Our friends over at The Guild are hard at work on season 3 -- if you've been following their Twitter feeds, you'll have seen that shooting is underway en masse, and while we haven't yet heard when they'll be done, it sounds like they're already keeping some long hours over there. Such long hours, in fact, that tempers are apparently flaring on the set -- as you can see above, director and editor Sean Becker has become a victim of Felicia Day's (substantial?) wrath, and been fired from the show.

Ok, not really -- they're just joking around. But even if he's kidding about what's in that "guild 3 master" box, we at least know there is a season 3 master, and that sooner than ever, we'll be able to see just what happened when Codex took that out-of-body sprint at the end of season 2. Can't wait to see it.

The Guild (which, as we were told by Michele Boyd last week, just started putting together their third season last weekend) is having a video contest, with a little twist. They want you to make a one minute video of a potential guildie for The Guild that would obviously get rejected -- in other words, a worst guild candidate ever video contest. So maybe you could clearly be a loot hog, or not know anything about your character (but claim to know everything). Or whatever else you come up with -- it sounds like they want the entries to be as embarrassingly bad as possible. To enter, you'll just have to create a video, upload it to a sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo (make sure you save a high-quality original of it just in case), and then drop them an email with a link to the video.

Sounds like fun. If you win, you'll get featured on their website, and/or have a chance to get your video on their season 3 DVD release. They've also got legal rules over on their site (unfortunately, it's US-only, like so many other contests on the Internet), and have discussions about the contest going on their forums as well. Good luck to all who enter -- we can't wait to see the results!

World of Warcraft isn't actually at this year's E3 -- Activision Blizzard has a great big booth with lots of cool games in it, but none of them are Blizzard's. We guess they're saving everything for the big event at BlizzCon. But we still found someone cool to meet on the floor -- The Guild's Michele Boyd (you can see her here in the last Season 2 episode) was working on the show floor for THQ, and was kind enough to stop by and talk to me before she went off to actually, you know, see some videogames (we heard there's some here, but we've been too busy writing about all the cool stuff we're seeing on Joystiq and Massively).

As you can see above, she's hosting a series on Discovery Channel (and she's got the science chops to do it), she's currently rocking an Enhancement Shaman (in Outland, not Northrend -- what can I say, I was confused by her awesomeness), and she's got some good thoughts on what's up in the next season of The Guild. Big thanks again to her for chatting with us, enjoy the video!

Season 3 of The Guild has been given the green light via sponsorship from Microsoft and Sprint. According to the Hollywood Reporter, production is anticipated to begin in June, with a sneak peak of season three happening at the San Diego Comic-Con in July.

Season 2 ended on a cliffhanger, and according to Felicia Day via the Hollywood Reporter, "the repercussions of [the cliffhanger] will be felt by the guild. Expect a lot of real-life distractions for the characters and some hurt feelings from the last season."

Hopefully we'll see more of the guild at BlizzCon this August as well (why, what a perfect time to release the first episode of season three!). Last year they gave a great, and packed, presentation.

I for one can't wait to see what happens this season. Go Guild!

The Guild's second season is now available for preorder on DVD, and apparently it's an Amazon Exclusive -- yes, the ever-more-corporate folks at The Guild are going with the big online retailer to distribute their second DVD collection. But we can't blame them too much -- surely it's a chance at a wider distribution, and probably less work for them in general. You can preorder the DVD set right now for just $12.99, and according to The Guild's site, the set will have commentary tracks, subtitles in English, and Behind the Scenes and Audition footage. If you're as much of a fan of the series as we are, it sounds well worth the purchase.

Amazon has a release date of May 19th, and it also looks like they're doing a re-release of season one on the same day (though we're not sure if that new season one cover demotes new material or if it's the same version of the season one DVD they were selling before). And of course if you're not interested in picking up any extras, you can still just watch the episodes online at their site, or by downloading them in HD from Xbox Live for free.

Our friends at The Guild made an ingame appearance the other day, but not in our game -- they showed up as avatars in Second Life as part of a talk show called the Copper Robot. Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh (Zaboo), and Jeff Lewis (Vork) all stopped by to talk to journalist Mitch Wagner (whom I met on the TUAW Talkcast last night), and you can watch video of the proceedings over on their blog, or just listen in to the audio if you'd like. And there's news about season 3 in the interview -- it should be happening, though Felicia says they haven't gotten "an official pickup" yet, and she hasn't started writing yet. The season 2 DVD is also coming soon.

What's perhaps most interesting about this interview is that the Guildies all used custom-made avatars to appear in the game. Second Life, if you've never played it, is more of a sandbox MMO than the strict rules and design of World of Warcraft, and players have mostly complete freedom to make themselves look like whatever they want. And so a few fans from a site called World2Worlds actually made some avatars for the Guild folks, and they based them off of the (also fan-made) art of the characters. We've never seen footage of "the game," as the characters in The Guild call it, so this is the first time we've seen these avatars represented in any game. Very interesting. The show has a Flickr group, so if you want to check out more shots of what they looked like in-game (including some nutty Vork antics), check that out as well.

A big congrats to our friends over at The Guild, who picked up a trio of awards at Saturday night's Streamys Awards, honoring the best in web video over the past year. The show picked up Best Comedy Web Series, and Best Ensemble Cast, and Felicia Day was a big winner herself -- not only did she win Best Female Actor in a Comedy Web Series (beating out Lisa Kudrow, Megan Mullally and one of my favorites, Kristen Schaal), but that other little web series she was in, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, picked up a slew of awards on its own. And in other WoW Streamys news, as we said on the podcast post today, Alex Albrecht picked up an award for Best Web Series Host for his WoW video podcast, Project Lore.

StoryGas has a list of all the winners (a list that's strangely missing from the official Streamys site) and LG15today has pictures from the ceremony, including a few cast members of The Guild all dressed up in their finest. 12seconds.tv has video of most of the award winners as well, including Felicia. Sounds like it was a blast. Congrats to all the winners -- this was definitely an excellent season of the show, and we can't wait to see the next one!

Yes, The Guild season 2 finale is out now on MSN Video and Xbox Live, and it's a good one. There's revelations, revenges, an epic battle, and even some spiritual reflection on Vork's part. And it's probably fair to say that after this episode, The Guild will never be the same.

That's it for this season, but The Guild isn't going anywhere -- they're planning a live Ustream chat this evening with the cast and crew to talk about the season and the future of the show. This season's episodes should also be "unlocked" from Microsoft soon, so they should be showing up on YouTube as well.

We'll be watching, as usual, and we'll bring you news of the third season when we hear it. It's safe to say this season and the big Microsoft experiment turned out to be a big success (despite a few complaints about the exclusivity), so hopefully we'll hear more on what's next soon.

Thanks, Savant!

WoW Intervention is a new YouTube video that is turning out to be quite popular, made by the BarelyDigital.com folks. It's professionally done and has a very "The Guild" feel to it. It's also hella funny.

The plot is that a group of guild mates get together and work to get their friend back in the game. They're having a real life WoW Intervention. They go through some comedic moves and the protagonist is eventually presented with the choice between a romantic rendezvous with his girlfriend and WoW, well... he decided to go with something. /facepalm.

You'll have to watch it for yourself. It's moderately safe for work, although don't watch it in a meeting.

If lovin' chipwichs is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.

It's Tuesday, and you know what that means. Not only is it time to wipe down the Ampitheater of Anguish (that thing gets messy over the weekend), but it's time once again for a new episode of The Guild. And for those of you unhappy to see this here every Tuesday (perhaps because you're stricken with some horribly rare disease that keeps your eyes from moving on to our other posts instead?), we're sorry to say that there's only a few weeks left in the season. So let's make the most of it while we can.
And the guildies definitely try their best -- they decide to take the night offline and split up the sexes, to... err... mixed results. Clara gets a little nuts with girls night out, and the guys also struggle to find something to do that doesn't involve signing into the game. Good times as always.

And just in case you missed it last week, The Guild shared some pretty important company on MSN Video on Inauguration Day. Say what you want about the Microsoft deal, but even when there's big news going down in real life, MS is keeping up their end of the promotion deal.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

I'm back and forth on Jimmy Fallon -- when NBC first announced that he was taking over the great Conan O'Brien's late night spot, I wasn't real impressed. But since then, you can't say he hasn't worked for it -- the show, which isn't even on the air yet, has been blogging and running all over the country to drum up some interest (including a little gig with the guys at sister site Engadget), and their latest stop takes then to the abode of our good friend Felicia Day to play World of Warcraft.

As you can see above, Fallon isn't much for Azeroth -- while Felicia is rocking a pretty hardcore Warlock, Jimmy still has a tough time getting past the character creation screen. But he did drum at least one laugh out of me (which is one more than he ever got from me on SNL), so well done. I very much agree with the commenters on the blog -- if he can keep the show technology and geek-focused like this (and maybe get at least one character up to level 30 -- all Felicia had to do was say "roll on a PvE server," right?), he might have a chance at filling Conan's shoes.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Yes, the new episode of The Guild is now live for your watching enjoyment, and the gang deals with the servers going down the only way they know how: by driving each other crazy. Strangely, rather than running for the hills while they don't have to be in the game together, they decide to party up in real life as well, and that should be a sight to see next week. Plus, Codex gets her own game shut down by an unexpected player.

Good times as always. The latest episode should also be up in HD soon on Xbox Live and in the Zune marketplace as well. Just the thing to keep you entertained during today's extended maintenance.