Restarts and maintenance for Tuesday, May 20th

It's a relatively painless Tuesday Morning this time around for those who play in what are the early morning hours at Blizzard HQ. This time, most US servers will just recieve a quick rolling restart at 5 AM PDT, about half an hour from now, which should result in no more than 15 minutes of downtime. However, there are some servers that will get 2 hours of downtime: Agamaggan, Azshara, Baelgun, Dark Iron, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Greymane, Kalecgos, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Sargeras, Staghelm, Twisting Nether, Ursin, and Wildhammer.

Also, here's something that should please a lot of Australian players: Their realms won't get the rolling restarts until 5AM AEST -- which translates to noon PDT. That should translate to lots of time for night owls to finish their raids before the restarts kick them off.

So in that 15 minutes to 2 hours of down time you'll have to go through, or if you're stuck at school or work, here's a few WoW Insider articles from the last week that are worth checking out. First, last week's major news and views:

• The WoTLK Friends and Family Alpha is underway, and we have the leaked patch notes.

• A Vivendi earnings statement gave us the first real official word on WoTLK's expected release date.

• The Hunter Growl and Scare Beast changes from patch 2.4.2 didn't turn out so great after all.

• Raiders rejoice: M'uru got a little easier, and those nasty Archimonde and Eredar Twin bugs got a hotfix.

• Death and Taxes, the premiere US WoW raiding guild, disbanded. That set a few of us to pontificating on the problems of raid guild drama here and here.

• We covered a few more tidbits of WoTLK info, such as Death Knight "reruning."

• Check out sister site BigDownload's interview with Blizzard on that whole eSport thing.

• In Hybrid Theory, Alex soothes your fears about Death Knights taking your jobs.

If these aren't enough for you, there's more after the break.

This was also a great week for Lore and RP discussions on WoW Insider:

• Ever wondered something about Lore? Check out what other people wondered on Ask a Lore Nerd, and see how Alex answered them in Answers from a Lore Nerd, and start planning your questions for the next round.

• Discuss the ins and outs of Rogue roleplaying with Encrypted Text.

• Matthew Rossi discusses roleplaying on non-RP servers.

If neither of those categories strike your fancy, here's a few odds and ends:

• See how It Came From The Blog celebrated Mother's Day. Did you hug your Orc-Mom?

• Speaking of Mother's Day, check out our Mother's Day Radio show, featuring real moms!

• See what loot Kil'jaedan has in store for us.

• Find out about the most epic WoW loot ever -- but mind you, the repair costs are going to be huge.

• Share your old school memories with us, or tell us about your biggest sale at the AH.

There's tons more great content here on WoW Insider, so don't be afraid to just jump in and start browsing, too. We'll see you after the restarts!