soon, the expansion gets released), now's a good a time as any to take a look backwards.

So last night I was making yet another run through ZF trying to down Gahz and get my Carrot when the mage who was carrying our Mallet made a joke that he was probably one of four people on the server who currently had it in possession. Could that be true? Are there that few people out there carrying around the Mallet of Zul'Farrak, the only way to summon Gahz'rilla and clear Zul'Farrak?

If it is true, it's probably because of Jintha'Alor. A huge troll city practically hidden in the Hinterlands (it's just south of the entrance to the beach on the eastern coast), Jintha'Alor might be the biggest non-instanced elite area in the world of Azeroth. Home to a bevy of elite quests, tons of elite trolls, slimes and wolves, and (at the center of the city on the hill) the Altar of Zul, Jintha'Alor is definitely a great place to visit with a full party on your way to 60.

So why do so few people go there? When there's so much to do and see there, why do so few people make it to the Altar and create the Mallet?