criteria
Latest
Engadget decides the Best of CES 2015: Here's how it goes down
Repeating the events of CES 2014, Engadget's once again in charge of the Best of CES awards. A cocktail of trepidation and adrenaline, we love exploring the country's biggest tech convention and hunting down the best on show. AS CES 2015 happens, and we reveal the nominees and eventual winners, we'll be giving you, our passionate readers, the chance to decide our Peoples' Choice winner. But before even get to that, let's talk submissions. Whether you're a company (from tech giant to scrappy start-up) with something amazing to show us, or a reader simply curious about the rules, you'll find all the info you need at our newly-christened awards hub. We've honed and tweaked the categories (and even created some new ones) this time -- let's take a closer look at them.
The price of a game time refund
Is it just me or has it been a long time since Blizzard passed out some free game time? Reader Jim T. emailed me about a conversation he recently had with Blizzard's customer service -- he was disappointed with the lag, the queues, and the downtime on his server lately, and checking in about how he might get a refund or credit. The customer rep told him that while they didn't give out individual credit, they occasionally do give out game-wide credit for downtime mistakes.Which is true -- Blizzard will occasionally give out a free day to folks affected by major unexpected downtime or server issues. But while they used to do it fairly often, by my recollection, they seem much less inclined to pull the trigger on a refund lately. On the one hand, sure, Blizzard does a better job than they used to -- last Tuesday's maintenance lasted quite a while, but it wasn't anything compared to the days the servers used to be offline a few years ago. On the other hand, though, there's no question players are being affected -- by queues, by problems logging in, and by lag on the instance servers and elsewhere.Of course, we have no idea if Blizzard has an actual rule for when they give out free gametime and when they don't -- at this point, the criteria for giving players a refund happens to be "when they feel like it." Which is all right, we guess -- it's their company, of course. But it does seem like the criteria has changed -- we used to get refunds all the time, and even with all the problems lately, Blizzard hasn't decided to give customers any game time back.
Breakfast Topic: The perfect server
Spiritus has a good quesiton on WoW Ladies: if you could transfer, right now, to any server, what would you look for in the server you moved to?What makes the perfect server? I can think of a lot of things that would go into the server decision. If you had friends there already (this was the reason I rolled on the server I'm on now) Server population Server age (you reroll locusts) AH prices Guilds and progression Server type (PvE, PvP, or RP) And does anyone consider the server name in their choice? Would you rather be on Arthas or Thrall? So if you could conjure up your perfect server, what would it be like and why? If Blizzard offered transfers tomorrow to any realm, what would server heaven be like for you?
