Apparently, this patch is the first one in some time to implement a lot of new code, so that may explain why so many bugs came with it. I'm sure most of you have experienced the new responsiveness bug, the one that makes your units ignore commands such as hero spells, hero skill selection, and tp's (I've also heard people complain about control groups ignoring commands). Blizzard is trying to figure out what exactly the responsiveness bug is and what is causing it. Take a look at this post to provide some input and follow the discussion. Unfortunately, the stutter bug that AndyB describes is not the problem that most people are complaining about, but I think AndyB understands that now:)

Blizzard posted a cool, new holiday wallpaper to adorn your desktops, so take a look. They also released a War3x bonus map, called Blizzard Tower Defense, before turning in for the holidays. Have a good one folks.

Here it is straight from the horse's mouth:

Over the past few weeks, it has become apparent that the World of Warcraft beta will not be available within the fourth quarter of 2003. The development team is currently hard at work testing the alpha version of the game, and we look forward to bringing you an outstanding beta in early 2004. Our goal is to always make the best games possible, and a critical part of the development process includes the public beta test. This means that we will not release the final product or any other component of the game until it's ready. Rather than release an inferior candidate to meet a specific date, we have chosen to further test World of Warcraft internally until we feel the game will allow for a productive beta test.

Announcements concerning the beta test, along with additional details about the game, will be released in the near future. We encourage you to check our official Web site www.blizzard.com/wow for further updates. Thank you for your continued support and patience.

Katricia didn't take long to get a few answers from the WoW development team, and she's posted them here. Enjoy.

Samwise Didier has finally started his own page. The gallery is massive and awesome, so take a look.

Source: Expect Nothing

Link. Fixed nothing that was created in 1.13, but those bug fixes should come in 1.14. Thanks to Killtodie and Decelerate for the plug.

I'm thinking we're stuck with this patch over the holidays, which sucks. The laggy controls problem really bothers me.

Katricia, the new community manager for World of Warcraft, posted a few GenCon misconceptions created by the flurry of reports recently. Take a look.

TCadwell has been active on the forums as well, responding to balance complaints and other issues since 1.13. Take a look at his posts here.

Blizzard has posted a list of bugs in 1.13 that they're aware of. So far I've only seen the TP bug, but since it hurts everybody equally, I don't think it's that big of a deal.. Take a look at the bug list to see what's confirmed, what Blizzard's looking in to, and what 'bugs' they added intentionally.

Return of the King and 1.13 in the same day:) Go download it. Here's the official post for the list of of changes. Or just read below:

FEATURES

- Acts II & III, the conclusion acts to the bonus Orc campaign contained in The Frozen Throne, are included in this patch. To play these levels, you can simply click the "Chapter Two - Old Hatreds" link from the Bonus Campaign screen. If you have completed Act I, your Heroes will carry over to Act II. Otherwise, your Heroes will be default-level Heroes with basic starting items.
- Warcraft III now supports binding an email address to your Battle.net account, so that you can recover your password at a later stage, similar to the functionality that was added to D2.
- Race selection on the scheduled game dialog (tournament finals) is now saved for future scheduled games.

Click on "Read More" for the full details of map and balance changes.

Forum post from GFraizer:

You haven't been forgotten :) Your day will come.

Thanks Can.Bacon.

Link. Here's a cut:

The detail of the models, scenery, and lighting was quite amazing and it was because of this that I was dumb-founded when Blizzard level designer, Joshua Kurtz said, “Oh, why don't we turn on the pixel shaders.” From that point on, the sand looked gritty, the grass looked soft, and water looked wet.

The Battle.net forums are chock-full of Gen Con reports and rumours, so I looked through and found the best, most extensive posts. Enjoy as TehSug writes a few thousand words, SoCxRhijord shares some good info, and Eternal lists more about WoW.

Wb-cyborg posted an exclusive Gen Con report on the Battle.net forums. He took pictures of World of Warcraft, asked a lot of questions, and played the game. I recommend you read the post and check out the screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), but here's some goodness:

WoW Bits:

• First off gnomes have the BEST facial hair in any game ever. Huge eyebrows that are bigger than they are, wacky mustaches that go out a foot in either direction. And their facial hair can be blue, pink, orange and other bizarre colors!
• The really cool demo guy then actually let me PLAY THE GAME! It was great. The controls are a bit wierd if youve played UO or D2. You must hold down both mouse buttons to move or use the WASD keys. You can strafe with the arrow keys.
• Oh before I forget: EACH RACE HAS AN INTRO CINEMATIC to explain the races background. I watched the UD one and it was frickin sweet. The cinematic uses the ingame engine so the cinematic flows seamlessly into your starting character.
• We also talked about housing. He said its still being implemented and may not make it for release. He said that currently it works like WC3 (you get an outline of a building and place it in the world where you find a spot. So not preplaced houses).
• Speaking of cool, I saw the gates to the undercity and they were guarded by these 2 huge abominations! Guards WILL be attackable and even killable but its probably unwise to do so as killing a guard will get the rest of the guards on you ass GTA3 style and you will eventaully have to die or flee. Also you are freely attackable when in another faction's city. So high level players can raid opposing cities but you will need a big group and lots of luck to survive for long.
• Well I think thats all I've got. I asked about release date but all they could say was they were "aiming for 2004" Still the game looks atleast 90% finished. Only one thing I saw still had placeholder art. I can't wait!
  War3 1.13 Update:
  
• I asked him about patch 1.13 and the orc campaign acts II and III and he said it should be out very soon since they only have to finalize the foriegn language versions. So look for that probably next week!

Thanks Decelerate.

This one's from GFraizer:

We're still working on 1.13. We just have to hang on =[

GFraizer has been responding to everything on the World of Warcraft Battle.net forum for the past few days, so read pages 2 - 6 of his list of posts to keep up:)

Blizzard will be at Gen Con showing off World of Warcraft from December 11th to 14th. If you're nearby the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, take a look.

Blizzard sent out 5 exclusive screenshots to all members of the Blizzard Fansite Program, including us, so check them out. The Deadmines look awesome. What's behind the big door guarded by the Ogre?:)

Blizzard added a dungeons page to the World of Warcraft Town Hall. The page gives a brief explanation of how dungeons work, then takes a look at the Deadmines with captions and 9 new screenshots. Enjoy.

An official Warcraft 3 tournament called the Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational will be held in Seoul, Korea from January 15th to 18th. With over $40,000 in prize money and top gamers from around the world, expect to see some intense and skilled competition.

In other news, a new War3x bonus map is out, called Emerald Garden. And, GUComics has posted another World of Warcraft comic, so check it out.

I'm sure it's obvious now, but Blizzard does not have enough time to release the beta this year. In the past, Blizzard has given at least a week's notice before sign-ups, a week for sign-ups, then between two weeks and a month to get the beta out. The game has actually been playable for a long time, but I guess they want to stabilize most of the details before releasing it.. Read this post from GFraizer:

The game has been in development + playable for longer than a year. =] It's so much fun and I can't wait until we can share it with you.

I'm guessing the beta will start up in February, but we'll see..

Update: Here's another post by GFraizer about the wait:

We're working very hard to get the game ready for beta. The longer you have to wait, the better it is for you because the game becomes that much better. We add new features, we balance, improve quests, improve quest rewards, improve items, etc. The result is you get a better experience when you first see the game. So it does hurt to wait but you're better off for it.

Post from Brett Wood (Blizzard):

Due to a variety of unforeseen problems, the 1.13 patch is taking longer to finalize than we expected. Obviously our estimate of "a few weeks" on October 29 was incorrect, which is why we usually do not announce release dates.

We are well aware that the patch is overdue, and believe it or not, we are doing everything we can to get the patch out as soon as possible. Really.

Thanks for the link Decelerate.

GFraizer posted on Arreat Summit (the Diablo 2x Guide) that he won't be updating much for a while because he's hard at work on the World of Warcraft Guide. Hopefully this change in focus means the beta will start before Christmas. I'm doubtful of a pre-Christmas start, but Blizz employees talk about WoW like it's ready to go... We'll see.

Rob Pardo made a post to 'set the facts straight' in regards to the FOH Guild (who have recently been posting screenshots and class descriptions) and why Blizzard showed them the game. Read up, or read here:

1) Many people at Blizzard played a lot of Everquest back in the day (and Ultima Online, and other MMORPGs). Several of us even participated in the so-called uber guilds of various servers. For example, I was the guild leader of the Legacy of Steel guild on the Nameless server. Tigole took over when I stepped down. We remained friends and he eventually took on a job at Blizzard.

2) Some of us knew Furor and his guild Fires of Heaven back then. Furor is a hard-core gamer and pretty intelligent person. You cannot judge someone based on thier internet personna.

3) Furor lives very close to our office in Southern California, so we had him come by and take a look at WoW to get his opinion. We actually do this quite a bit with a whole variety of people. Newbies, fans of our other games, etc.

4) Furor was very impressed with WOW and asked us very nicely if he could post information about the game on his guild's website. While this was not a carefully planned PR opporunity, we felt like Furor could explain what he saw in WOW with more MMORPG terminology. While we have shown the classes and spells to various websites and magazines in the past, Furor had a very different sort of "take" on them that we thought would be interesting to existing MMORPG players.

5) No one at Blizzard is in Fires of Heaven, nor have we invited the guild into our internal tests. Once we get to the beta test, we will likely invite some players from various MMORPGs. We have done this in all of our beta tests. In Warcraft 3, we invited many top Starcraft players. The hard-core players devote a lot of time to our betas and help to find exploits, bugs and balance problems throughout the game.

6) When we design a game, we try very hard not to design it for one niche of players. Our mantra has always been "easy to learn, difficult to master". While many of us are great fans of the existing MMORPGs on the market, and they were certainly the inspiration for WOW, we do not intend to clone any one game. Rather, we wish to try to capture the exciting elements that made these games successful while eliminating problems and frustrations and adding some innovative features along the way. We sincerely hope we can achieve a game where new players, roleplayers, trade skillers, PvPers and guilds will have a fun time for years to come.

FOH Guild posted the next round of class descriptions after their exclusive look at World of Warcraft. Both the Paladin and the Rogue are described in substantial detail, and three new screenshots of the Pally were posted. That hammer rocks:) Take a look [1, 2, 3].

Check out the new wallpaper, titled Illidan Stormrage.

The recently released World of Warcraft screenshots have made their way onto Blizzard's site, starting here. Enjoy all eleven of them.