The first wave of comics partecipating at the World of Warcraft Comic Contest has been published . It is still possible to partecipate and submit your comic through this form . According to the rules , the first prize is an iPod Nano.

From an article at CNet.com ""Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center," said Evgeny Krevets, a sometimes-frustrated WoW player. "I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job.""

On April 12th some technical problems made a few Warcraft servers unavailable. Players with a character in those servers will receive 1 free day of gametime as a compensation. Here is the list of the affected servers:

Our reporter Falckeneint of Crushridge sent us this morning the latest patch notes for World of Warcraft.

For the Horde! 

There is a new contest online for World of Warcraft, different for european and american players. EU players can send a picture of their Warcraft themed painted eggs to win a Asus EN7600 GT 256 Mb, while US ones can submit Warcraft themed CD covers to win five SanDisk Sansa™ c100 Series MP3 Player and some free music downloads.

"The Burning Crusade will introduce a whole new world and many new dungeons to the game", Blizzard says. And this new world has to be populated with monsters, new monsters. This is way they published this new bestiary with descriptions and concept art for the Ethereals, Fleshbeasts, Forest Trolls and Gronn.

The first information we had about the next World of Warcraft patch was about the incoming keyrings to hold permanently dungeon keys. Now Blizzard announced a talent revamp for the Mage class and a new high level dungeon.

More character transfer options available for World of Warcraft players, both for american and european servers.
In other news, WOW limited edition bronze figures are for sale .

From the official forums we understand that "We're pleased to announce that the keyring functionality has been completed and will be in place for patch 1.11. When a player first acquires a key, they will automatically acquire a keyring that will hold permanent dungeon keys. The size of this keyring will increase as the player goes up in level -- as seen below.

Level 1-40 = 4 slots
Level 41-50 = 8 slots
Level 51-60 = 12 slots"

A few news from the official World of Warcraft website. First of all they published some new screenshots from The Burning Crusade. The High Level Armor Sets page has been updated and the Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton shares his toughts about talents, how to balance them and at the same time make them interesting.