Watching Blizzard: Busy bees (Patreon)

It's patch day in World of Warcraft, and the servers are back up and running patch 8.0.1. Mostly. As with any patch day, there's been some small, itsy bitsy amount of instability. (I'm starting to think I really should have made a "maybe" image for our "are the servers up" post.)  But all in all, successful patch day! Welcome to the Battle for Azeroth world. I hope you like it, because there's no turning back now.

Let's check out what's been going on in the wide world of Warcraft and beyond.

All the things you need to know about patch 8.0

• Start by reading the patch notes for an overview of everything that happened in the game today.
• Don't forget to update your addons, or you're in for some trouble the first time you log in. But you're all old hat, so you know that and you've probably updated your addons — but if your favorites don't have updates already, you should see most major addons updated within the next few days.
• And Rossi's done a rundown of what to do when you hop on to the patch for the first time.

It's a lore kind of day

• Okay. I admit it: we didn't run out and write a ton of new Know Your Lores. But a couple of older ones seemed relevant to the coming expansion... and they're just good reading material if you're still struggling to log on.
• Catch up on the lore of Teldrassil and Lordaeron before they both fall. (Or, in the case of Lordaeron, fall again.)

If you were just coming back to the game and wanting to play an allied race...

• Bad news, because Blizzard  isn't planning on relaxing the reputation requirements, so you're in for a grind.

Need a break from WoW? How about Hearthstone!

• You can get double gold on all quests until the end of the week, plus some other fun festivities as Ragnaros celebrates the Fire Festival.

And if you're a fan of rodents...

• Hammond is joining the Overwatch lineup next week. I cannot wait to see him in Overwatch League, but I'm going to be waiting a while for that.

That's all for now, everyone. Until tomorrow, this is Liz, signing off.