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About the Bloggers: Amanda Dean
Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. Click here to read more About the Bloggers. Hi there. It's nice to finally make an introduction. The name's Amanda, but you can call me mandy. With a whole generation of Amandas out there it helps to differentiate us. What do you do for WoW Insider? I'm technically just your average, run-of-the-mill blogger. Since coming on staff in February, I've picked up the WoW Rookie column and Blood Sport. David Bowers and I write He Said She Said together, but we're taking a little break due to educational commitments. I have the most fun writing Well Fed Buff. I really enjoy writing about intersections between the real and virtual worlds, and I love any topic that gets people talking.
WoW Insider Show Episode 37: Happy Mother's Day
This last week on the WoW Insider Show, which is now available for listening on WoW Radio, we celebrated Mother's Day by inviting on both Amanda Dean, and her mother Linda Emrys, who is herself a WoW player. We also had Robin Torres on, who not only writes for us here at WoW Insider, but also is the mother of a two-and-a-half year old. Turpster and I were both on, but we didn't do much more than ask questions this time around -- the ladies got in some good discussion about what it's like to play WoW as a mother, how this game might actually help you raise children, and what it's like coming to WoW as someone who doesn't have a lot of gaming experience. If you're a casual gamer (or just know someone who is), the show should be really interesting to you.And even if not, we were able to squeeze some great Wrath of the Lich King discussion in there after all of Friday's revelations, including what's up with the Death Knights, how 10/25 man raiding will change, and all of the other zone information we heard on Friday, from Dragonblight to Grizzly Hills to how what we see in the Borean Tundra gives us clues about what the next expansion might be.I thought it was a pretty good show, but if you have other opinions (or any opinions, really), feel free to share them by emailing us at theshow@wow.com. And don't forget that while you can listen to the show either in WoW Radio's archives or on iTunes, you can also hear us live every Saturday afternoon at 3:30pm EST/8:30pm GMT.Hope your Mother's Day was excellent, and enjoy the podcast!
WoW Insider Show: Mother's Day edition live tomorrow
For tomorrow's WoW Insider Show (which you can hear live at 3:30pm EST on WoW Radio), we're doing something a little special for Mother's Day: we've got mothers! Amanda Dean is actually bringing her mother on the show, and Ms. Emrys, (aka SpaceLady) is a WoW player herself, so we'll chat with her about what it's like to come to games via World of Warcraft. Robin Torres will also be joining us, and she's got little ones of her own, so she'll tell us what it's like to be a WoW player while also running your own little "guild" in real life. And Turpster will return after his absence last week -- all we can say about him is that he's a bad mother... shut yo' mouth.Plus, we definitely can't ignore all the Wrath of the Lich King info that dropped last night, so we'll definitely be talking about vehicles, Death Knights, the 10/25 man instances, and all of the other huge information that Blizzard dropped on us like a ton of level 80 bricks. And as usual (as if all that wasn't enough), we'll have reader mail, which you can send to us at theshow@wow.com, and we'll be chatting in IRC as well at irc.mmoirc.com in the #wowradio channel.Whew! It's a mother of a show. Make sure to tune in tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, at 3:30pm EST over on WoW Radio. See you there.
WoW Insider Arena team thoughts and tinkers
Let's get one thing out of the way: this isn't an epeen-stroking session. When you go into the Tournament Realm joining a 1382 team that went 3-11 on its debut week, you have to set your expectations right. Aside from Amanda Dean, or Mandy, who's professed an enjoyment for Arenas, the WoW Insider team is composed of people who don't have extensive Arena experience. We also have Adam Holisky, who doesn't consider PvP to be the 'real' game (whatever that means), and Amanda Miller, who covers our Sunday Morning Funnies. I do a fair amount of Arena on live myself and our team is rated enough to garner us Season 3 swag every two weeks or so. You do the math. But here's the thing -- Arena is a team game. Like every team sport, it relies on synergy, teamwork, and communication. The top players in the world know this, and team leaders replace underperforming members regularly with a dose of nerd rage for good measure. That's just competitive Arena play.On the other hand, WoW Insider's venture into the Tournament Realm is more of a journalistic exercise than anything else. For one thing, I'm not even eligible to actually participate in the actual tournament because my country isn't on the list, so my expectations of going far in this tournament is nil. To be perfectly honest, that's a good thing. Ironically, I feel a lot less pressure to perform on the TR with the WoW Insider Team than I do on live. In fact, I even ventured to play as a Retribution Paladin only because I can. I had initially created a Restoration Shaman named Insiderzach but since Mandy was running with a Restoration Druid, I thought I could have a little fun with running double melee with Adam so I made a Paladin. After all, it is my favorite class.
Arena Tournament: Tales from day one
Last night, the WoW Insider arena team stepped into battle for the first time on the arena tournament realms, and it was immediately apparent that things were going to be quite different from our experiences on the tournament test realms. For starters, there were way fewer people. I also noticed that, contrary to my expectations that everyone shelling out an extra $20 to play here would be a hardcore arena-goer, there were many people on just to have fun. General chat was full of people who didn't know where to go, how to allocate their talent points, and even people who hadn't formed teams yet!Still, despite the fact the vendor areas had a drastically reduced population, the queues were amazingly short, as Adam points out. Often, I was reading that my team had joined the queue at the same time I was clicking to enter the battle.
[1.Local]: The best of WoW Insider comments this week
WoW Insider readers are a talkative bunch. All of us here at WI monitor our own posts for comments, but there's not always time to keep up with what's happening on all the other posts. And if those of us who hang around here all the time can't keep up, we wondered how much our readers were missing, too?Enter [1.Local], our new roundup bringing you a smattering of the zingers that may have gotten buried in the peanut gallery. We'll serve up both the sublime and the ridiculous, the thought-provoking and the just plain silly -- definitely a cut above Barrens chat (although we do admit that "Barrens Chat" was a strong contender for the feature's title).This week's reader comments ranged from thoughtful ruminations on gender and modern culture's definition of "beauty" to an ongoing tussle over what constitutes success for an MMO. Be sure to dive into the comments area and add your own thoughts – unlike your mama, we like us some hot, fresh backtalk.Warning: Some offensive language mentioned after the jump.
WoW Insider Show, Episode 30: Not completely about patch 2.4
Man, with all the patch 2.4 news flying around today, you might feel a little overwhelmed. Well, worry no more, because just when you need something a little silly and lighthearted, the WoW Insider Show comes right along, with Episode 30 now available on WoW Radio and iTunes. This past Saturday, Turpster and I, along with Amanda Dean and Elizabeth Wachowski of WoW Insider, had a sit down to talk about all of the biggest news in the past week of Warcraft, including, but not limited to: Our favorite trinkets (mine I picked only because the tooltip uses the word "fecundity") What "counts" in terms of leveling as fast as possible Elizabeth talked to us for a bit about the lore of the Burning Crusade, and both the high and low points of it We chatted about the best starting areas in the game (there was a strange split over the Dwarf/Gnome area for some reason as well) And finally we hit on Amanda's Azerothian General Election, which you can still vote on right now -- Thrall is still winning, so Alliance, you better grab your sword and fight the Horde. We did check in reader email, too, and Turpster says he's headed to 70, so we asked for your input on what kind of reward (or punishment) we can give him if he makes it before Wrath -- if you have a suggestion, email us at theshow@wow.com.And speaking of Turpster, you've got to see his new TurpsterVision over at Massively today -- it's a spectacular tale of a galaxy long ago and far away, if you know what I mean.
WoW Insider Show live on the air tomorrow
If you listened to the show last week, you may have heard that this week's podcast was supposed to be all about multiboxing, with a special guest, but unfortunately we've had to postpone that show (so look for it at some point in the future). But worry not, because this week on the podcast we're bringing back fan favorite Elizabeth Wachowski (and we're going to ask her to talk about some of the lore in the Burning Crusade), and other fan favorite Amanda Dean, who is always insightful. Fan super favorite Turpster will be on as well, and fan not-so-favorite Mike Schramm, also known as me, will be present and accounted for, too.In addition to the lore stuff, we'll chat about racing through the game, getting your loot stolen, and why it's a good thing that the Alliance sees "kek" instead of "lol" from the Horde. Plus, we will answer your reader questions, which you can send to us at theshow@wow.com, or ask us personally on the IRC channel during the show: that's at mmo.irc.com in the #wowradio channel.Should be fun -- the show starts right at 3:30pm EST, so be there and bring your ears, too.
WoW Insider Show Episode 28: Lifetap, Lifebloom and online antics
The 28th episode of the WoW Insider Show included myself, blogger Amanda Dean, Druid columnist John Patricelli and Turpster in an hour of lively discussion on this week's hot topics. Stories covered included: The debate raged on over when, or even if, is it acceptable to go afk without notice? The latest rollbacks on the PTR for Warlocks and Shaman and why players shouldn't be ready to quit over temporary tests on that server Blizzard so cleverly dubbed the Test server. The effects of the Lifebloom nerf and how Blizzard may have not seen the results they were looking for. Amanda Dean talks about introducing her Mom (hi Amanda's Mom!) to WoW and how she is handling her first few levels in Azeroth Each participant on the show gave their personal opinion on what playable race they would choose if a new one were introduced to the game. If you missed the show, there are plenty of ways for you to listen today including the Flash player on the WoW Radio site, free iTunes download or mp3 file. And you can listen in live every Saturday at 3:30p ET on WoW Radio.[Listen] to this week's show.[iTunes] Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.[RSS] Get your favorite reader in on the fun.
WoW Insider Show Episode 26: Badges, Blizzard and buffs
This past Saturday the WoW Insider Show welcomed Amanda Dean and Adam Holisky on, as well as myself and Turpster, for the 26th episode of our podcast on WoW Radio. Despite some lackluster, if I may say so, email from readers (you can send us some better emails at theshow@wow.com), we charged through and got a lot of good discussion done: We chatted about Amanda's hacked characters, and what a little name-dropping will get you from Blizzard (not much) We confronted whether all this new badge loot makes raiding worthless (surprise -- we decided it does not) We talked about all the new class changes on the PTR, with a special look at Shamans, and the Warlock change to Lifetap. We ran over what Rob Pardo said during the GDC Liveblog And finally, we wondered just what kind of player it takes to PuG with Adam All in all, good show, and you can listen to it right now over on WoW Radio's website. You can also subscribe to our podcast in iTunes if you so choose, and we'll be back at it again next weekend -- every Saturday at 3:30pm EST. Enjoy the show!
