Gather round, and let me tell you a story. A story about a crab and a floating skull. A love story. It all started yesterday, when a warrior called Rendan posted that the reason Ghostcrawler no longer frequents the forums is that he has fallen pregnant with Zarhym's baby.

Senior Community Rep Zarhym was first to weigh in on the thread. He told the story of how he wooed Ghostcrawler with Al Green's Let's Stay Together, and things rapidly escalated from there. A Doodle Gnome by the name of Paululum provided a first image of the happy family, as can be seen to the right, and the thread went on with what must be a record number of blue posts detailing little Zarcrawler's godfather, babysitters of dubious quality, and his various other relatives. Rygarius even managed to tear himself away from patch notes to join in the fun.

Paululum the Doodle Gnome continued to document little Zarcrawler's early days, depicting everything from the infant's first words, through the terrible twos and the tough love, the games of peek-a-boo and the pictures. Zarcrawler's awkward questions, first outings, and nerf bat training, all documented by one talented gnome! WoW Insider wishes Ghostcrawler, Zarhym, and little Zarcrawler all the best for their future together.

This week only, one of WoW's most adorable pets is on sale. The Moonkin Hatchling is on sale for $5, €5 or £4.50, depending on your local currency. This adorable little creature is effectively a buy one moonkin hatchling get one moonkin hatchling free deal, as you get both versions pictured above for your money, one for the Alliance and one for the Horde. As you'd expect, they are account-wide, and also battle pets.

The Moonkin Hatchling is a humanoid battle pet, with abilities such as Solar Beam, Cyclone and Moonfire reflecting his druidic status. He also has some utterly adorable animations, growing little flowers on the ground to brighten your day, as well as periodically hovering a few inches from the ground with his tiny wings. And what's more, he can fly, and will accompany you on your flying mounts, defying the laws of physics.

The sale ends on July 1 at 11.59pm PDT in the US, CET in the EU.

This week, in episode five of the WoW Insider Round Table, the panelists are looking at Proving Grounds, one of the new features coming in patch 5.4. Dawn Moore, Matt Low, Kristin Marshall, Joe Perez and Olivia Grace discuss various elements of the new feature, from the basis of speculation as, at the time of recording, it is not yet accessible on the PTR.

We wonder exactly how it will play out on the PTR for healers, tanks and DPS and what the content will offer in the way of challenges, before moving on to discuss whether it will really be an effective training tool for healers and tanks. The panel largely agree that, for the initial learning stages, it will definitely serve as an excellent method to learn the basics of tanking and healing in a pressure-free environment. The team went on to discuss ways in which Proving Grounds could also be useful for more high-level skills for these specs, before discussing the use of them as a recruitment tool.

We hope you enjoyed this Round Table, and if you have questions or ideas you would like us to discuss in future let us know!

A well-known YouTube personality, who's pretty big on the PvP circuit, recently posted a video about PvP in Mists of Pandaria. Amongst other things, he talked about how the PvP resilience changes made the pure PvPers suffer, while only really pleasing a small group of players who did both PvP and PvE. Now, while my evidence is just as anecdotal as Reinhardt's, this has got me wondering. You see, while PvPers are a passionate and vocal group, I suspect we fall into the minority. Particularly those, and I don't include myself in that group, who purely PvP. It seems to me that it's likely a fairly small group compared to those who PvE, or those who do both.

So, to expand my purely anecdotal evidence, I thought I'd ask the WoW Insider audience what they did. Now, the poll is pretty binary, I've deliberately not included choices indicating whether you do more or less, it's either just PvP, just PvE, or both. For clarity, I'm looking at end-game content here. If you've leveled purely via PvP (from level 10 at least), then fantastic. But if you leveled via quests and dungeons, but just PvP in end-game, you're in the PvP category. I'm looking forward to seeing the results!

There has been an excellent thread running in the EU forums laying out constructive criticisms of the new arena tie-break system. This system, if you hadn't heard, introduces a new buff called "The Crowd Chose You!!!" which will be applied to one team or another based on two criteria: the team with the largest number of players alive, and the team that brought an enemy player closest to death. Blizzard EU Community Manager Taepsilum posted in the thread to clarify that this is still very much in iteration, and to calm the fears of the posters, but a couple of great points were brought up.

Firstly, if one team gets an enemy player to repeatedly low health percentages, for example, they get a mage to 10% then to 5% then to 8%, but their opponents get one of them to 2%, do their opponents win? It sounds, from reading about the system, like the team that got the player to 2% would emerge victorious, but this seems a little counter-intuitive. Another great question is whether the health for the calculation is percentage based or numerical. Percent would make more sense, it seems. Hit the break for Taepsilum's post.

Way, way back in the last Addon Spotlight, we talked about addons to monitor your debuffs on your target, and after a lengthy hiatus, we're back to look at buffs. Why is buff monitoring a good idea? Well, think of DoT classes. The way the game works is that when you cast a DoT, it will take a snapshot of your current situation, so, if you have a buff up that increases your intellect for a few seconds, such as a weapon enchant, then that intellect increase will be applied to your DoT. If you refresh that DoT without the intellect proc active, the second DoT will be weaker than the first. The same applies to healing, to general damage, to so many things, so monitoring your buffs is really important. Regardless of what class you play, there will be buffs you want to look out for to make the best of what you're doing.

So how do you watch them? With addons, that's how! We're going to take a look at several addons that monitor buffs, and we're going to start with the one I prefer, which is the oddly named Weak Auras. Weak Auras was originally created as an alternative to Power Auras, which, alas, has rather fallen by the wayside of late. Weak Auras is, therefore, the one to look out for. We've talked about it before here at Addon Spotlight, but Weak Auras is just so good at tracking buffs we thought it was worth dedicating an article to that specific role. Setting up Weak Auras seems daunting at first, but I promise you that this is really, really easy. You just need someone to tell you how to do it.

WoW Insider reported on this over the weekend, and Blizzard has now confirmed that there has been a security issue with the Mobile Auction House.

Blizzard Entertainment

There's been a recent increase in unauthorized World of Warcraft account-logins via our website and the World of Warcraft mobile armory app.

We're in the process of notifying any account holders who were not using an authenticator and whose account showed signs of unauthorized access (e.g., logging in from an unusual IP address). If you are among this group, you will receive an email describing how to reset your account.

As a result of these activities, access to the World of Warcraft auction house via the mobile app has been taken off-line temporarily. Upon request, our customer support team will restore in-game items and gold for any accounts impacted.

While no means of account security is guaranteed, every precaution you take to secure your computer and your account-including changing your password periodically-adds another defensive barrier. We strongly encourage everyone to take a few moments to read through the security tips available on our support website and follow the suggestions posted there.

source

As we mentioned in the original article, a GM had recommended the addition of SMS Protect to further secure accounts, and using unique passwords for your battle.net account. Also, running virus scans, keylogger scans, and malware scans is an excellent practice.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about gear lately. PvP gear, specifically, how it's changed, and how it compares to PvE gear. I've also been thinking about my fairly awful gear-related luck, in both my guild's raids and the raid finder, and looking back to earlier tiers when, thanks in part to not being quite so busy, I've been far higher in the gear curve far earlier in the tier.

As part of my post-grad studies, I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time looking at the psychology of gaming. One of the theories on how games like WoW keep people interested, and a good theory at that, was one revolving around breadcrumbs. Like a trail of breadcrumbs, WoW offers the player lots of small, reachable rewards. Nothing so big that you feel like you're done, but lots of small things that aren't too hard to get to. Perhaps those things are in pursuit of something bigger, but they happen fairly regularly. Think of valor points, for example. A little additional reward for completing straightforward tasks. Reputation is another good example. Or leveling, be it a character or a profession.

Gear is much the same, it is the carrot that remains only slightly out of reach, pushing you to play just a little longer. In a PvE context, for an average player at least, you're never really done. Think of Thunderforged gear, this is an additional breadcrumb for those players who are at the top of the ladder already.

WoW Insider reported last week on a pretty crazy debuff that a player had found on the patch 5.4 PTR, The Crowd Chose You!!!. At the time, we were very sure to clarify that, as Brian Holinka mentioned on Twitter, this was not a tie-breaker in itself, rather it was, and is, a match-ender. It is the mechanic by which a match is ended once a tie-break system has decided who should emerge victorious. Rather like boxing, where not every fight can end with a knockout, and the judges use specific criteria to judge the winner, the tie-break system is in place to ascertain who should be awarded a victory, and give them this buff to put that victory in place.

As I discussed in a Blood Sport a while back, the important element here was always the mechanic within the game that decided who would get the buff. For clarity, the current mechanic is very simple: if you are unable to kill the entire of the other team before the timer runs out, you will draw, and both sides will lose rating. The arena system currently favors a knockout, and refuses to recognize any other type of win, to continue our boxing analogy. But this is all set to change in patch 5.4, so let's take a look at the patch note excerpt that clarifies the new system.

WoW Insider has received a significant number of reports of an alleged security threat which is related to the Mobile Armory. Several players have reported that the Mobile Armory has been used to fraudulently spend large amounts of their gold on extremely overpriced white-quality items on the auction house, which serve as means to illegally launder gold to the posting player.

In a US forum thread, players have reportedly already lost hundreds of thousands of gold. Further, many of these players have Blizzard Authenticators attached to their accounts. Similar reports are coming in from the EU.

There is reported confirmation from GMs, alleging that the technical team are aware of an issue, and advising the player in question to add SMS Protect to their account to safeguard against any potential further issues. If you would like further information on adding SMS Protect to your account there are video guides available. Of course, it is also important to maintain an authenticator on your account, as well as running regular virus scans, malware scans, and keylogger scans, as well as using unique passwords for your battle.net account.

We have reached out to various contacts at Blizzard Entertainment for comment. We will provide any updates to this developing story here.

Update 12:50pm EDT: We're getting reports that the Auction House on some realms have been closed. The Mobile Armory Auction House also appears to have been closed, confirmed by Blizzard EU via Twitter:

The Mobile Auction House is currently down for maintenance. We don't have an ETA yet, but will keep you updated.

- Blizzard CS EU (@BlizzardCSEU_EN) June 22, 2013

Thank you to the various people who contributed to this story.