There's only 1 day left on our contest we're running in tandem with Blizzard's own contest to give away 5 hardcover copies of Arthas: Rise of the Lich King -- Christie Golden's new novel coming out on April 21st that tells the story of Arthas, and how he slowly crept into darkness and became Azeroth's greatest villain yet! The contest ends tomorrow evening so please have your posts up on the Top 5 Things You'd Do As The Lich King Curse Contest Forum by then!

Winners will be selected April 21st from our Top 5 Things You'd Do As The Lich King Curse Contest Page!

Here's our original post for the Arthas Book Contest:

From April 8th, 2009 to April 20th, 2009 you'll be able to submit your entries, and on April 21st -- the day the book is released -- we'll be selecting the winners to receive their very own copy.  The reviews thus far have been excellent; many proclaiming it as the best Blizzard novel yet, so even if you're not a book-lover, this is certainly a collector's piece you'll want to own as a World of Warcraft fan.

Top 5 Things You'd Do As The Lich King

So you've fused with the most powerful shaman in existence and command the vast undead armies of Azeroth, but you've got 12 Million people trying to kill you, what do you do? We'd like to see your ideas, how you'd ensure your own survival, how you'd prevail against the masses, or anything else you'd do if you were the Lich King! Would you dig an escape route, take a left turn at Albuquerque, or just downgrade to Burning Crusade? Be creative! We will read everything that's posted!

The rules for the contest are pretty simple; winners will be determined by the staff here at Curse. Your entry should be at least four (4) paragraphs long and We have 5 books total to giveaway so there will be 5 winners! Winners will be judged on creativity, ability to make us laugh, and the overall level of detail/intrigue to your ideas or post. Post your entry here on our Top 5 Things You'd Do As The Lich King Curse Contest Forum! Winners will be selected April 21st to coincide with the release of the book; Arthas: Rise of the Lich King!

Note: There's along list of places that Blizzard WILL ship these books too; so it's not U.S. only!

Tasos has recently posted an update about the major patch for Darkfall Online. Our DarkfallDB.com Dev Tracker picked up the post where Tasos explains the current pre-order situation. He also explains some of the trouble they are having with the pre-order servers. He also mentions the new patch and has a list of some of the fixes.

Quote from Tasos:

Today a substantial patch was applied to the game. We've also opened up the beta information forums where you can read the newly released patch notes.

These patch notes, among other things, explain the basics of the conquest system. We've been working hard on the game as you can see by the volume of this update, we've already spoken of our commitment to supporting the game and that's what we'll continue doing. Things are looking good for launch; the game has been very stable, even though server and client are still in debug mode.

We feel we should explain what's happening with the pre-ordering even though it hasn't been officially opened yet: Yesterday we gave the beta testers some lead time to the pre-order. This was offered not only as a courtesy but also in order to get reports on any problems before releasing to the public. Since the pre-order link leaked out, our system has been overrun by players from all over the world trying to pre-order at the same time.

Even though areas like Asia are excluded from this release, they remain major contributors to the heavy server load. This load is many times above our highest estimate and as a result the system has been very slow. We've been correcting the few issues that have surfaced while in the process of increasing our web server capacity-yet again.

We apologize for these problems, we have people working on this around the clock and should have it fixed by tomorrow. We're disabling the pre-orders until then. Even though many persistent people have managed to pre-order successfully, it's just not a good user experience. We'll post the pre-order information and resume taking pre-orders as soon as we're back up tomorrow.