WotLK Beta - The in-game calendar

Another feature added with the latest build on the beta servers, is a calendar for organizing your in-game events. A useful addition, considering the fact that third party addons like this have been around since pretty much the beginning of the game.

You access the calender by clicking the huge button on the top right of your screen, near the mini-map. This gives you a month-by-month overview, which already has all the Blizzard-organized events in it, such as the weekly Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Extravaganza and Brewfest for example. Right-clicking on a particular day allows you to create an event. You can give it a name, a description and pick from 5 different categories: Raid, Dungeon, PvP, Meeting or Other. Choosing either Raid or Dungeon then allows you to pick the instance you wish to go to. You can set a time and invite other players.

When these players then hover over the calendar button, they'll see they have been invited to an event and haven't responded yet. When they then open the calendar, they can either accept, decline or remove the raid from their calendar. At the bottom of the screen you can see an overview of the players that are connected to this event and their status.


Looks remarkably similar to Guild Event Manager, doesn't it? It seems like Blizzard is keeping the tradition of "borrowing" the ideas of third party addons and implementing them in their main game. Which is perfectly fine by me, the more people get access to good functionality, the better.

Anyway, this seems like a very useful tool, especially for the more casual guilds who don't have a dedicated website with their own planner or for non-guild groups who do events on an irregular basis. As for the raiding guilds, they'll probably want to stick to their website, because it's a lot easier being able to sign up for something without being in the game.