I love hotfixes. They're like patches you don't have to wait for. Just posted by Daelo, WoW's lead encounter designer (who I've been seeing a lot of lately, but don't remember seeing much before) is a brief account of hotfixes to Archimonde and the Eredar Twins. For Archie:

We just implemented a hotfix for all realms that makes Archimonde's doomfires no longer be able to move right through him after they spawn. Their movement should now be much more consistent with the previous patch's behavior, and melee should have a bit easier time dodging the doomfires as a result of the change.

He goes on to note that any other problems people might have noticed have been un-reproduceable at Blizz HQ, but they're still keeping an eye on them. As for the Eredar Twins, they "hotfixed a bug in the Eredar Twins encounter that prevent a Hunter's Feign Death ability from working if Lady Sacrolash was alive." Nuff said there. These fixes should, as far as I can tell, be live now on the US and the EU realms.

The materials for the elixir are fairly irritating to farm in quantity, and I find myself in a lot of areas I never even leveled extensively in when I was raising my Druid main. Desolace? Paid it a visit to get some fishing done. Blasted Lands? Uh...passed through it on my way to Outland. Maraudon? Did I do that? I want to say I did, but was brought up short at learning of the existence of a scepter that allows you to bypass two-thirds of the instance. I know for sure I've never set foot in Dire Maul North, much less a Tribute Run, I'd never seen the live side of Stratholme, and I hadn't so much as clapped eyes on the Emperor in Blackrock Depths.

Yesterday my guild was getting ready for our nightly foray into the Black Temple (we downed the first five bosses in 3 ½ hours, not too bad). Out of the blue, a member who has been having some "issues" as of late decided it was high time to leave the guild. And he didn't just stealth gquit, he went out in style.

Instead of being adult about it, which everyone in my guild is, he posted a long winded and rambling message to the guild and then left. His tantrum was quite good, one of the most epic I've seen. But the epicness of his lack of class wasn't the best part. The best part was that he had enough foresight to do it all with a macro. So after a bunch of us got done laughing about him leaving on ventrilo I thought to myself, "Self, I should post this on WoW Insider tomorrow. After all, a gquit macro sounds like a good idea!"

Take a look after the break to see some screenshots of this ex-guildie's gquit macro, and how you too can make your own gquit macro!

We've covered the IBM/Seriosity study before -- that's the one that said players who are able to organize and lead guilds can use those same skills to succeed in the workplace. Just recently, Computerworld sat down to chat with Seriosity co-founder Byron Reeves, who's since used his research to actually develop ways for companies to use MMO-style gameplay in the workplace, including creating a currency system to develop and manage interactions between employees.

It's very interesting stuff. Reeves says that MMO games and the leaders in them are a prime example of the environment creating the leader, not necessarily the talents of the person themselves -- when a game gives you the tools and influences necessary to have you leading a guild, you'll do a good job at it. He also says that the speed of online games can be a huge benefit to workers -- when you need to organize groups fast ingame, those skills will directly translate to running groups in real life.

Not everything is the same -- Reeves admits that the risks are much smaller when running around a virtual world (no one loses their livelihood if you don't down a boss), and there's a lot more transparency in games -- you can know characters' levels and specs, but you can't really know exactly how much experience your employees have or what they're really good at just by looking them up in the Armory. The interview is definitely an interesting read for anyone who's ever lead a guild or a workplace -- it's becoming more and more apparently that there are many lessons to be learned across both.

As you may have heard the other day, our Twitter account is up and running, and one of the most vocal participants so far has been our new Priest blogger, Matticus from World of Matticus. The other day, he posted a question on the Twitter account that he'd also asked people on his own blog: what makes an encounter epic?

The answers are all pretty good (I've put them all behind the break -- thanks, Twitterers!). From what most people said, lore and story play a huge part in making a fight feel epic, and not just the story of the game, but the story of the guild playing as well -- when your guild almost wipes, and pulls off a great kill, that's an epic battle whether it's in Karazhan or in Sunwell Plateau. Challenge also helps -- people raid to be pushed to the edge of their endgame abilities, and when a well-tuned fight does that, it's one of the best experiences in the game.

Great answers all -- hopefully we'll get to see more epic encounters than not in the Wrath of the Lich King (as Matticus points out, we don't need 40 or even 25 players to have a truly epic encounter with Arthas). And if you haven't started following our Twitter account (@WoWInsider) yet, please do, and stay tuned for more interesting and informal Twitter polls like this.

Not to be out done by the recent flurry of convention announcements, The Blizzard World Wide Invitational 2008 is throwing out an announcement or two of its own. Today, they are officially announcing a Machinma contest. There will be two categories, one for movies, and one for TV Commercials for WoW items. Online submission is open from June 9th to June 16th. You can check out the contest details (Including the prizes, of course) here.

If Machinima isn't your thing, but you're still creative in other arenas, the announcement also mentions that they will reveal more contests in the near future.

At the moment, the official terms suggest that the contest is open only to Europeans, but if that pans out, I'm certain American Machinimists will get a crack at things at Blizzcon 2008.

Vivendi earning statements announced today hint that Wrath of the Lich King is expected to be released the second half of 2008. This would also fit into dates that we've seen on sites like Amazon and Gamestop.

This is also significant in that it's the first time an official confirmation of a release time frame has come out. And being that this is the data sent to Vivendi investors, it comes with a good bit of clout.

Additionally, the statement tells us that World of Warcraft now has 10.7 million subscribers, up from 10 million at the end of 2007.

The exact paragraph in the statement is after the break. And of course, stay tuned to WoW Insider for all the latest Wrath of the Lich King news.

It's been almost a full year since I last saw this brought up, and we still haven't seen anything from Blizzard on it. Eric over on WoW LJ brings up the issue of tracking alts within a guild. As we found out last time, most people just use guild notes (or helpful addons) to keep track of whose alt is whose inside a guild, and it works OK -- assuming people are up front about when they're logging in on another toon.

But still, it seems like an official interface would work much better. And especially considering that Blizzard is actually going to start encouraging alts as a part of the gameplay (you have to have a character at least 55 on the account to start up a Death Knight, and there are rumors that alts will benefit from reputation grinds as well), it seems like they might be interested in making the connection between characters on the account a little more obvious.

And as we said last time, there are benefits to the guild as well -- you never know when that lowbie leveling through Westfall might actually have a Death Knight ready to tank for you. I'm still not sure about marking alts in the Armory, but if you join up to a guild, I'd think guilds should have the right to know, officially, who's an alt of whom.

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, the Big Bear Butt Blogger, brings you some choice tidbits of knowledge on level 70 consumables for the beary furry crowd.

We've talked about the gear you can get to build your tanking set up to Karazhan, but to actually tank in a raid, you need to bring along plenty of tasty consumables to buff you up to tip-top shape. And that's what we're going to cover today.

There are four basic types of consumables you can have active buffs from.

You can have active at one time;

• Flask or Elixir buffs (One Flask, or One Guardian and One Battle Elixir effect)
• Multiple scroll buffs (as long as the buffs do not overlap with player spell casting)
• One Weapon buff
• One food buff

Also, there are tons of potions and items that can be darn handy to use in the middle of a fight, especially when things are looking their bleakest, and with the changes to how Druids shift forms in Patch 2.3, there are some very simple macros that you can use to make your own 'oh no!' buttons. Use at your own risk!

What will help you in your fight is situational, but knowing what you have to choose from can make creating your own shopping list a lot easier.

Hopefully, this post will help you plan ahead!

Before I start this post, I should warn you that every single post we do about the size of something ingame must, by contractual obligations, contain a risqué double entendre somewhere within. Be warned.

Reader Veras was nice enough to point out to us that as of the 2.4.2 release, Tauren two-hand weapons have returned to normal size as planned. It seems to me that this got fixed fairly quicker than other size issues that Blizzard has had. We still have no idea how their code works (and what they're changing that causes all of these weird issues), but at least they're getting better at fixing things.

Of course, as any Tauren Fury Warrior will tell you, it's not the size of your two-hand weapon -- it's how you use it. Contract fulfilled.

The small handful of guilds worldwide that have killed M'uru thus far are going to have an achievement therein that nobody else can touch. As of yesterday's patch 2.4.2 (today on the European realms), Blizzard has made the following change to the encounter:

We've changed the Negative Energy spells cast by M'uru and Entropius to no longer cause spell interruption on the target. This should ease the frustration of the encounter for those casting classes who can not obtain 100% resistance to spell interruption through talents and effects such as Concentration Aura.

Having not done the fight myself, I can't really comment on how big of a nerf this is, but it's something, anyway. (Background: M'uru is the next-to-last boss of Sunwell Plateau, followed only by Kil'Jaeden, and Entropius is another aspect of M'uru that appears during the fight.) Guilds who have been wiping on M'uru, or who intend to try him in the future, do you welcome this change?

You might remember yesterday that we reported on the Wall Street Journal's report on the canceling of the Dell XPS line, which includes the World of Warcraft laptop. It seems that the Wall Street Journal got it wrong, according to Dell spokeswoman Anne B. Camden, speaking via Dell's official blog.

She took issue with almost every aspect of the Wall Street Journal's report, saying that both Alienware and the XPS line are hardly in trouble, and are known for excellence and have gained many awards and accolades, and that Dell was dedicated to both. In fact, she specifically praised the XPS M1730, which is the base for the World of Warcraft laptop.

In short, the WoW laptop will probably still be available for your buying pleasure, if you are inclined to drop between 2500 and 3000 dollars on a souped up gaming laptop and a couple of extra toys.

[Thanks to all the tipsters who sent this in!]

As usual with WoW patches, patch 2.4.2 includes a couple of wild bugs. My personal favorites(and by favorites I mean I absolutely hate them) are the bugs(changes?) to the Archimonde encounter.

Now, this may just be "Onyxia Deep Breaths moar" syndrome, but the official Dungeons and Raids forum has some pretty substantial(mostly anecdotal) evidence to the contrary. What are these bugs? Well, it seems Archimonde's Doom Fires are spawning on top of the melee and immediately chasing them, rather than travelling out towards the ranged first. Seeing as this fight is generally carried entirely by the melee DPS, that changes the fight quite a bit. The second change/bug is that... your main tank can now be Air Bursted! Hooray! That isn't annoying at all! Sarcasm is sweet!

Archimonde certainly isn't the most difficult encounter in WoW and it is still able to be beaten even now, but I personally hated this encounter with all of my heart and soul to begin with. This doesn't help much. Admittedly, I haven't seen these bugs/changes in action personally yet, but I do not ever want to see them, either. Have I mentioned I hate Archimonde?

Since you guys couldn't get enough of Gnomechewer, I'm featuring a suggestion by one of our commenters. If you can remember the 90s, a satire film, Last Action Hero, came out, and it starred California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. What was supposed to be a summer blockbuster has ended up the butt of jokes for 15 years. However, the dialogue and action worked much better in Last Action Crusader. Keep in mind that this machinima is seven months old.

You're going to have to try to follow along with me on this plot. Arnold Menethil is freed by Scarlet Commander Mograine, and escapes Stormwind to join the Scarlet Crusade. The whole time, he plans to avenge his father's death and reclaim Lordaeron to sit as King. The storyline for this machinima is totally over the top, but then so is the original film that it's parodying. What you can expect is cheesy dialogue, fight scenes, and special effects.

[Thanks, Kassius!]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...