Reader Sekhar P. sent us an interesting story of a strange roll seen in Naxx recently: Haunting Call dropped, and four people needed. The rolls came up, in order: 1, 2, 3, 4. The raid boggled at how unlikely that must be. Sekhar’s tip set off a round of discussion among our WoW Insider staff: while it seems unlikely that four numbers would wow goldcome up in sequence, the math on it isn’t any more likely than any other four numbers (3, 69, 82, and 95, for example, or even 4, 8, 15, and 16). The odds come out to 24/100^4, about 0.00000024%, or about two chances out of 10 million. Of course, probability is tricky, so the chances that any one of those rolls would come up is still one out of 100 — just like coin flips, previous die rolls won’t affect the current die rolls (mistaking that is often called the gambler’s fallacy) But the chances that any specific four numbers would come up are the astronomical chances above. Of course, math aside, that still doesn’t keep us from trying to predict how random rolls might work. We also recieved word from

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers’ Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. As an officer or a guild leader, doing favors for your friends is one thing. The situation described below goes way beyond that. This one just blows my mind. Let’s jump right into it. Hey Scott, I’m by no means an officer or leader of a guild but I am a very active raider. We use the EP/GP loot system in our guild; it calculates how often you raid vs. how much gear you acquire and based on that gives you priority when looting. Myself, a raider who attends almost every major raid, and an officer who tries to be there when he can, have both been wanting a certain item to drop. I finally pass this officer on priority and if the item drops it should be mine. Our last Naxx raid the item drops and I put in for it, and suddenly it gets awarded to the officer. I confront the guild leader about this, knowing he is friends with the guy and he gives me a vague answer such as “I’m sorry I know you’re pissed at me, but that item has been destined

Aratil posted another weekly update on the top teams on the US Tournament Realms, with last week’s number one BARKSDALE CREW remaining stagnant at 2501 rating, allowing last week’s third placers well then to move past them into first place. Curiously, well-known pro gamer Serennia’s We Met on eHarmony, another Death Knight/ Paladin/ Warlock comp, which was fifth last week tanked to 43rd place. Interestingly, Serennia openly dissed NO LIGHTNING GEN BRAH in his blog as “not-so-surprisingly horrible,” while taking a potshot at less popular Battlegroups. The players of NO LIGHTNING GEN BRAH currently hold the top spot of the 3v3 bracket on the Rampage Battlegroup and maintained status quo in the rankings on the Tournament Realms. Of course, it’s important to note that none of these rankings really matter at this point. As Serennia noted in the same blog entry, players only need their teams to be in the top 1000 to qualify for the invitational phase of the tournament. Standings right now are merely observational benchmarks and Aratil’s

We’ve talked a whole lot about Ulduar in the last few months, and a lot of great Ulduar-related resources have cropped up. So you don’t need to dig through our entire site to find what you’re looking for this fine Tuesday morning, I’ve tried to collect the most useful pieces of our current Ulduar content into one nice list for you. Enjoy! Ulduar Mania kicked off with this preview of Ulduar from the official EU community site. And then this video! You can listen to this song by Summergale and Cranius titled ‘Ulduar‘ while you read this insanely long list! To be sure you’ll never be lost in Ulduar, we’ve covered a few sites with maps of the zone. Check out an early iteration of the Ulduar achievements. Most of them have remained the same, but note that some of the numbers in the post were placeholders and have since been updated. We have write-ups of early iterations of some of the bosses. They were written early on in the PTR’s lifetime so I wouldn’t go forming a strategy based on them, but it’ll certainly give

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn’t our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn’t work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that’s a threat, after all, we don’t have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we’d win. Marty wrote in earlier this month about a common occurrence among casual players: finding yourself guildless. This morning I woke up and jumped on WoW to work the Auction house and found a letter from my Guild Master saying he has closed the Guild and moved on because the guild wasn’t progressing the way he wanted. This was very surprising for me for many reasons. Primarily because I was a “Co-Leader” of the guild and had no idea this was coming, but also because for the 1.5 years the guild had been around we were really just Casual….

e US forums have had this feature for a while, EU Blue Wryxian has posted that the EU forums have a little more order this afternoon. Rather than clumping the Horde and Alliance guild recruitment threads together, they now have separate areas to, as he puts it, ‘increase the usefulness and accessibility of the Guild Recruitment forums’. Despite his entreaties to the contrary, we’re sure it’s more to do with furthering the mutual dislike between factions. However that said, it will certainly save a lot of time and hassle. So if you’re Alliance and looking for a guild, take a look here while Hordies can go here.

It looks like Noblegarden started a trend: the Equipment Manager, Blizzard’s answer to Outfitter et al., is being delayed and will not be included as part of the upcoming patch 3.1. The cited reason is that “certain issues were encountered…that could not be resolved in time” to be included with the patch, and they would rather delay to “ensure wow goldthat this feature meets our standard of quality.” Does this mean the patch is coming pretty soon? One can only hope. This is especially disappointing with dual spec coming as a major feature in the patch, and with Outfitter’s author pulling the mod from distribution; people will be needing ways to switch sets quickly more than ever. Fortunately, Addon Spotlight has you covered – come on over and read all about some alternatives to Outfitter.

Today David returns to All the World’s a Stage, still taking a break from his series of roleplaying lore guides for World of Warcraft. Instead, he shares a few thoughts especially for people who may roleplay all the time without realizing it. There are lots of people playing World of Warcraft out there, and if you gave a survey to each one of them, asking, “are you a roleplayer?” most of them would probably say “no.” But if you actually listened to them, or engaged with them in conversation about it, you might learn a lot of things that surveys usually miss. Many people who say they are not roleplayers actually have an imagination of their character’s backstory, personality, or even just individual style. They may not know how to act out the character, and they may not have friends they feel they can act out with, yet at the same time, they do have a sense of their character as their own little creative exploration. The distinction between roleplayers and non-roleplayers is not as clear as people seem to think. In fact, there’s a whole