Fellow Adventures,

As we're all waiting for the Wrath of the Lich King game disc to finish installing, I wanted to remind you of a few features of Hearthstone, the best WoW App on Facebook.

As you level and gain rep adventuring through Northrend, be sure to come in and 'refresh' your characters so you can share your achievements (not achievement-achievements (yet!)) with your friends.

If you come in and refresh at least one per level, you'll have a level history tracking how quickly you level (Armory permitting... those of you that are first to 80 might out run the armory itself...) and when you encounter new factions. Be sure to click the "Allow Offline Access" option on the main page (or the settings tab) if you want your wall updated automatically too.

Just added to the system is the ability to add your characters to your info tab of your facebook profile, so they are all listed there for you. Also, if you haven't seen it you can put a single character at a time on your profile, or stick with the traditional view of 4 toons on your Boxes tab.

I believe I've prepared the app to handle people getting past 70, and it should be supporting Death Knights too -- I just have to get mine created first to double check it's all working as expected. If you encounter any problems with the app -- feel free to contact me or post a message on the discussion boards.

If you've been away from WoW for a while and aren't in a rush (i.e. weren't at a midnight opening tonight (which of you did I meet in line tonight?), you can order from Amazon (figured I'd drop this in and see if I can cover server costs for a change...) or elsewhere.

Safe Travels and ... perfect timing, mine just finished installing. Later! Doh, patching again... there we go done! Off to Northrend we go!

Do you have a blog or a guild site? Somewhere that you like to talk about your toon, or as your toon?

Well, now with just adding one line of javascript to your website's template, any links to a characters page here will show up with a cool little tooltip.

Get all the details on the embed page page and please let us know your feedback to so we can further improve the tooltip. It's very minimal right now, but it'll grow as more people demand features.

You can see it in use on a test post I made on this blog. Also, there is a screenshot available too.

I'm pleased to announce a long over-due feature -- Per Toon Privacy Settings!

Limit who can see your Toon's Detail

Piggy-backing on the new Privacy Options released by Facebook this week, for each of your characters you can use the 'Actions' menu over their portrait to access the 'Set Privacy' page.

Then select a level of access to your toons -- e.g. set it so only people who can see your profile can see your toons -- that means by default any of your friends and networks for example (perhaps you're a badass ganker and are a bit worried someone might send you a nasty message if you know who you are IRL? (I know I'd consider it if you killed me 18 times in STV while leveling)).

You of course have the option to go really fine (if you want to use one of your available areas of customization). E.g. say you have a group of 5 friends you play with and you only want them to know about your Hearthstone:

1. Go to your friends page and make a new list, including only those friends you want to know about your hearthstone
2. Go to your facebook privacy page and pick a little used setting (say if you haven't posted your home phone number, use that field) and set access only to that list
3. Go to the app settings page for Hearthstone and limit your Hearthstone Profile Box to be visible only to that list (and you'll probably want to turn off News and Mini-feeds in this case too)
4. Go to each toons privacy page (or use the settings page for quick access and set the "Limit to" to be the Land Phone (in this example)
5. Presto -- you've got your secret little cadre

Another potential use is say you want to hide one character from all your guildies but not your RL friends -- you know how sometimes it's nice to just play without having to be on raid stand-by for to be free from the latest drama (wait! who's guild has drama?!). There are a few areas where this feature isn't fully working yet (i.e. it'll still show on your profile so you'd have to hide your profile box, and it'll still show on your in-app news feeds) but I expect to tweaks those issues out in the next little while.

Please provide feed-back here or via the discussion boards if you have any suggestions or critiques of these changes.

Armory Refresh Queue

In follow-up to the recent Armory Problems we've implemented a character refresh queue.

For now, we will no longer automatically attempted to refresh your toons, instead you'll have to put your toons into the queue manually.

It's real simple, you can do it directly from your profile (just click the little refresh icon under a toon), or from the 'Actions' menu when viewing your toon on your roster. E.g. if you've leveled or hit a new reputation level you want people to know about, just queue it up and presto you'll be updated as soon as we're able (on good days it shouldn't be more than 5 minutes, but when the Armory is having trouble it'll be longer).

This also brings us a bit more into sync with Facebook's policy about only publishing stories when a user does something in the app. In addition, I hope that by doing the refreshes in the background with a much longer timeout, Blizzard won't shut our access to the armory down again.

Level History

Speaking of refreshing when you've leveled, we've also exposed the leveling history for yours toons (as best we can from when things were refreshed). When looking at your character sheet, the level is now clickable which will take your to your level history (for example, here's mine).

In addition, you'll notice on that page there is a link to an XML version, and an Atom version of the level history. If you're technical, you'll know what these are and how you might want to use them.

Please let us know what you think of these changes here, or on the discussion boards.

Reminder: Our data is only as good as the armory. If it's delayed (e.g. it doesn't always update when you log out like it's supposed to) we're delayed and you may need to queue for refresh a few times (look at the bottom of your character sheet to know when it was last refreshed and if it's current queue and if it had any error attempting to refresh).

Just a heads up for any one trying to add new characters or refresh existing. We seem to be having some connectivity issues with the armory at the moment (execution expired errors).

It appears to be up and running normally though, so it's something between our server and theirs.

I'll be investigating in the morning. Thank you for your patience.

The Hearthstone home page has been completely revamped!

It may look a bit familiar -- as it looks a lot like your main Facebook home page now.

Myself and the Kekova goblins like to stay on top of how our friends are doing in-game, and with so much competition for stories on the main facebook news page, their stories don't always make it through. Now, you can get nothing but your friends' stories in directly in-app!

In addition, when you're looking at your's or your friends' roster pages, there is a small link to the 'mini-feed' for that user at the top of the character list. It will show you just the news for that user. Note: This information is currently only visible to yourself and your friends.

Please leave any feedback on these changes here, or on the discussion boards.

The Duelling banner flaps slowly in the breeze, the wear and tear of endless battles of the past few weeks have taken its toll.

1) The character that won the most number of duels....

Congratulations to Inocencia of Arathor for being the character with the most wins during the contest. She won 42 out of 81 duels.

Runners up:
Dahlia of Arathor won 40 of 72 duels.
Mazterpill of Sunstrider won 31 of 59 duels.
Herio of Gorgonnash won 29 of 57 duels.

2) The user whose characters participated in duels with the most number of other user's characters....

Congratulations to Dan Drane's toons for duelling the most number of opponents during the contest. He duelled with 14 other users.

Runners up:
Billy Chau duelled with 8 different friends.
Kevin Vermilion duelled with 7 different friends.
Someone anonymous who also duelled with 7 different friends.

We will contact the winners directly to arrange delivery. If winners do not get back to us in 3 days, then the runner ups will be contacted.

The Kekova goblins were mumbling about future contests. Sounds like there will be other chances to compete.

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Blame the goblins if you got this email twice.

Hearthstone is pleased to announce our new dueling system, and to kick it off we've concocted a couple of contests.

1) The character that wins the most number of duels before midnight server time on Dec 8, 2008 will win a prize.

2) The user whose characters participates in duels with the most number of other user's characters before midnight server time on Dec 8, 2008 will also win a prize. In other words, you need to duel 10 friends a day, not one friend with 10 characters, so get your friends on board ;-)

Prizes?! What prizes? None other than a 60 day game card which you can redeem for, well 60 free days of game play!

Check out the contest rules for some of the nitty gritty and we look forward to hearing your tales of battle!

We've managed to work some background magic so most profiles will now be updating on their own. That means if you level up for example, in addition to the notice you get in your mini-feed, the profile box will keep up with your toons as well.

Ok, so this isn't all that exciting, but the page you're reading is now available so you can stay on top of the changes we're making to Hearthstone.