World of Warcraft is finally getting back up on its feet in China, but it seems that it didn't do so without making some concessions to China's censorship. We know that when The9 was still in charge, they had to make multiple graphical edits to the game to avoid showing off exposed bones, such as altering the Forsaken models and turning player corpses into gravestones, rather than a skeleton heap.

Now that NetEase is in charge, they've had to make some changes to the game as well, though perhaps not as substantial. Potentially funnier, though. According to this Chinese website, severed heads and skulls have been covered up. Literally. Item icons that would show heads or skulls in other regions of the world are now bags, chests and crates in China. This includes things like Van Cleef's Head, and even spell icons like the ones used by Ruin and Improved Corruption have been replaced by bags.

Surprise! Well, it was to me, anyway. Wowhead announced on Wednesday that they are launching a new Premium subscription service. Subscriptions cost from $2.50 to $3.33 a month, depending on how many months you subscribe for at a time, and confer the following benefits:

• No ads.
• No CAPTCHAs when you post comments/forum posts, and an increased character limit on those posts.
• Custom avatars, with special badges and borders, for the forums and user pages.
• Prioritized placement in the Armory queue for profiler resyncs.
• A direct line to Wowhead's developers, in case you want to suggest new features or whatever.
• Premium access to the other ZAM sites (ZAM.com, Allakhazam, and WoWInterface).

Malgayne stresses that unlike some sites, non-premium users on Wowhead are not penalized. The site will continue to work just as beautifully as it always has for users that don't pay a dime.

There is a slight exception to this in the profile resync queue feature, although at the moment it's not a practical issue - not enough requests are being sent for the queue to be a factor.

So what do you think? Are you going to fork over a few bucks to become one of the Wowhead elite, or maybe just to show your support for a fantastic site?

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

I love it when a content patch includes some professions love. As the details keep surfacing, patch 3.2 is looking better than ever.

In fact, with the upcoming patch, Engineers will finally be able to drop their Gnomish and/or Goblin specialties ("for a fee")! This has been one of those issues, like ugly and buggy cat forms, that has dragged on and on.

The materials for Jeeves have also been updated (get the schematic!). If you're wondering just what you should be saving, hop on through the break for that and other patch 3.2 news!

Not all of us get to run around with Val'aynr. But for you mace casters out there who aren't first on your guild's Legendary list, here's another sweet mace to hunt down.

Name: Constellus (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)Type: Epic Main Hand Mace
Damage/Speed: 93-298 / 1.80 (108.8 DPS)
Attributes:

• +55 Stamina, +54 Intellect
• Blue socket with a +5 Spell Power bonus
• Improves crit strike rating by 29, restores 19 mana per five seconds, and improves spell power by 587

Our old friend Tim Sullivan, who worked at Wowhead way back in the day, just sent along a note that he's working on a brand new web video series all about something in World of Warcraft that's been gaining a lot of ground lately: multiboxing. Thanks to recruit-a-friend and all of the bonuses that come along with sponsoring a second account, quite a few people have shown an interest in running more than one character in the game, and Tim's series, called Multiboxing.tv, shows live feeds from his gameplay (all five screens of it, four Hunters and one Priest) while people can chat and learn live about multiboxing and how it all works. He's also leveling the group up -- they're currently around level 40, and he says he's headed to 80 eventually.

You can check out his front page to see when he'll be streaming next (and someone told us he was streaming for something like fourteen hours the other day -- take care of yourself, Tim!), and if you're interested in how you might get started multiboxing, he and his chat channel are probably more than happy to help you figure out how to do it. He did say he'd be streaming every night this weekend, so if you're around then, you should be able to catch him. Personally (as you probably already know), I'm a big fan of the standard one character gameplay -- I have enough trouble figuring out one toon, much less five. But Turpster, as you've probably heard on our podcast, has dived into this kind of stuff headfirst and loves it, so if you're interested in seeing how it works, tune in to Tim's channel and find out.

Update: Apparently while this was presented to us (and appears to be) just a guy streaming his multiboxing, Tim may have some less generous motives -- he's apparently trying to sell multiboxing software, and you can see the comments below for some other shady moves that have been made. Watch at your own risk, and keep in mind that while the stream appeared legit to us, it may be an advertisement for software you certainly don't need to multibox.

We've heard this argument before, and every time Blizzard makes a change to help players complete quests more quickly, it comes up again. And with the recent announcement that Blizzard will actually be adding quest targets to the ingame maps (again replicating another function of the popular Questhelper addon), players have again brought up the old argument: is the game too dumbed-down? Originally, when the game began (though I don't know anyone that didn't still use Wowhead to find quest coordinates even back then), you were sent "east" to find a tiny little brown backpack to click on, and in the next patch, not only will you see that brown backpack sparkling with flares as you get close, but you'll have it marked on your map the entire time.

Larisa waxes nostalgic over at the Pink Pigtail Inn, and says that this is just farther down a sliding slope that leads to a ravine where we all just have two spells and need to kill three boars to level to 100. Kinless Chronicles straight out says "Patch 3.2 will play for you" with some funny tongue-in-cheek analysis. But since I do it so much anyway, I'll play the Devil's advocate here: let's face it, we all used the addons and coordinates while leveling up alts, if not even while leveling mains. It's easy to be nostalgic, but I never did like hunting around for that little pixel of brown you had to click on to finish a quest, and if you really do want to stumble around in the dark the old way, just don't look at your map and/or close the minimap down. I've recently played two other console games, Fable 2 and Dead Space, that also offer glowing line navigation straight to your quest targets, and I did feel a sense of exploration in both -- if I wanted to wander off the path, I was welcome to (and usually rewarded for it), while if I just wanted to get to where I was going, I could do that, too.

Wowhead has been promising a profiler system for quite some time (it's been under development for over two years, according to the site), and now it's finally here.

Wowhead's profiler has pretty much every feature you might want from a modern profiling site, and fits right in to the excellent Wowhead interface. Armory import, 3D character view, gear sets, gear scores, upgrade search - it's all there. You can save your characters however you want, link them to your friends, check puggies, and so forth.

It's just gone public, so bugs are to be expected. Report them to Wowhead if you find them; the Wowhead team is very responsive. New features are also in development, such as embeddable 3D widgets of your characters, or automatic comparison between items in the site database and a profile of your choice.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Today's edition of The Queue is a pretty short one, but it's an important one. I'm making a change to the format of this column, which will be explained in our very first question of the day. Why is it so short? When you read the answer to the question, you'll understand. I just ran out of steam after pulling that off.

elstor asked...

"What's with the music lately? Why did you have to start this?!"

It's something we did for giggles once, people liked it, we kept doing it just for kicks. I'm pretty bored of it though! We should pick a new Whatever of the Day instead of songs. Extreme Stunt of the Day?

Read this edition of The Queue while doing a kickflip out of a burning building and through the moving blades of a helicopter, then land in the middle of the ocean where you will wrestle a shark. While covered in bees.

It seems that Blizzard snuck this one in quietly with Patch 3.1 as not a lot of people noticed, but thanks to Saithir of angrydwarfs for pointing it out. Apparently, an NPC named Loremaster Skosiris appeared at the top of Scryer's Tier in Shattrath tending to a new library of books. The NPC tends to a host of bookshelves that act as master trainers for primary and secondary professions, saying "Here I have amassed what may well be the greatest depository of lore in all of Outland. Even the grand libraries of Silvermoon City pale in comparison." Skosiris also tells players, "please... look, read, browse to your heart's content. You'll find everything organized and clearly labeled."

Why is this so cool? Well, Skosiris is the name of the founder of everybody's favorite World of Warcraft database, Wowhead. What can be a more fitting tribute than an NPC that manages, well, data! So that's what the Scryers did with all those Arcane Tomes. Blizzard has given nods to the community in the past, most notably with the NPC Breanni, who operates the pet store in Dalaran, and even to now-retired Druid blogger Phaelia, who got an item appropriately named after her. These are the tiny little touches that remind all of us that Blizzard appreciates what the gaming community does. Even though Shattrath is now a ghost town, Loremaster Skosiris and his library is a pretty good reason to drop by. When you do swing by the Scryer's tier, don't forget to bring some tacos for this librarian.

The second and final round of BlizzCon tickets go on sale this Saturday, May 30, and I'm pretty sure they'll go fast - the first round sold out in half an hour. However, if you miss out on a ticket (or if you think they're just too expensive), you may have a chance to go anyway.

Wowhead, along with APC (makers of UPSes and such), is running a contest over the next few weeks, with a drawing every day until June 18th. June 17th is the last day to enter; all you need to do is fill in your contact details on the contest page, and you're automatically entered for every drawing. Sadly, this contest is only open to US residents age 18 and older ("we know it sucks," Wowhead says).

Oh right, the prizes.

There is one grand prize, consisting of two tickets to BlizzCon, along with air fare and accommodations, an APC UPS, and a dinner with the Wowhead folks. Three lucky first-prize winners will get their choice of a Wii, a PS3, or an Xbox 360, as well as an APC surge protector. And every day that those prizes aren't given out, someone will win a Wowhead t-shirt and an APC surge protector. One of these last winners will be randomly chosen to win a Blizzcon ticket as well, at the end of the contest.

Many thanks to Sacco for covering The Queue last Friday. For some odd reason he decided to start drawing this weekend, and you can see one of his drawings above. For the other image you'll have to check out our Twitter page (it wasn't done when today's edition of The Queue was written).

If you're wondering about the title, we're not going to talk about the mistake Adam made over the weekend when he was setting up WoW on his fresh dual-boot linux install. It's just really not worth going over how he managed to delete his WoW directory that has lasted him since pre-BC. Not at all.

Remember that The Queue is here to answer your questions, and you can either leave them in a comment in this article or contact us with them. So without further ado...

Swampsquach asked...

"When you do the repeatable Frenzyheart/Oracle quest in Sholazar Basin, does it have any effect on the current rep you have with either one? For example, if I get revered with the Oracle's and then do that quest but pick Oracle's again, is that just free gold? Or does it set your rep back to honored?"

So we said that we would have a special edition of The Queue this past Saturday. It never happened. Why? Well, the intent was for it to be entertainment while we all sat in the queue for BlizzCon tickets. Yammer about BlizzCon, get excited, all of that sort of thing. Adam and I put ourselves in the ticket queue, were getting ready to push the post out, and then... ticket sales were over. It was kind of a pointless post at that point! So it never happened. We apologize for that.

The ticket sales went surprisingly smoothly. We're always going to find something to gripe about (holy crap why don't they have more tickets) but the whole thing didn't come tumbling down this year, and that's such a massive improvement over last year. It was a good thing.

Dusseldorf asked...

"Is there any benefit to converting my account to a Battle.net account? I see problems with Battle.net users logging in all the time, and was just wondering the point of converting."

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

We're going to jump right in today, because we have plenty to talk about this time around!

NarwhalFrenzy asked...

"Referring to the quest Out of Body Experience, we already know what happened to Prince Keleseth and Prince Valanar, but will we ever figure out what happened to the other darkfallen there, like Prince Theraldis or Prince Atherann?"

I have no doubt we'll be seeing them in Patch 3.3, in and around Icecrown. Prince Theraldis (the one on a horse (with an equine-themed pashmina afghan)) seems to have been the overseer of that whole project going on during Out of Body Experience, so I wouldn't be surprised if he turns out to be a raid boss and Prince Atherann is in a 5-man or a group quest elsewhere. Though it would be interesting if they were a side-by-side raid boss, like the Twin Emperors. Hm!

Update April 30th, 2009: Karatechop's account has been closed. Read the fully story here.

We first received a tip on a mysterious guild that was blowing through Ulduar's hardest achievements one after the other, all in one day, about a day or two ago. Their gear and raid experience stated very well that they were in no position to do any of those achievements, but we sort of shrugged and let it pass by. It was odd that these players were barely in Naxxramas gear, and their first recorded Kel'thuzad kill was only two weeks prior to their explosion of Ulduar achievements, but we initially ignored these reports because surely, nobody could be hacking the game. On top of that, the forum threads submitted to us all had so many posts deleted from them that they were completely incomprehensible. There was nothing solid about any of it.

Tips on it are still flooding our mailboxes today and a bit more information has surfaced, so let's look into it a little, shall we? The guild is The Marvel Family of US-Vek'nilash. The character Karatechop is the one that has attracted the most attention, and you'll see why in just a moment. If you look over his gear, it's not that bad, really. Epic tank gear, a lot of it from Naxxramas, so it's feasible that he could make some progress through Ulduar. It gets weird when you go to his Statistics and/or Achievements panels. Let's go to his statistics first.

The talent calculator was Wowhead's original feature, and it's been a good friend through WoW's development. So it is with a heavy heart that I announce that Wowhead is shutting down the talent calculator.

Nah, just kidding: they released an awesome new version today. The new version of the Wowhead talent calculator, in addition to looking even spiffier than usual, has a few added features:

• Glyphs, like the MMO-Champion calculator has had for a while (but prettier, of course)
• Auto-updating URL - no more need for a "link to this" button
• "Restore" button will reset a calculator if you got there from a link and then altered it

All talents are now updated for patch 3.1, as well. The pet talent calculator has gotten the same treatment as the main talent calculator, with auto-updating URLs and a Restore button.

The only thing I don't like about the new talent calculators is the way you select your class/pet family; it used to be a text list, and now it's an icon grid, which I find harder to use quickly, especially in the case of the pet calculator. But it's a small complaint.