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Method Man and Vashj
As a society we are not always interested in seconds. We prefer firsts, the first man to walk on the moon, the first man to swim the English Channel, heck even the first woman got plenty of notice in her day. And yes, Nihilum did managed to down Lady Vashj first, but I have been following the story of the second guild to kill the snake-headed wench, and I am happy to report their day has finally come. For those of you not obsessed with minutia the way I am, the guild Method from the Sylvanas (EU) realm killed Lady Vashj on May 5th. Something happened though that makes this kill more interesting than just any old world 2nd. The encounter bugged out and the guild, after all their hard work, lost the chance at looting the corpse. That's right folks, imagine watching Lady Vashj's corpse despawn in front of your very eyes. I know I would cry wet, salty tears. Naturally members of the guild contacted a GM, but to no avail. It was a whole day before the guild finally got resolution. They did get a mail message though that told them that their loot would indeed be delivered. World of Raids says Method received a Krakken-Heart Breastplate and Gauntlets of the Crestfall amongst other things. Congrats to them for getting their just rewards. If you're interested in learning more details about the fight, Method will be interviewed by WoW Radio on May 13th at 12:30 EST. I'm sure they'll have some fascinating insights. [via World of Raids]
No UBRS key for you!
Call me crazy, but I am still collecting Azeroth keys and attunements. It's this thing I have with needing to complete things. I realize fully that I will hardly ever go to UBRS now that I am 70 (it's a Murphy's Law thing), but should any of the lower members of the guild need entrance for attunements or gear of their own (my guild is full of collectors just like me), then I will be able to help them out. I have two out of the three gems needed, and have in my spare time been running the instance with our guild leader trying for the third. So imagine my irritation when I read today on QJ.net that the quest line is bugged, severely. Vaelen, the schmoe who gives you the quest in the first place, is now in the habit of deleting the quest and your quest items when you talk to him. Now, this isn't right by any stretch of the imagination. Vrakhris mentioned in the forum post that Blizz knows about the problem, and are working on fixing it in an upcoming patch. Meanwhile, there's a workaround to tide us over.
Breakfast Topic: Buggy encounters
Recently I was doing a half-guild/half-PuG Arcatraz run, trying to get my Sha'tar rep up for heroic Mechanar (free Badges of Justice FTW). It was all going very smoothly, up until the last encounter. If you haven't been, the Skyriss fight is more of an event than a straight-out fight. Four creatures spawn before Skyriss finally does, one at a time, although one of them is an awesome gnome who helps you with mad DPS, and you get drink breaks in between so it's not that bad. Anyway, we finally get to Skyriss himself. It goes pretty well for a while, although our Mage got double-mind flayed and thereby died. Eventually the tank (Druid) went down, and then the Hunter. At this point it's just me (Priest) and the Rogue left, and I've been mind-controlled. Rogue does a very impressive job staying alive, gets Skyriss down to 2% before dying, and then...the encounter reset, because I was still mind-controlled -- there were no "friendly" players left.The trigger mob to start the event over eventually respawned, we fought the first mini-boss again, but then the gnome, who spawns second, refused to spawn! This halted our progress through the encounter and, after opening a ticket and waiting for a while with no response, we had to call it. It was pretty frustrating. A similar thing happened to me at the chess event in Karazhan last weekend. The guy who was controlling our king disconnected, so we lost; however, you can usually restart again after a short break. Not this time. We waited around for a while, walked in and out of the room and even the instance; no joy. Frustrating again. What have been the most annoying bugged moments for you?
Nintendo's Zelda replacement policy
Have you been plagued by the Zelda: Twilight Princess sky cannon bug? We've got good news and bad news for you. The bad news is obvious: you were plagued by the sky cannon bug. The good news is that Nintendo will replace your disc, allowing you to pick right back up where the bug torpedoed your game. If you're suffering from this bug, just send your game disc to Nintendo, along with a note containing your name, address, phone number, and the circumstances of the error, and Nintendo will ship you a replacement.The shipping address:NINTENDO OF AMERICA ATTN: CS ADMIN 4900 150TH AVE NE REDMOND WA 98052-5171
Is Bug Bash a game or something else entirely?
Gamingtalkhq stumbled across a person playing Bug Bash while floating around Xbox Live. They were curious to know what game this was and if it is the name of a secret project. The player's gamertag had a Windows symbol in the bottom right corner and informed them he was part of the "G4W Live Beta." So, bug bash, was exactly that -- an attempt to find and bash bugs in the Games for Windows Live Beta.Wikipedia defines bug bash as a time "where all the developers, testers, program managers, usability researchers, designers, documentation folks, and even sometimes marketing people, put aside their regular day-to-day duties and pound on the product to get as many eyes on the product as possible." The term is credited to a Microsoft blog post from 2004. So if you ever run across someone playing "bug bash" they may be Microsoft employees just testing the system. Then again, if you run across someone playing Bug Bash Beta 1337 -- that might be a game.[Thanks Alex]
Users report problems searching in iTunes 7.1.1
Jason O'Grady of ZDNet posts that thousands of Windows users are having problems with iTunes 7.1.1, which they believe will not allow them to properly search the iTunes store. Their search goes into an endless wait, and then they get a message that their iTunes request could not be completed. It seems to me that Apple's response, namely that the "network connection timed-out" error is an Internet problem not a software problem, sounds reasonable. When iTunes connects to the store, it's sending out a request for what is essentially a webpage and this request can hang for any number of network reasons--including those on the Apple end.O'Grady suggests that users may have to uninstall iTunes 7.1.1 and re-install iTunes 7.0, but I'm not sure that is necessary. The original Apple discussion list thread is here.
iTunes 7.1: Are sorts breaking scroll-by-letter?
TUAW reader Rae tipped us off that the new iTunes 7.1 sorting features are causing problems with the iPod's scroll-by-letter functionality. Items that start with the word "The" (like "The Breakers" or "The Danse") are sorted by their main phrase ("Breakers", "Danse") and not by "The", but when you scroll through your music, the iPod gets mixed up and the letter 'T' keeps flashing almost randomly. I sorted out my music, synced my iPod and saw exactly what Rae was talking about. When scrolling by All Artists -> Albums, the following items "In Your Eyes", "The Innocent and the E Street", "Innocent Man", "The Instigator", "Invincible Summer" caused my iPod to flash "I", "T", "I", "T", "I". Very annoying! Rae pointed us to a couple of discussion threads over at Apple's boards about this subject.
Do your item bonuses stack? You may want to double-check. [Updated]
They certainly haven't announced it very loudly, but when player Athas complained about mana regeneration numbers not adding up just right, Blizzard poster Eilanai responded saying it sounded like a known bug. (Who knew about it is another question entirely.) The bug? If you have two items with identical bonuses (i.e. two items that both give +6 mana per 5 seconds) they will not stack. Sounds kind of an important issue to me. Anyone else experiencing these issues?Update: A post by Tseric seems to confirm that this bug is specific to mana per 5 bonuses. Tseric also informs us not to expect a fix in 2.0.10, but that it will be fixed in a future patch.[Thanks, Jamie]
Magtheridon re-evaluated, Magtheridon hotfixed
Maybe these two are related, and maybe they aren't -- but this morning Tigole announced that the Magtheridon encounter was going to be re-evaluated over the next few weeks, as Blizzard had expected to see players progressing more quickly than they are. Just over an hour later, Tigole returned to announce a hotfix for a bug that was causing the Hellfire Channeler's "Dark Mending" spell to heal for more than intended. Of course, considering the number of complaints on the forums about the encounter, I doubt this will be the last change Magtheridon will be seeing.
Yojimbo 1.4.1
While it isn't a major release that adds big features like tagging or AppleScript support, Yojimbo 1.4.1 does fix a lot of miscellaneous bugs that users have been battling. A full changelog is here, listing fixes for things like crashes when viewing web archives and some scripting operations, as well as an auto-save fix to make sure your most recent un-saved changes don't get tossed out with the bath water when you quit. Yojimbo 1.4.1 can be had from from Bare Bones's Updates page.
Lots of hotfixes kills bugs dead
Looks like the Entangling Roots hotfix, while one of the most anticipated, wasn't the only hotfix that dropped at the end of last week. Tseric has updated the forums with a bit more than a few hotfixes to hit the servers recently.Among them, the Roots problem is now fixed, as well as that problem with the Draenei getting the "Crumpled Up Note" for the quest in BRD. There are also changes with the Maiden of Virtue, the chess pieces in Karazhan, and the Mechanar elevator door that lots of players were having trouble with.All the fixes are reprinted after the jump. Keep that bug squashing coming, Blizz!
On TextExpander cursor positions and why the Dock hiding feature no longer works
Users of the fantastic TextExpander who are also fond of the cmd+opt+d shortcut for hiding/showing the Dock might have noticed a weird behavior with this shortcut as of late. To be specific: the shortcut doesn't quite work anymore, even in 10.4.8; pressing it will cause the Dock to hide (or un-hide), but the Dock quickly reverses the behavior as soon as you let go of the shortcut. I know I thought it was a mere illusion brought on by sleep deprivation when I first stumbled across this, but occasional attempts at troubleshooting revealed not only that I was seeing just fine, but that a solution or even the culprit were seemingly nowhere to be found. Fortunately, watching the latest MacBreak #63 in which Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann cover TextExpander taught me not one but two useful things about this typing tool (three, if you count that I now know that Merlin has a mind-boggling 700+ text snippets). First is a handy way to control where your cursor is positioned once a snippet is expanded. All you need to do is include a specific string - %| - in your snippet to dictate where you cursor is inserted after your snippet unfolds itself. This is great for creating snippets in which you still need to include something specific on the fly that can't be snipped, such as creating [a href] links. Once Merlin covered this hint, however, I was inspired to open TextExpander's Help file to see if there were any other hidden gems. While perusing their FAQs, I discovered an explanation to this aforementioned bizarre Dock hiding behavior (it's towards the bottom of the FAQ page if you're curious). As it turns out, the specific way TextExpander is designed to hook into Mac OS X has uncovered an alleged bug in the OS that causes this unfortunate drawback. SmileOnMyMac is pretty sure this is a bug in Mac OS X rather than TextExpander, and I hope they have alerted Apple, in which case we could hope to see a fix possibly in 10.4.9. For now, the easiest way to get around this quirk and hide/show the Dock is probably to right-click the Dock divider (the line between Applications and the Trash/docs/files sections) and use that contextual menu.
Guards bugged in Silvermoon City
As a sidenote to the Valentine's Day guide from earlier: Don't even bother to try the Love quests in the new cities. As Memory from Scilla notes, the guards there are completely bugged-- in Silvermoon, guards talk about Stormwind (I even, as a Blood Elf, had one try to speak Dwarven to me).Now, Drysc says it's a known problem that has to do with the event itself, so if the problem isn't fixed soon, it'll go away for sure by Thursday, since that's when the Love event ends. And there's no real point to tooling around looking for love in the expansion cities anyway-- Kwee Q. Peddlefeet isn't there at all (because not all players, I suppose, have the expansion, and that would mess up the popularity contest, since all the rewards are city specific). So this isn't exactly the end of the world, even though when you get Heartbroken, it may seem like it.But for the moment, good luck trying to find your way around an expansion city you don't know. I was trying to find the Mage trainer in Silvermoon, and had to just give up and run back to the newbie area to train my new spells.
Bugged Instance Gates?
User Chris McDonnald sent us a tip about an issue with a gate in the Mechanar instance in Tempest Keep, Netherstorm. It seems that the gate pictured here has an annoying tendency to lock closed if your party wipes on the final boss. It's been confirmed by Drysc as a known bug here, where Drysc goes on to say that it's not intended, however it requires a client side patch that most likely won't be included in 2.0.7. Blizzard seems to have a bad track record with implementing gates in dungeons. Anyone remember the door to Baron Rivendare on the undead side of Stratholme? Or the gate right before the Razorgore encounter, just inside the instance in Blackwing Lair, which originally would only reset 2 hours after a wipe? Or the door to Vaelastrasz in Blackwing Lair shortly after it was released, which would jam shut in certain circumstances? Or the gates in the Rend encounter in Upper Blackrock Spire? That's the list I came up with off the top of my head. Why do they need to put these gates in, and why can't they check what's obviously been a problem area in the past (well, except for the Razorgore encounter, which was an intended reset time but someone changed their intention later).So, a word of warning. Make sure you have a Shaman have an Ankh up, a Warlock have a soulstone up, and a Paladin use Divine Intervention as required, because if your party wipes here, you either get to put in a ticket in order to be transported through or re-clear the dungeon.
The infinite mana bug
Infinite mana sounds like a good thing to me (I always did love fighting Vaelastraz), but this odd game behavior has to be a bug. There seems to be different speculation about what causes it, with some posters on Lurker Lounge suggesting it's a bug involving the priests' Divine Spirit buff. But whatever the cause, it was still in the game prior to today's maintenance, though I can't find any confirmation on whether it's still occuring. Reader Louies, who sent in this video, says that a GM replied this was a known issue which can currently be fixed by relogging.
High-level instances bugged
The Raids and Dungeons forumgoers are up in arms about major bugs in Tempest Keep's Mechanar and the Caverns of Time Black Morass event. The Black Morass, also known as Opening the Dark Portal, features portals of angry dragons coming to stop Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. You have to kill these mobs to preserve the timeline. However, it looks like the spawns of the portals are either really random or really bugged. Sometimes multiple portals spawn at the same time, and sometimes you wait ten minutes and nothing spawns at all. Poptrix of Bloodhoof suggests that setting loot to free-for-all and looting everything off the corpses evens out the spawn times a bit. Tempest Keep's Mechanar features an elevator that appears to have some issues being visible. Some people can see it and others can't. This bug killed a run of Mechanar for my guild a couple nights ago. Hortus on the Bug Report Forum says that Blizzard is working on it, but many people trying to get attuned for Karazhan are pretty upset that they can't progress in Mechanar. Kink of the infamous "PALS FOR LIFE" suggests a fix:
