Content Update Notes

As this is my first Coffee with the Devs, I thought some introductions would be in order. I’m the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, but many of you may already be familiar with my writing and webcomics under the pen-name Fargo from years past. To all my new and old friends: Hello! I hope to have the opportunity for more chats like this in between cramming our game full of epic experiences capable of melting your frontal lobes with pure liquefied awesome. (It says that on my business card.)

I have seen worlds bathed in the Community News. The fan sites posting news without so much as a whimper. Entire WoW Comics written and drawn in the time that it takes your mortal hearts to beat once. Yet all throughout, the forums, that are full of informative... and fun threads. I... have... reported... FORUM TROLLS!

Last week, you had the opportunity to vote for the best submissions for the weekly challenge “Arena's Chic”. The competition was intense and the choice was hard, but the favour of the community went to the following candidates. They all obtained an additional achievement and more points!

The Practice Phase of the 2011 Arena Pass is coming to an end. Ranked Ladder Phase 1 will begin after the maintenance period on Wednesday, June 8, so read on for a few important facts to bear in mind before we kick things off.

The hungry monster was hungry indeed, but his cravings were of an entirely different nature this day… He had no hankerings for human flesh, nor yearnings for fat livestock. What the monster wanted was the Community News full of ripe fan site updates, bountiful comics, and delicious forum threads and fan creations!

Looking for another chance to attend this year's BlizzCon Benefit Dinner and help out a good cause in the process? An additional handful of tickets have become available to this special pre-BlizzCon event and will be going on sale Wednesday, June 8 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time through the online Blizzard Store.

You may have noticed we changed class talent trees for Cataclysm. We changed not just the trees themselves, as you might expect for an expansion, but the entire structure of the trees and the way you choose talents. Now that the Cataclysm model has been in play for several months, the team has been discussing what we like and don’t like about it, and I thought that might be of interest to some of you. As always with this series, this is design rumination, not a list of upcoming changes.

Haven’t you heard? This week, the 2011 Arena Pass: Community Challenge is covering "Arena’s Chic", and we've got some great submissions from our participants. We can’t think of any good reason why you should miss them, so check them out below! Once you’ve picked your favorite entry make sure you vote for it in our poll to help decide who will win this week's challenge!

In just a few days, the Arena Pass Practice Phase ends and the real action will begin! This is therefore the ideal time to ensure your character and team names are fully appropriate. Creating colourful names for characters and Arena teams might seem fun, but we’ve got a strict naming policy in place—violations of which will have consequences!

We’ve updated our Trading Card Game art gallery to feature ten new pieces. Each image is taken directly from the official World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. Be sure to give a shout-out to your favorite pieces in the comments.

Our French Warcraft Facebook page has just reached a new milestone: over 50,000 people have ‘liked’ it! To celebrate, and to thank you all for making our community great, we have a special reward lined up.

My momma always said, "Community News is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.” Well, I reckon that aint really true, because there are always fan site updates, awesome comics, and cool and interesting forum threads in that darn box… But all of these have different flavours each time though, so maybe Momma was right after all if that was what she meant.