The second giveaway for newsletter subscribers will be the Flag of Ownership. The winner will receive the code for the item but not the card itself so we can avoid the hassle of shipping things through snail mail.

Enter To Win

To be eligible to win the code for the Flag of Ownership you must be a subscribed member of my newsletter by midnight on Friday, August 21st 2009. At that time I’ll be randomly selecting one (1) valid and confirmed email address from my list of newsletter subscribers to send the code for the item. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, you can do so now using this form:

Related posts:

1. Newsletter Giveaway: Picnic Basket
2. Giveaway: You Choose The Loot Card
3. Newsletter Giveaway #1 Winner

I’ve narrowed it down to one of these two cards: The Flag of Ownership or the Ogre Pinata. You can check out their respective pages on Wowhead to get the details on each before you vote in the poll.

The Poll… Is Closed

The Flag of Ownership won by a nose, 23 votes to 20, over the Ogre Pinata. Stay tuned soon for details on how you can win the Flag of Ownership.

Related posts:

1. Newsletter Giveaway: Picnic Basket

What Happened?

Contrary to some of the more technically clueless comments on the WoW.com post, I did not run out of bandwidth or have my hosting account shut down. And I don’t host the site on my own personal computer. What caused PUG Checker to break was the fact that I was accessing the Armory for fresh data every time someone looked up a character. If you do that too much, too quickly, the Armory automatically bans your site from accessing the data for a certain amount of time.

So the crash and burn is entirely my fault. I never built a cache of the Armory data in advance because, quite frankly, I have other stuff I’m responsible for that helps me pay the bills and eat on a regular basis that takes priority over a small fan site that I see no significant income from.

What’s Next?

I got some great advice about how I can get PUG Checker back up and running again without future downtime but it’s going to take a lot of work on my part. And right now I’m not too sure how feasible that is going to be. In order to avoid any kind of ban from the Armory I’d need to have what amounts to an entire copy of the Armory’s data on my own server. From what I’ve been told this morning that could take a program that runs non-stop over an entire week to complete. Once that initial copy was made, I could just update characters as they were checked on the site.

I highly, highly doubt at this time that I’ll be going to that extreme to keep the site operational. I’m going to let the traffic tidal wave from the WoW.com link work itself out over the rest of this week and then go from there.

In the meantime I want to apologize for the outage, since it’s 100% my fault, and thank everyone for the nice emails and comments this morning. I appreciate it.

Related posts:

1. PUG Checker
2. PUG Checker Works Again
3. New WoW Project

Related posts:

1. Newsletter Giveaway: Picnic Basket
2. The Alterac Volley Newsletter

Well, shortly after 3.1 was released they reintroduced the Boss Kill stuff back into the Armory. So anyone who was a fan of PUG Checker before it went down the gutter will be glad to know that it’s back up and working now.

Related posts:

1. PUG Checker
2. Back From Vacation
3. My First 25 Man Naxx PUG

The first giveaway for newsletter subscribers will be a Picnic Basket. The winner will receive the code for the item but not the card itself so we can avoid the hassle of shipping things through snail mail.

Enter To Win

To be eligible to win the code for the Picnic Basket you must be a subscribed member of my newsletter by midnight on Friday, May 1st 2009. At that time I’ll be randomly selecting one (1) valid and confirmed email address from my list of newsletter subscribers to send the code for the item. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, you can do so now using this form:

About The Newsletter

The newsletter is going to be all about making money on the Auction House. I’m going to start the whole thing off with a series about making money with nothing. I’ll be creating a level 1 character and, starting with just one gold, showing you techniques you can use in the game to make gold with as little startup money as possible. Look for Issue #1 to hit your inbox this upcoming Monday.

Related posts:

1. The Alterac Volley Newsletter
2. The Darkmoon Faire Auction House Feeding Frenzy

Why A Newsletter?

A newsletter is a great way to give people timely information, directly to their inbox, about the latest in Auction House ideas without running the risk of those ideas being overexposed, exploited and ruined before anyone has a chance to find them useful. Also, it’s a nice way to run controlled contests for the blog. I’m looking to give away TCG loot cards and having a collection of verified emails makes that easier to do.

Subscribe

To subscribe to the newsletter, simply fill out the form below and then confirm your subscription via the email you’ll receive afterwards in your inbox.

Related posts:

1. Welcome to Alterac Volley

With PUG Checker, you can type in the name of a player and the server they are on and get a quick “scorecard” style display of their boss kills in all of the instances in Wrath of the Lich King. This is a quick and simple way to get some kind of an idea about the experience level of the player you’re about to group up with.

I’ve been personally using PUG Checker before every PUG I’ve ran over the last week and it’s been pretty useful for me so far. I’ve seen some stuff, when scanning players before a PUG, that made me a leery of going forward from the start that were proven correct. One particular Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run looked like trouble according to PUG Checker and after about an hour later and several wipes it was proven to be correct.

Of course, everyone’s mileage with the site will vary and it’s by no means advertised or intended to be a ruling body on PUG worth. If you find it useful though, please bookmark it and visit often. If you don’t think it’s fair or a valid representation of your character I understand completely but the data I’m using is freely available from the WoW Armory already. I’m just displaying it in a more useful and accessible manner.

Related posts:

1. My First 25 Man Naxx PUG
2. Back From Vacation
3. Big Updates For WoW Headlines

In addition to the front page makeover, each individual class now as its own subpage with a list of the most recent 50 posts as well as direct links to each of the blogs its tracking. So far, Hunter blogs are dominating the site at the moment and a kind reader just emailed about dozen more I need to add. During the rest of the week I hope to expand the amount of blogs for the other classes as well. If you’d like to give me a hand in that, feel free to send a list of blogs you think the site is missing at info@wowheadlines.com.

I’m also adding graphical links to everyone’s blogs throughout the site as well. If you run your own WoW blog and would like a banner ad to your site added to the rotation please send your blog info and a graphic that’s 275 pixels wide by 75 pixels high to info@wowheadlines.com as well.

Feel free to offer criticisms and suggestions for WoW Headlines here on the post or via email. Thanks for checking it out and for putting up with my near constant updates about its construction on my Twitter profile.

Related posts:

1. New WoW Project
2. The 3.1 PTR Has Arrived
3. Back From Vacation

Well, I decided late last night that it was time to do something similar for WoW. My new site, aptly named WoW Headlines, is a portal-style site that gathers in blog posts from all of the most popular WoW bloggers online and breaks their content down by class. You can even subscribe to RSS feeds for each class and get regular updates on new blog posts that have been written.

Since I’ve only put a few hours of work into this the current site is a little rough around the edges. It looks awfully plain and it’s missing a ton of features that I plan to implement in the coming days and weeks. I thought I’d post about it now so any of you could offer up suggestions or just start using the site now before it’s 100% ready to go.

Also, and on an unrelated note, I’ve started a Twitter account to update everyone on the progress of Wow Headlines as well as my in-game antics.

You can find my profile at: http://twitter.com/AlteracVolley

Related posts:

1. Back From Vacation
2. The 3.1 PTR Has Arrived

In the meantime, I’m stuck using my old Macbook for work and a little WoW but nothing intense like Raids or Heroics. What a bummer.

I’ll try and write some posts during this downtime though. I have an article on tips for Strand of the Ancients that I’ve been planning to write so you can look for that tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. The Ice Stone Has Melted!
2. Fixing Alterac Valley

It’s been nearly two months since I started Alterac Volley and so far it’s been a lot of fun venting and discussing my thoughts on WoW. As I continue forward I want to keep providing quest guides (with more video supplements) and hopefully, if I can muster the courage, some thoughts being on a first time raider. I had my first 10 man PUG last weekend before I left town and it was interesting. I’ll be writing more about that in my next post.

Thanks again for reading, subscribing and commenting at my little site.

Related posts:

1. The Future Is Video

I’ve decided I want to dabble a little bit in video on this blog so the above is a test run. If you’re reading from an RSS reader you might want to visit the actual site in order to see the movie.

It’s a short (and low resolution, for now) clip of an Alliance attack on Thunder Bluff. Well, it’s really more of their escape than the attack but I just happened to log into my Bank Alt at the same time as this was going on. I hit record in time to see the last of them heading for the elevators.

In the future, I want to post video guides for particular quests. I’m sure I’ll think of more uses as I get going as well. Also, if anyone is having problems seeing the video please let me know in the comments of this post. Thanks.

It was until the beginning of January this year that I re-activated my account again to give WoW another shot. My friend and I were looking for a game we could play together now that he had moved across the state and we settled on WoW because it was one of the few computer games I could play on my Mac and he could run on his PC.

Even though I came to the party in Outland very late compared to everyone else I was having a much better time. With the help of my friend I managed to hit 60 without much of a problem and I was starting to really master how the auction house worked. Unfortunately, I really hit a wall leveling the final grind to 70. Instead of giving up again I decided I would give PvP a try and I became a battleground addict overnight.

Battlegrounds eventually motivated me to reach level 70 and solved a growing concern I had over getting decent gear as someone who spent most of their time playing solo. It was painfully clear I wasn’t going to get high-end gear for my hunter without running raids and instances, but the idea of PvP Honor rewards solved that problem entirely. By the time Wrath came out I had all of the PvP trinkets and the Merciless Gladiator’s Pursuit set with over 10,000 gold in the back.

That’s great. But why another Warcraft blog?

I started Alterac Volley so I could have a place to rant and rave about World of Warcraft. It seemed like a better option than having my thoughts drowned out on a random WoW forum or buried in the comments of an obscure page on Wowhead.

I’m going to offer my take on WoW from the perspective of a casual player, with an emphasis on the hunter class as it pertains to solo play, PvP and maybe some light dungeon running. In addition, I’m going to talk a lot (probably too much) about ways to make easy gold in the game by using your smarts at the auction house.