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WoW Rookie: Patch madness
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.Welcome, O WoW rookie, to patch week madness. If you thought run-of-the-mill maintenance and minor patch days could be dicey, here's your chance to enjoy the epic-level chaos wrought by epic-level content patches. World of Warcraft has evolved considerably since its launch in what's now been almost a handful of years ago. Blizzard regularly releases downloadable updates, called "patches," to add new content and features, fix problems and tweak game play and balance. Through patches, players have gained access to new quests, instances, Battlegrounds, events, items and tools. This week's Patch 3.1 is known as a content patch – a nice way of saying "a ton of new stuff we've added to the game that's going to make all hell break loose." The realms go up, the realms go down. The realms go up. Did we mention they also go down? You may log in only to find your characters nowhere in sight ("Oh #%$&, my characters are all gone!"). You may experience disappearing mail or auctions, random disconnections from the game and insufferable lag. You may find yourself merrily rolling along only to find the NPCs have disappeared, you can't zone in or out of instances or log out of the game, and you and every other player who's trapped in your zone are left with nothing to do but chat about the whole thing. (Almost makes you wonder if the Ice Stone has melted yet.)
Login servers down
We're not out of the woods with this patch yet. I'm seeing this message on a North American realm, and lots of other people are seeing the same thing. At least one of our bloggers is still in the game, though, and Blizzard is saying the Authentication servers are still up and running, so this should be fixed soon.We'll keep you updated, stay tuned.Thanks to everyone who sent this in!Update: A login server died. If you try signing in with a Bnet account, you should be able to get in. Otherwise, everybody PANIC hold on and they'll be back up soon.Update 2: Everything seems back up. That was relatively painless. Thanks for playing, everybody!
Authenticating...
It should be no surprise to anyone that the authentication servers are having issues lately - the servers themselves may be running fine, and perhaps you have a few friends whom you know are connected and playing, yet you can't get past login. Or perhaps your server doesn't even appear on the server list when you do manage to log on. Well, Eyonix has made a post in the general forums providing some clarification on the problem. Apparently last night's troubles were due to a hardware failure, and because the failure occurred during peak playing hours, all players will be receiving a day's credit to their account. However, while the hardware failure was fixed, we should continue to expect slow logins during peak hours. However, there is hope - they should soon be moving to an improved authentication platform, which should reduce the login lag. No ETA on this system, but at least it's coming.
