It’s Wednesday, which mean it’s time for some Warcraft! This knitted baby Onyxia is awesome, and available over on Etsy. Also check out the Voidwalker and omgz the “Gruuloc” Gladiator.

• I haven’t been playing much lately — I got a PS3 last week and most of my gaming time has gone to that. But I have been running the occasional instance on my pally, and my guild is apparently moving through Ulduar quickly. I didn’t get to raid with them on New Year’s Day, but hopefully I’ll get in with them this week.
• Hide and Seek in Stormwind has been done before, but never quite like this: someone dressed up in full Stormwind guard gear and hid in plain sight. I love that lowbies actually ran up and tried to click on him.
• Oculus, as you’ve heard, has new rewards in it. I think it’s great — I’ve never liked the instance, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those drakes. But I do think it’s an interesting precedent for Blizzard to set: if people don’t like your content, just make it more rewarding. That can be a tough line to walk. If Arena is less popular, should they beef up the rewards you get from it? Obviously Oculus is an outlier — we’re at the end of an expansion, epics are already being given away like candy, and this is an instance that has fundamental issues; they can’t simply fix it without completely redoing it. In essence, Blizzard is saying, “we surrender, have some more stuff.” When Cataclysm comes around, I don’t expect to see them solving things in the same way. Then again, Exanna says it’s still not enough.
• I’m not saying this guy made the wrong choice, but if the Orc was an actual replica of the statue outside the Blizzard offices, I might have given it a lot of thought. I guess if it’s the girl or the Orc, you go with the girl, but look at it! That thing is awesome! Can’t we keep it in a closet or something, baby?
• Note that players can now send whispers to other players on different realms while in the same party. Big change, small notice about it.
• Did you know that Furbolgs are actually based on the Irish legend of Fir Bolgs? You did? Well I had no idea. Obviously Blizzard constantly borrows from mythology (Loken = Loki, Thorim = Thor, and so on), but it’s surprising that even some of the things you think are original about Azeroth turn out to not be so original after all.
• Finally, this is old, but I just heard about it this week. Bummed that your gearscore addon isn’t finding you quality people to partner with ingame? Try the new standard, Namescore, which is an addon that uses what I can only imagine is a high-quality algorithm to determine what the person you’re looking at is like in terms of playstyle, talent, and attitude, and then give you a number to rate them with. I don’t know about you all, but I’m not grouping with anyone below a namescore of 100 ever again! Sorry, Ðæthkíllá, no group for you!

Have a tip for Warcraft Wednesday? Email it along, I’d love to check it out.