The Warcraft Weekly is up and ready for masses! Check it out here.

In January we outlined our plans for improving the performance and overall play experience in World of Warcraft. [http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=6635412] We’re farther along with implementing some of the changes mentioned in that update, and we wanted to share the details with you.

We’ve spent the past few weeks obtaining new, top-of-the-line equipment and preparing it for deployment at a new World of Warcraft site. This new site, which we expect to go live by the beginning of April, will allow us to open new realms to accommodate our growing player base. In addition, we will be able to transfer existing realms to this new hardware to alleviate pressure on our current systems.

To make sure the launch of the new site goes well, we plan on testing the new hardware, along with the 1.10 content patch, on the public test realms. This testing phase is scheduled to go live soon. In addition to monitoring the impact of the new game content, we will be able to observe the performance of the new hardware under conditions that closely resemble a live environment.

To make things interesting, we will be holding three skill-based contests during this test. Players with active accounts in Europe, Korea, and North America will be able to participate in these contests, and each winner will receive a spot in the beta test for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. We’ll be announcing the contest details on the official World of Warcraft community Web sites in each region soon, so be sure to check back from time to time in the days ahead.

For the love of all that is Petey, Please test this out!