WoW Insider Show Episode 109: Drakes for everyone

We recorded our latest podcast last Saturday afternoon, and it was a good one — not only did we have Eddie “Brigwyn” Carrington and Turpster on from here at WoW.com, but we welcomed two special guests: Fimlys and Nibuca from the Twisted Nether Blogcast. They were on to talk about their podcast and what they do with Twisted Nether, as well as their new Azeroth United project and what they’ll be doing with that in the future. And of course, after we introduced everybody, we sat down and chatted about the most popular stories from the last week in Warcraft, including Brewfest and Onyxia, as well as patch 3.2.2 and the bugs contained therein. Enjoy the show. And if you’ve heard something you’d like to respond to on the show, feel free to drop us a note via email — the address is theshow@wow.com. We’ll see you next Saturday as usual, thanks for listening!

Twisted Nether and friends unveil Azeroth United

The Twisted Nether folks have been a huge part of the WoW community for a while now — I finally got to meet both Fimlys and Nibuca in person at the last BlizzCon, and of course we’ve mentioned them and their work here on the site before. They’ve recently announced another big project, in coordination with Stompalina over at Rawrcast and our own Eddie “Brigwyn” Carrington, author of the Scattered Shots column and curator of The Hunting Lodge, and it sounds exciting. Azeroth United is an “Internet media community” centered around World of Warcraft, so it’ll be a hub for sharing news and support around not just bloggers, but all WoW-related fansites and online resources. It sounds like their first project will be a large-scale charity drive, much like the Children’s Week auction that Brigwyn put together earlier this year. More news on that, we’re told, is coming soon, and we’ll keep our ears open to see what they’re up to. We’ve seen the power of the Warcraft community before, both in making a difference with donations and and uniting under a common flag, so a project like this is sure to be fun to

WoW back online in China

The long wait is finally over — World of Warcraft’s servers are finally back online in China after they went offline all the way back at the beginning of June, due to a switch between former host The9 and current host NetEase. It took a while for the government to approve the move (and some have even suggested that the delay wasn’t completely legit), but things are finally back to business as usual, according to a few sources out of China. A few more interesting facts have arisen with this news as well: apparently NetEase has spent over a million yuan (about $146,000) per day to keep up and maintain the game and its servers during the past month of closed beta and free play. Of course, that includes customer support and all the other costs. Even with that price, however, the company is still expected to grow. We haven’t heard any population numbers worldwide for WoW since this whole deal began, but you have to think that they lost at least a few players due to all of the problems. Of course, the release of Wrath over there may bring back some players, but even though they were planning to have it out before all of this happened, the switchover has

BG Hero tracks your battleground activity

I’m really impressed with BG Hero. We take a look at these stats sites pretty often, but I have never seen a site targeted strictly at PvP data like this one, and with such a clean and interesting view. Unfortunately, it’s still getting off the ground, so we’re probably going to give the server a run for its money with this link, but give it a few days and head back there when they’ve smoothed things out. It’ll track your plays and wins in each BG, obviously, but you can also get a whole bunch of graphs and numbers about how you’re doing each time you play, including HKs per BG, and killing blows per battleground that you play. The app also tracks your totals daily and weekly, so if you get your character in there and let it update over a period of time, you can see just how you’re doing. Pretty amazing stuff if you’ve been playing a lot of battlegrounds lately (and with the extra XP in there, why wouldn’t you?). We’re told the site is still being worked on, so expect more updates soon (and Phood is keeping info flowing on his blog), but in the meantime, it looks like a great way to look at your BG progress in more

The Los Angeles Times visits BlizzCon

The LA Times has a story up that’s about a month late — it tells the story of a guild meeting up at BlizzCon last month (they were actually at the Lost Bar, a place we at WoW.com know well from past meetups) and doing everything players do at BlizzCon: meet each other face to face, talk Warcraft, and enjoy everything Blizzard has set up on the convention floor. Truth be told, the experience sounds pretty tame to us — BlizzCon is BlizzCon, it’s a ton of fun, but it’s not that alien of an experience to go with your ingame friends to a gaming convention. Then again, maybe we’re just biased. Maybe having guildies as friends is really a fascinating thing to someone who’s never done it before, and maybe the spectacle of BlizzCon really is so interesting that you can just report it in the paper. They do chat with Morgan Webb (why?) and they get one line from Blizzard COO Paul Sams, but otherwise, it’s just basically the story of the Dread Pirates and their trip to BlizzCon (complete with veiled accusations of misogyny and a dictatorial guildleader — thanks, LA Times!). To folks who don’t play World of Warcraft, it might be

Darkmoon Faire France cancelled

Upper Deck has posted on their site that they have canceled the upcoming Darkmoon Faire event in France for the TCG. They’ve been having events all over the world of this kind, featuring tournaments, exhibitions, and interaction with the game’s officials and designers (I checked out one such event when it was in Chicago last year). And while they had planned to hold a Faire in Paris in 2009, apparently it’s not going to happen — they say there was “complications” with the “venue,” and the event has been shut down. They are still trying to come to France, however: they’re hoping to hold an event called the Tournois du Voile d’Hiver (“Tournament of Winter’s Veil” in English) in Toulouse in November. And this really does just look like a schedule conflict, as they are still holding events in Amsterdam, Austin, and Vegas later on in 2009, and from what we’ve seen at various conventions this year, Upper Deck’s WoW-related TCG and minis games are bigger than ever (in fact, given what I saw at Gen Con and have heard from various UD employees, it’s possible that the WoW games are the

The Explain-o-matic will explain your macros

This is actually a really cool idea for a site — Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic is basically a web script that reads WoW macros, and will go, line by line, through them to put exactly what they do in plain English. Sure, odds are that if you have a macro already, you probably have some idea of what it does, but if you’ve ever wanted to learn how to write macros, or aren’t sure exactly what the macro your friend emailed to you is supposed to do for your character, you can just throw it in a text field, and then Fitzcairn’s script will break it apart for you. The site will even let you save (with a permalink) and email any macros you punch in — though I couldn’t find a way to browse them, maybe Fitzcarin is working on that. There are lots of resources online to find macros, but not so many to explain them well, so the Explain-o-matic is definitely worth a bookmark for the next time you need a little help.