Of all the Blizzard employees who post on the official forums, Blizzard dungeon designer, Tigole, always seems to provide the most useful information, even if he's not always allowed to be specific.  In the last two days, he's posted two interesting nuggets of information that, even if they're non-specific, at least point in the direction of the thinking of Blizzard developers.

The first one is a small post to let people know that the developers are concerned about the rogue's role in raid level content.

Second, Tigole mentioned that the loot tables of Molten Core mobs and bosses are being reevaluated, but I thought the most interesting line of his post came at the end:

Fortunately, the patching schedule seems back on track to what it should be so this shouldn't be too terribly long.

Does this mean the next patch is coming soon?  Does this mean we'll be seeing smaller patches more often than what we have been seeing?  We'll have to wait and see.

A lot of new information on the upcoming patch has been released today.  First and foremost, UI improvements will include four new action bars that will give players a total of 48 action slots to work with, so no more having to download custom UI programs to get all the hotkeys you need.  More UI improvements include chat bubbles and a quest tracker.

Among class changes, mages will get a new spell called Mage Armor that allows mana regeneration to function while casting and increases resistance to all schools of magic.  I guess Blizzard really wants mages to like +spirit items.  Some other not very detailed class improvements that are mentioned include that the druid cat form will get more dps, that warriors will be able to generate rage on dodge, parried, and blocked hits, and that priests will be able to cast PW: Shield on all raid members (thank God).

Kalimdor will get its first high-level regular instance dungeon, when Dire Maul, a level 56-60 dungeon in Ferales, opens.

Finally comes the news that most of us have expected but that will nonetheless disappoint many:  battlegrounds and the PvP honor system will not be included in the upcoming patch. Instead, after the folks at Blizzard are happy with their internal test results, they're going to open a seperate external test realm so that the battleground system can be adequately tested before final release.

Post your comments to the thread Treesh started in the Crossroads.

There's lots of good information out there that doesn't get posted directly to the Lurker Lounge forums.  Lucky for us, we have no problem pointing out good information on other websites.  Silkfire at worldofwar.net found a way to get to a secret lake between Darkshore and Moonglade that houses an entire community of friendly Shatterspear trolls. Take a look!

And if you find other posts or websites with good newsworthy information, whether the information is composed of heavy calculations or fun tales of explorations like this one, click on the Submit News button to the left and send me a link!

An emergency patch was released today with the patch notes stating:

"We have deployed a client-side change that should improve performance when large numbers of players are gathered in a small area of the world.  No other changes are included with this emergency patch."

For some reason, many Lurkers seem to doubt the last sentence of the patch notes.  I don't know what could cause such skepticism.

Players logging in today were greeted with this server alert:

"Please be advised that players caught using third-party programs (hacks) designed to modify the intended movement speed of characters, or that allow for the instant teleportation to other locations on the map will most certainly be subject to permanent removal from World of Warcraft.  We regret having to employ these extreme measures; however, certain unscrupulous players have impaired the game play of the World of Warcraft community as a whole, and severe action continues to be warrented and required."

After the recent rapid rise in the practice of player gambling using the /random command and the accompanying spam in the chat channels that came with it, Blizzard finally put its foot down and declared that "casinos are no longer allowed in World of Warcraft."

Discuss this topic in this Lurker thread.

Bolty has started a spirited debate over the character attribute, spirit.  While most of the player population considers spirit to be "useless," Bolty points out that there is a small movement back toward gathering items with spirit on them, especially among players who frequent raid instances, where fights can be extremely long. Other posters are bandying ideas around about how to make spirit more useful, and MongoJerry posted a brief history of how and why intelligence, spirit, and drinking were changed as the beta was coming to a close.  Take a look!