This Sunday. 1pm Pacific (which I think is 9pm GMT). Somewhere on Ustream. Turpster and I are returning to the virtual airwaves together. We’ll be doing a weekly podcast, and while I can tell you it won’t be a podcast only about World of Warcraft, it will be something cool. We haven’t even figured out a name yet The podcast’s name is the Incredible Podcast of Amazing Awesomeness (yes, it is — we figured we’d go a little lower key on the name than we expect the actual podcast to be), and it’ll be us, it’ll be fun, and you will enjoy it. I’m looking forward to it, even though I’m kind of scared to jump in and do something off on our own, without a big site behind us. But we have one requirement: as long as it’s a good time, we’ll do it. We’ll definitely need some emails to read during the first show, so if you have emails for us, please send them along to incrediblepodcast@gmail.com — that’s what we’ll use until we set up a proper email inbox.

This Sunday, 1pm. Be there, and by there, I mean here — I’ll have a link to our Ustream page by then.

Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve found interesting in the World of Warcraft this past week (actually two, since I was at Macworld and busy last week):

• Sex advice from World of Warcraft players. This is silly, but what it showed me more than anything is that “Warcraft players” is a huge group of people. Giving them advice about anything, from spec builds to sex positions, is a tough thing to do, just because there are so many different kinds of people in the group that they’re tough to box up.
• Blizzard announced today that they’ve given $1.1 million to the Make-a-Wish foundation thanks to the sales of the Pandaren in-game pets, and my friend at the OC (don’t call it that) Register was on the scene. Apparently Samwise was drawing characters for one of the MaW kids (awesome!) and they had a big check and everything. Plus, though I could have only told you about Ezra, Blizzard has actually hosted eight different Make-a-Wish kids. Good for them. The cynical side of me wonders what they could have done if they had donated all of the earnings from the Pandaren to charity (instead of just the half), but that’s just the cynical side. Also, boggle at the fact that over 220,000 players bought the Pandaren, one of only two pets to show up on the store that day. Just think what they’ll do with these. Blizzard has yet another money printing press, and it doesn’t even require them to develop a game.
• Pike is the latest WoW blogger to let the account lapse. I still have my account (though I’ve been too busy to play over the past week or so), and I’m not going anywhere, but we are definitely moving into the hibernation period of the game, with all of the Wrath content out and competitors like Star Trek Online (and even Starcraft II, which opened up a private beta today) knocking at the door. I’m too good at hedging my bets to call it quits, but I will say that Cataclysm represents a big challenge for WoW. Their goal will be to get WoW players who’ve quit once or twice already interested in the game yet again, and the fact that most of their new content will be revamped versions of old content will be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, maybe people who actually miss the Barrens will find new things to do there again. But on the other hand, who actually misses the Barrens?
• Turns out Blizzard is splitting up with Upper Deck. Lots of people are saying that this has something to do with the Yu-Gi-Oh thing, but really, I’m sure it has more to do with sales and interest — even at GenCon last year, interest in the WoW TCG was way down, and they were even canceling events at the end of 2009. I don’t think Blizzard will start it all up again with a new vendor, though — I think, from the rumors I’ve heard for a while, that they’ll start it up in a completely new way. Probably not one involving a separate company, or those pesky actual paper cards…
• Larisa wrote a post about Blizzard’s guild program, and her guesses are true: the whole thing is super shady. There’s way more interaction between developers and the top guilds in the game than most people realize. The developers have multiple tools to watch and see what’s going on in the game’s dungeons, and so when they see anything strange or interesting, odds are that they’re either there in an invisible (or even visible) form, or looking through the many logs that Blizzard keeps about what’s happening on the servers. I’ve heard stories from the developers about how on the night after a patch release, all they do is follow guilds through the content, taking notes on what they’re doing and what should be fixed. On a 25-man raid the night after a given release, it’s very likely that you’ve got 5-10 folks on Blizzard campus right there in the raid following along with you. The other reason it’s shady is that communication goes both ways — I won’t say these high level guilds are cheating on the live servers (at least not any more — there was a time when Blizzard would provide server transfers and character re-customization to free to some high level guilds, even before the public could do that for pay), but on the test servers, anything goes. And Blizzard is running any number of test or mirror or special event servers at any given time, not just the ones we see when we log into the test realms.
• These are great.
• You’ve all seen this, right? The lyrics are iffy, but I love the camera work and the voices. Very well done.

And that’s all I got for now — there are about 500 more posts sitting in my RSS reader about Warcraft, but I don’t have time to sift through two weeks of stuff at the moment. Stay tuned on Sunday though — we will discuss WoW and lots of other things. If you have something you want to us to answer, discuss, or make fun of, please do email me about it!