There is some confusion as to whether/how the Dungeon Finder matches characters according to internal gear score. To the best of my knowledge, it actually attempt to create a discrepancy between characters’ gear, so that you’re likely to wind up with a few heavily geared members ‘carrying’ lesser-geared members. This is directly contrary to a claim I’ve seen circulating that the system attempts to match internal gear scores. If the system doesn’t attempt to create disparate groups, it should, and if it does, I’m glad it does. It may be disheartening to see someone in your group in full blues or maybe even a couple greens, instead of the now-familiar suit o’ purples, but as some commenters pointed out in my post on Dungeon Finder bingo, we all started out in blues and greens at 80 (with the possible exception of some crafted gear and BoEs), and heroics were designed to be run with that gear. Where are the epics supposed to come from, for a pre-raid character? Furthermore, a less-geared character might actually need some of the gear that drops in the ilvl 200 heroics (i.e. everything except CC, FoS, PoS, and HoR), which is a nice change of pace from the usual shardfest. It may take

Every day until Saturday we will have new prizes to give away along with new loot codes for WoW.com’s Twelve Days of Winter Veil contests. Today, we are giving away 1 Disco Inferno code courtesy of WoWTCGLoot.com. As you can see in the movie above, this in-game item summons a disco ball that comes with a lightshow and disco music. Any player that clicks on it will /dance. The perfect celebration item for your next guild meeting or surviving a PUG with your sanity intact. To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment in this post by Friday, January 1, 2010, 12pm ET (noon). Limit one entry per person and make sure you’re registered with a valid email address. We’ll be choosing one winner randomly from the entrants and contact them via email after the close of the contest. Don’t forget to check back every day through Saturday for new contests celebrating the Twelve Days of Winter Veil!EDIT: Contest closed. Thanks everyone!

That’s right, we’re a week into patch 3.3 (well, almost) and we’re still running random PuG’s on our alts. Well, I am, anyway, and if the emails we at WoW.com are seeing are accurate so are a lot of you. And as is often the case when dungeons are being run, we’re seeing loot issues. Oddly enough, I for once don’t really have much to complain about loot wise. My tauren got a swanky trinket, an upgrade to his main hand weapon, and plenty of emblems for his DPS set as well as some nice tanking gear. Since I don’t get as much time to play Horde side as I used to, the new Dungeon Finder has been a positive boon for me as a DPS warrior while at the same time giving me something to do to use up some time on Alliance side as well before raids. But I’ve seen and heard plenty of the opposite result: people queuing up over and over and over again hoping for a drop and seeing the Orca-Hunter’s Harpoon get sharded for the sixteenth run in a row. (I admit to taking one for my arms set and then sharding it after the axe dropped, but in my defense no one wanted it). So we move the question to you: have you snagged that elusive drop yet? Has the Battered Hilt dropped for you? (Blasted

Roxzee of <Teen Moo Squad> on Dragonmaw wrote, “I recently discontinued my World of Warcraft account. Before I left the game I decided it would be fun to grant my level 71 Druid epic flight form. After training the spell, I had to get a bird’s eye view of my favorite zone in the expansion (and probably in the game) – the Grizzly Hills. After flying around, I found a nice perch and took a few screen shots of Roxzee watching over the forest that I fell in love with not so long ago.” Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles

Few were surprised yesterday when there was extended maintenance due to patch 3.3 being implemented on the live servers. Though I was briefly able to log on and grab a Corehound Pup Pet, otherwise I was at the mercy of the downtime along with everyone else. Here’s what I did: Caught up in Cafe World — unfortunately, my food had spoiled. Watched the Fall of the Lich King trailer — more than once. Colored with The Spawn — some of those new Crayola 64 color names are weird. Read up on the new Dungeon Finder Guide — good stuff. And, of course, I tried to log on over and over and over and over. What did you do during the 3.3 extended downtime?

As dark and depressing as it may seem when you’re slogging through the swamps, Zangarmarsh can be considered one of the most visually detailed zones in the game. “I was flying into Zangarmarsh from Terokkar and noticed just how beautiful this game can be at times,” writes Scomparsa of Earthen Ring. “The sunlight streaming around those massive, otherworldly mushrooms just took my breath away. I play this game for these kinds of moments, and after almost 4 years of playing, they still happen on a regular basis.” Sure, it’s pretty, but if we’re looking for stunning visuals, I’m going to have to go with Tim Tebow crying on the sidelines. Hey-o! Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly

Malygos was up at five in the morning today to pick up his bargain Christmas present for Alexstrasza; a delicious slice of turkey seared in a turtle shell with natural flavoring. Shopping on Black Friday is a lot easier when you can fly over the crowds and breathe fire at any queue-cutters. (Thanks to Angeliqa of <Shattered Ravens> on Steamwheedle Cartel-EU for this picture.) Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

The 5th anniversary press continues — this time it’s a site called Techland, where our friend Tracey John (who also writes for Massively) interviews Jeff Kaplan about his reflections on the last five years of the game. It’s surprising to hear that early on, Blizzard wasn’t so sure of their success. Despite the fact that even before WoW, they had made some of the most classic PC games of all time, they weren’t sure that going the subscription route was a good idea. But one of the companies’ founders stood up and gave a pep talk, and promised a whole million subscribers, apparently. Of course, they’d go on to make many times that, but that was good enough to get the team going again. Kaplan also says that he is a little bummed that Blizzard didn’t scale back raiding earlier — 40-man raids were a little unwieldy, he admits now, and smaller raids would have meant more content in the vanilla days. But he does say that since the game has been updated so much, most of the stuff they wish they’d done different has actually been done differently. And in the future, he says that better technology will play a big role — bigger instance capacity, and things like