The Blog Azeroth shared topic for August 6 to August 12 was suggested by Frinka from Warcraft Street:

Are you playing the MoP Beta? Why or why not? How much time are you spending there vs. the "live" servers?

2 years ago I made a few posts about the incoming expansion and did play a lot in beta, not the 80-85 content but was investigating the scenery changes and was avidly exploring the old world and trying to find bugs by exploiting landscape and doing the weird things people do.

This time things have been very different as apart from a few hours levelling a panda in the starting zone and a morning in the Jade Forest I have done nothing. The simple reason for this is that all the content to test and explore is the content I will experience when the expansion goes live.

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Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We will soon begin public testing of patch 5.0.1 of World of Warcraft, a patch that will precede the Mists of Pandaria release, and includes many features and functions that are new to the game.

We encourage all players who wish to test patch 5.0.1 with us to take careful note of the following:

• It will not be possible to access the 5.0.1 PTR realms with a game account that accesses the Mists of Pandaria Beta.
• If a game account has been flagged with a Mists of Pandaria Beta license, it can only be used to enter Beta realms.
• This limitation is on each World of Warcraft license, and is not Battle.net account-based.
• While testing 5.0.1, players will not be able to access zones or content that is a part of the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

Thank you for your continued support of our testing and tuning process. We look forward to seeing you in-game.

This is good news. Unless you subbed up for the 12 month trial and got your guaranteed beta invite and does make me wonder how many of us who want to test the PTR have 2nd accounts to enable this. Hopefully enough s the PTR isn't too under subscribed that it last for more than the typical will last for 4-6 weeks.

This means that we can guess potential dates for the Pandacraft pre-patch of August 14/21/28 and using the usual 2 weeks between the pre-patch and expansion launch means we will all be "rolling" on our Pandas on Aug 28/Sept 4/Sept 11.

However, with Guild Wars 2 out on August 28th I don't think Blizzard will be cruel enough to go on that date and I'm not sure they will be prepared to launch on Sept 11 either because of the place that date has in the hearts of America. So my money is on September 4th, although that will upset me greatly as I doubt I will be able to get the time off work because I am on Olympic cover until September 9th  So I'm actually hoping for Sept 18th or later.

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Just go my first really detailed look at the list of changes for the next patch and what a lot of changes there are. One thing is for sure, we're going to have to relearn how to manage our mana all over again just as we did when 4.0.3 and Cataclysm came.

The list of changes doesn't just affect us priests though, all of our friends are getting the same treatment too. Did Blizz get it wrong? Did those beta testers actually do any testing? Well I think the answers there are no and yes but still the changes coming in are really needed but were probably not going to get pickedup on a small scale test as Blizz perform in-house (small is relative here their testing team is nothing compared to 12 million players) and the beta testers were testing so many things that were ever changing that somethings were miss diagnosed or just not discovered.
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With 2010 drawing to an end I thought I'd take a look back at the year's highs and lows. From changing guilds, to killing the Lich King suffering ISP issues and more guild drama 2010 has bee a strange year. I have had great times and bad times, happy days and sad days but I've never regretted anything I have done and have become better as a person out of game as well as in game because of it.
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With Cataclysm almost upon us and one of the main features is a new secondary profession. This is the first secondary profession added to the game since launch and rather than being on that will make money is one that will enhance your character with a few of the finds but more importantly provide some interesting back story.

So what is archaeology?

a

Archaeology is a secondary profession which means everybody can learn it, which is cool. The general idea is that you collect fragments of historical items and store them in a journal. Once you have all the fragments for an item you'll be able to study it and you'll get a reward which can be anything from BoA armor/weapons (sadly not ones that level with you) vanity pets, gadgets and even mounts. Some of the rewards are very good epic items (eg X), also when gathering these fragments you will gain XP until you're at level cap just like the other gathering professions.

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To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
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To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
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On December 7th, we will begin the charge to kill Deathwing, but before we even think about the ultimate goal of this expansion we need to consider what smaller steps we need to take.

Firstly you should review the 10 steps I mentioned in my post Preparing For Deathwing last week as at least 9 are still relevant. Now you've done them, lets look at the task and set out the rest of our gameplan.

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Ever get the feeling you have a celebrity stalker? Well following my last post, Preparing For Deathwing,  on October 28th a ratehr well known blog has made a post about the exact same thing entitled, Cataclysm preparation #1. Now I'm not saying that he is following my blog or copying my content but a more suspicious man may arrive at that conclusion should he be into conspiracy theories.
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To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
Read more »

To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
Read more »

To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
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Another day, another round of sifting through the emails.

Is it me or does everyone get 10 spam emails for every 1 genuine one? Of course the fact that I stupidly put my main email address onto the web back in 2001 didn't help my cause. Anyways, with all those lucky people getting beta invites I live in hope of one day finding out that I too have been awarded an invite.

Recently my hopes have been dashed more frequently by hoax e-mails from Bilzzard.com and any other variant of the words Blizzard, cataclysm, beta and battle.net you wish to imagine all claiming that I had been "chosed" for the beta.
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