Quote:

“ Moscow has issued an extraordinary warning to the West that military assistance to Georgia for use against South Ossetia or Abkhazia would be viewed as a “declaration of war” by Russia.

The extreme rhetoric from the Kremlin’s envoy to NATO came as President Dmitry Medvedev stressed he will make a military response to US missile defence installations in eastern Europe, sending new shudders across countries whose people were once blighted by the Iron Curtain.

And Moscow also emphasised it was closely monitoring what it claims is a build-up of NATO firepower in the Black Sea.

The incendiary warning on Western military involvement in Georgia – where NATO nations have long played a role in training and equipping the small state – came in an interview with Dmitry Rogozin, a former nationalist politician who is now ambassador to the North Atlantic Alliance.

“If NATO suddenly takes military actions against Abkhazia and South Ossetia, acting solely in support of Tbilisi, this will mean a declaration of war on Russia,” he stated. “

The fact that it’s on a news website I’ve never heard of makes me question it’s validity, but it’s still a bit chilling.

In summation, Russia has said that if any of the NATO nations intervene, it will mean war with NATO, which includes the US and UK.

It has also hinted that in a war, the new missile-defense installations planned by the US for Poland will be nuclear targets.

Nuclear Targets? What the…?

Sincerely,

Sunfury Productions Staff

It’s not an iPhone Armory app, but Blizzard did release some official content for your mobile phones. They’ve set up a mobile.blizzard.com site, at which you can buy wallpapers and ringtones from WoW and the other Blizz franchises. At this point, you’re probably asking yourself one question: can I get a murloc gurgle ringtone? The answer, thankfully, is yes. Yes you can. (Though I can’t guarantee it’s a good idea.)

There is a big catch: the ringtones are priced at $2.99 each. Yikes. I know ringtones are big business, and I know Blizz is all about the tie-ins, but this is foolishness. Who would pay this over recording an MP3 and sending it to their phone? The wallpapers are $1.99, which is equally dumb for something I could just as easily screenshot off Blizz’s concept art pages and email to my phone. Also I can’t find the USA or Canada on the list of countries; it seems, at least at the moment, that these are not available here.

It’s a shame that these are so oddly expensive, and that they’re not even available in the US, because some of them are pretty well-done. It would be awesome to play the WoW intro theme when my guildies text me to go raid. I guess I’ll just have to make my own ringtone for it.

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 http://digg.com/pc_games/Blizz_posts_overpriced_rightones_wallpapers

In one video I found it shows a report on how we have the best bodyarmor yet we use the interceptor, not the dragonskin (we use it but not all of our troops have it)

Digg this Article at: http://digg.com/world_news/Our_government_thinks_it_has_the_best

To be honest, the Arena 1 items are more reminiscent of Outland Reputation PvP gear and don’t feel like worthy Arena rewards. On the other hand, comparing the Arena 1 2h mace vs. the Arena 2 2h mace shows a massive stat difference and could be indicative of a tiered reward system. Is it possible that Blizzard would create a separate set of Arena PvP gear that doesn’t require Personal Ratings but have inferior stats? It would be like running an instance in Normal mode, while the better gear is obtainable with (higher) Personal Ratings — the PvP equivalent of Heroic mode.

Blizzard has stated that there will no longer be any forthcoming Level 70 Arena rewards, and that the Brutal Gladiator sets are the last Arena items before the Level 80 items in Wrath of the Lich King. This brings a few questions to the fore — will Season 3 gear become available for purchase with Honor in Season 5 the way gear from Seasons 1 and 2 were? If so, will Season 4 gear then be offered at discounted rates and require lower ratings? Or will Brutal Gladiator gear be available for the same price and Personal Ratings for all perpetuity? With no new rewards, Level 70 Arena participation is destined to dwindle. While past PvP sets were retired, the Brutal Gladiator sets are likely to be the legacy set that will remain similar to Warlord and Field Marshal item sets for Level 60.

Most of this is bound to change in the coming weeks. In fact, I’m hoping they will. In particular, I’m concerned about the huge discrepancy between the epic 2h mace and the PvE maces glimpsed from Naxxramas. The Arena epic mace is at 186.5 DPS (806 top-end) while the Naxxramas maces sit at 203.6 and 203.7 DPS (up to 880 top-end), which makes the Arena mace massively inferior. Fortunately, all the PvP gear in the game are certain to undergo changes — at least in the graphics department, as the armor sets and weapons are old models from Season 4.

The folks at WotLK Wiki sent us a note that they’ve got an interactive Northrend map up and running. It’s nothing too surprising (they basically just put all of the map screen maps from the beta together), but it is in a nifty Google maps interface, so you can drag, click, and zoom around the new landscape at will. And of course, the pictures don’t mean too much at this point — of course big landmarks like The Nexus and Ulduar stand out, but it’s assured that actually seeing these places will be much more amazing than just seeing their flat representations on the map.

What’s really interesting, though, is going way back to the beginning and comparing this map to all the different versions from Blizzard’s planning stages. Though a lot of things have been added in to fill in all the space, they’ve really been faithful to the overall design since the beginning. Even the Warcraft III maps match up pretty well. Blizzard really sticks to their mythology, and that’s probably at least one reason why fans enjoy exploring it so much.

Digg this Article at: http://digg.com/pc_games/WotLKWiki_offers_interactive_Northread_map

Originally set to go live with Wrath of the Lich King, the calendar system is one of the biggest UI changes coming, and we now know that it’s going to happen in the big pre-LK content patch (which will probably be numbered 3.0 or so). This nice video will take you on a tour through the interface.

So what features will we be getting in this long-awaited calendar?

• Pre-existing events, like holidays and raid lockouts, will be on there by default. You can select what sort of events you want to see on your own calendar.
• Any user can create events viewable to their guild and/or to a user-selectable list of invitees. Events can be of various categories, like “PvP” or “Raid.”
• If you send someone an invite, their calendar icon (on the minimap) will flash. They will then be able to RSVP to the event with whether or not they’re coming.
• Events to which people have RSVPed show the total number and number of each class; very handy for raids. You can invite people to a party or raid straight from the calendar interface if they’re online.

Pretty much all you could ask for, really. The only feature that I haven’t heard anything about that I would want is a web interface to the calendar; it would be nice to at least be able to view events without logging into the game, and the Armory would be a natural place for that sort of thing. And the ability to send invites, while excellent, does open the door to yet another form of spam (which can be reported in the interface).

Overall though, it is an excellent addition to the guild tools in the game, and, along with guild banks, really should have been in from release. But at least it’ll be here soon.

Digg this Article at: http://digg.com/pc_games/Video_preview_of_the_new_Calendar_system_WotLK

Sincerely,

Sunfury Productions