Our Allakhazam team is incredibly proud of our sister site, Wowhead, and their fantastic accomplishment of being made into an Official U.S. Fan Site for World of Warcraft!

The entire Wowhead team has worked incredibly hard for this achievement, and we'd like to offer our most sincere congo rats to them all!  Tip of the hat to ya'll (and wag of the finger cause we're still not there)!

Other sites to be included in this round of approvals are ArenaJunkies, and Worldofwar.net.

Frustrations are mounting with my guild. Little history lesson here folks; I left my initial guild in September due to some politicking going around by the GM. It was for the best. I was distraught, as most of the people I knew in the game were from this one guild, so loneliness took over, finding myself suddenly without any support.

I got a message one day a couple weeks later from someone that was disgusted by how I was treated there, and told me that if I wanted, they would let me into their guild. I was contacted by someone that would later become probably my closest confidant in the game, and so I joined.

It was a pretty sweet spot. Keys quests for Kara were running at a regular basis, I was extremely close to 70, and Kara began just as I was wrapping up my key quests (This was around the time of Hallow's End). We soon began to have extreme difficulties with the Huntsmen, and so we merged with a much larger raiding guild, only to be treated virtually as second class citizens; we were unable to get groups to run anything, and in spite of promises of Kara and Gruul runs, nothing happened at all.

I would like to congratulate today's three winners: cancerous, Khalane, & cafeenoftheazurestorm!

All three of today's winners will be receiving 60-day World of Warcraft game cards! Winners please check your e-mail for instructions on how to get your cards.

Remember if you want to win, all you have to do is add to our wiki, post on our boards, or add quality comments to our site. You might even win a Nintendo Wii or a Gaming Laptop. Check back tomorrow for more winners, you might be one!

First day of our contest results! 

Congratulations to illianas, Kavekk and Jenovaomega on 60 day World of Warcraft game cards!  Check your e-mail for more instructions on how to get your cards.

Remember if you want to win all you have to do is add to our wiki, post on our boards, or add quality comments to our site.  You might even win a Nintendo Wii or a Gaming Laptop.  Check back tomorrow for more winners!

Wowhead has gone global! Along with a host of other recent features, Wowhead is now available in French, German, and Spanish!

Ten copies of the WoW UI programming book "World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons" are being raffled off at WoW Interface!

This guide is geared towards using Lua, a popular programming language used in video game development. Specifically, Lua is used for in-game scripting and creating addons for World of Warcraft. The authors cover the most relevant material, as well as a number of pitfalls and common mistakes that the reader may experience in development. No prior programming experience is assumed, although familiarity with languages such as PHP or JavaScript may be useful to the reader in picking up the Lua language. WORLD OF WARCRAFT PROGRAMMING also includes complete instructions on how to implement a number of specific addon concepts such as:

• Unit frames
• Secure templates
• Dynamic frames
• Parsing tooltips
• Dropdown menus
• Scroll frames

To find out how to enter simply visit their informational page! Good luck to everyone who enters, and I can't wait to see your work listed on WoW Interface!!

There seems to be connection issues for players in the Mid-west US.

Here is the blue post for people that can not connect to the oBoards:

We are aware there are currently some kind of Internet issues preventing some of our players from connecting to certain realms - and possibly our main website.

We are looking into this at the moment and will get back with information as soon as we can.

Please feel free to post in this thread.

We do appreciate your patience.

[Editors Note: The problem has since been resolved, but if you're still experiencing issues, please post in the official forums so Blizzard is made aware!]

Our WoW forums are having an awesome arena balance conversation, kicked off by one of our own community managers, Tyrandor!

The RNG, random number generator, is simply way to powerful in this game right now. As you get higher and higher rating, where people are both geared and skillful, it quite often comes down to who gets lucky, and entire games can decided in the blink of an eye based on nothing more then the RNG.

Things like getting Surefooted's 5% snare resist to make you resist a Frost Nova, a priest's talent saving him from a stun while he's doing a clutch heals, a Druid resisting a imp CS, etc - the deeper you go into the game, the more winning seems to be based on the luck of the draw.

Possibly the greatest offenders here, are warriors (At one time, rogues were just as bad, but combat mace is hardly viable anymore). Mace Stun and Imp Hamstring wins game, there's just no way around it. Warriors are either killing machine that will all but 3 shots you... or annoying pest you can more or less ignore because they can't touch you anyway. The same warrior with the same team will go from being one to the others, in the course of several fights... why? Because in 1 fight, he's getting Mace stuns and Hammies out everytime he touches you, on the other? Mace stuns aren't happening. It's totally ridiculous and in great part why warriors are considered a 'face roll class'. The most terrible warrior can get lucky and Stun 3 people with a Whirlwind or get 2 imp hamstring proc in a row, and there's nothing anybody can do about it.

Join in the conversation and let everyone know your thoughts!

Video Gamer has an interesting article regarding Blizzard's possible strategy with their next expansion!

Speaking to VideoGamer.com, Pearce said the team is still waiting to enjoy new content as players before turning to what must be an inevitable sequel.

"We haven't even started to think about a sequel," he said. "The team still has a huge wishlist of exciting features to add on top of what's already been implemented since launch. Not to mention, we're all still playing the game pretty heavily ourselves, and there's a lot more content that we want to see as players."

Asked when the new expansion might be released, Pearce was typically cagey, sticking to the "not ready till it's ready" mantra Blizzard is famous for.

He said: "As we've shown with The Burning Crusade, there's a massive amount of content required for what we consider a Blizzard-quality MMO expansion, and that can take some time to create. The bottom line is that we will never ship a product before it's ready.

Do you think they're right?  Discuss in our forums!