For those who may not know Gevlon, creator of the Greedy Goblin blog, has taken on the challenge of trying to clear as much WotLK raid content in possible while only wearing blue (rare) armor, with minor exceptions. His guild “Undergeared” of EU-Arathor spent much of the spring and summer clearing content despite the self-imposed handicap.

However as the summer has dragged on the group has fizzled somewhat, as many guilds do. They are planning one last attempt to clear some additional content this coming week, but other than that it appears this great experiment is coming to a close.

So what is the end result? The guild ended up clearing a large portion of the game’s 10-man content. Barring some additional success in the coming week; the group ended up clearing 8 out of the 12 bosses in Icecrown Citadel, including the first wing, plus Rotface, Festergut, Valithria Dreamwalker and Blood Princes. All of Trial of the Crusader and Naxxramas encounters were cleared, and all but two bosses in Ulduar (Yogg-Saron and Assembly of Iron). In addition they also cleared all of the 5-man heroic content.

Interestingly enough the group found the Trial of the Crusader (ToC) raid to be easier than Ulduar wearing the same gear, despite the fact that ToC was released later in the expansion. Whether or not they clear any additional content, the guild went a long way toward showing what a sufficiently skilled group can accomplish; kudos to them.

-- someproteinguy

We still don't have a release date for Blizzard's next World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm... but we do have details about what's included in the "Collector's Edition" box! In a press release earlier this week, Blizzard announced the limited-release Collector's Edition of Cataclysm, the third and upcoming expansion for WoW. The package will only be available at retail stores with a suggested price of $79.99, according to the press release.

The collector's edition includes the following "exclusive bonus items" in addition to the game disc: a 176-page artwork book titled "Art of the Cataclysm," a " Lil' Deathwing" in-game vanity pet, a behind-the-scenes DVD, a Cataclysm soundtrack CD, a Deathwing-themed mouse pad and a set of World of Warcraft Trading Card Game cards. The card set includes a 60-card starter deck from the Wrathgate series, two extended-art cards, and two Collector's Edition-exclusive hero cards, marking the first appearance of goblin and worgen heroes in the TCG.

Read the full Cataclysm collector's edition press release after the jump. Be sure to check out ZAM and Wowhead's Cataclysm Beta Key Contest for your chance to preview the upcoming expansion before it hits store shelves, and visit our World of Warcraft portal site for more Cataclysm news and information.

While piracy in MMO gaming isn't as prevalent as in other video game markets, Activision-Blizzard and other publishers remain aggressive in their hunt for operators of rogue, "private servers." Last week World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard made headlines across the blogosphere after the company was awarded more than $88 million in damages in federal court; the complaint was originally filed in October 2009, alleging Alyson Reeves—the defendant and operator of a popular "Scapegaming" private server—broke the company's EULA by hosting the illegal server and selling in-game items for real money via PayPal.

The recent lawsuit is one of the most extreme cases of piracy in the MMO industry; Scapegaming hosted 427,393 total users, with 32,000 to 40,000 players online each day, according to the court order [via THR, Esq.]. But is piracy in MMOs a widespread problem for most of today's publishers? Or is online gaming, by nature, more prohibitive to "digital theft" than traditional video games? Some publishers are taking cues from the cloud-based nature of online gaming, adopting new forms of digital rights management (DRM) for single-player or "offline" games that rely on users' Internet connections to constantly validate their usage rights.

Blizzcon might still seem very far off, but that doesn't mean that the excitement has to wait.  Blizzard just announced the start of the Blizzcon contests!

There are several categories to choose from:

• unique fan art contest
• song contest
• movie contest

We have some talented people at ZAM.com so put your creative caps on and go win some prizes. Be sure to come here afterwards and share your work with us; we'd all love to see it.

Sadly Blizzard does not, at the moment, have a writing contest specifically for Blizzcon, however, if you have a short story you'd like to share with people we have a story thread in the WoW general forums, and it'd be great to get more people involved.

- Xsarus

Put on your rose tinted glasses for a moment and travel back with us to an older, gentler time.  This was a time when men were real men, women were real women, class balance was perfect and Allakhazam proudly sported new screenshots and thoughts every day.

While I am afraid we cannot travel back to that time, we can bring back the screenshots and thoughts.  The key to this, of course, is you. Without you, our fantastic and loyal reader, we cannot possibly harness the sheer potential of this project. If you feel inspired by a quest, a spectacular view or if you took a screenshot and thought of the most hilarious caption, you have what we need!

There are a couple of categories you can submit pictures under:

• You have a cool picture and a story behind it, please submit it. Maybe someone else will submit a follow up picture and story to continue the experience!
• You found a really unique area, place or item. Send us the screenshot and all the information and we can post it to see who else will recognize it.
• You have a great screenshot, but think it needs a caption.  We can show it and see what other people think the perfect caption should be.
• You heard a cool joke in general chat and want to share with the world.
• You are bored and have a witty thought. We will accept those also!

Images do not have to be a screenshot from WoW. If you want to submit your own artwork, or just a cool picture that you can, through some twisted logic link to WoW, we will happily accept them.  We will be posting these at least once a week, and scaling up depending on submissions.

Please send your submissions to zampics@gmail.com and we will post them for everyone to enjoy.

-Xsarus

As the Beta moves on, in an recent interview Blizzard Game designers Luis Barriga and Craig Amai revealed some information on the remake of Darkshore. Wryxian posted the questions and answers on the European Blizzard forums.

It's great to see the challenges and hard work Blizzard is putting into even the smallest zones, not just the world reskinned, but a complete changing of the zones and storylines. It's interesting how they pull the lore into the remade zones, and how they pointed out the destruction of entire 'species' in this area. Allowing us, the players, much more immersion into our leveling experience, and the gigantic vortex at the center of the zone, which strikes me as rather epic. Even causing me to consider leveling an Alliance toon!

We've all seen the threads started by researchers on these forums asking questions, or directing us to surveys. They’ve wanted to know everything from details about your character’s appearance and race, questions about who you interact with, to uncomfortable probing queries about how your social life is supposedly failing because of your online gaming habits. So what if they didn’t have to ask?

This is just the case in a recently published article (http://www.pnas.org/content/107/31/13636.full.pdf+html) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The study involved the space-age browser based MMO Pardus (http://www.pardus.at/), and dove deeper into the interactions between players than previous studies, by recording a number of different player interactions.

Anyone in or around Cologne, Germany may want to drop by the Gamescon, which will take place from the 19^th to the 22^nd of August.  Blizzard has set up a booth and visitors will be able to try out both Diablo III and the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion.  More information can be found in this thread on the European Forums.

In addition to the fun of trying out the latest content, Blizzard has stated that their recruiters will be around and looking for new employees.  If you’re interested you can visit the European Blizzard Career page for more info.

Remember if you do go, make sure to take lots of pictures, and share them with us here at ZAM.com.

-Xsarus

Just about all of us have either been hacked or know someone who has been hacked. It's a familiar story and, while Blizzard is very good about restoring someone's character, it's still very annoying and inconvenient.

What is somewhat more serious is that if your WoW account was hacked, there's a decent chance you could have other compromised accounts with more vital information, such as banks or credit card companies.

Blizzard recently released a bit of advice for people when making internet accounts. In short, don't use the same password for everything, because if someone breaks one account, they've broken them all.

Are you tired of waiting for the patch to download so you can start playing World of Warcraft again?  Wait, no longer!

Blizzard is currently testing a new feature in the launcher which allows you to play the game while streaming data is sent to your computer on demand. The system is integrated into a new launcher, and while it still has bugs, being in beta, it promises to make patch day less annoying.  The blue announcement post is here and they’ve also posted an F.A.Q. here.