downtime
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Regular maintenance for all US realms this week
Yep, last week most realms had rolling restarts, which means that this week we have a regular maintenance. This week all US realms (which means AU realms, as well) will have a regularly scheduled maintenance period, starting at 5:00 AM PDT and ending at 11:00 AM PDT. Sure, on good weeks, the realms can come back up early, but it's just as common for them to come back up late. So for those of you who usually play during this period of time, my apologies -- maybe you can join me in my downtime hobby of re-playing the original StarCraft![Information via the login screen -- nope, there's nothing on the official site, or I'd link it]
Wowhead down; implementing gear profiles?
The saga of Wowhead continues: the site is currently down, as in no loading at all. My first thought was that Blizzard's maintenance and the extra traffic from the sale news brought them down, but they've never experienced uptime problems in the past, so that seems unlikely.And then Centipede (thanks!) sent us this forum thread in which someone who claims to be a Wowhead moderator says it might be down so they can implement "character profiles and gear wish lists (ala CTProfiles)" that they were supposedly hoping to put up before "the end of the month," which is of course right about now.So when the site comes back up, maybe we'll see some brand new features to play around with. We'll keep an eye on it and let you know more when we do.Update: Site's back up intermittently with no apparent changes so far. Your guess is as good as ours what's happening here.
Why Tuesday mornings?
Maintenance is going on right now on some servers, so now's a good a time as any to ask a question I've never really considered before: why 5 to 7 am PST on a Tuesday morning? Why did Blizzard choose this time to refresh and update the servers every week?The obvious answer is that that's when the least number of players will be bothered, and indeed, that's what the wise and kind Nethaera says. But there's no way that time is always the lowest population every week, and sometimes maintenance, as it will today, runs long anyway. Why not Wednesday morning, or Sunday morning, or Thursday midafternoon, or Saturday evening? Actually, that last one would be a problem. But you're always going to inconvenience someone, so why not move it around a little and give those Tuesday players a break?Neth says they're "always going to choose to do what needs done for the most benefit of the health of the game and servers." Which is fine by me-- back when I worked in retail shifts, I usually had Tuesday mornings off and couldn't play, but with my 9-5 now, it doesn't bother me anyway (and the recent changes to have restarts rather than downtime help, I'm sure). But are you someone who's been screwed out of gametime every Tuesday? And if you're not, would you mind giving up your playtime one week just so the folks on Tuesday morning wouldn't have to deal with the downtime and the restarts?
Incoming nether drake fix
It looks like the swift nether drake situation is getting fixed sooner rather than later, and they're going to have to bring the realms down for a few early-morning hours to do it. (Edit: early morning for some, but prime time for Oceania!) From the breaking news box:We will be bringing down all realms to implement a fix for the Arena end-of-season rewards, and sending the correct rewards to teams that participated. This maintenance will begin at 5:00 AM PDT, June 22, and will last until approximately 7:00 AM PDT. For more information on this issue and resolution please visit the PvP Discussion forum.Over in the PvP forums, Drysc posted the following:During this maintenance all of the end-of-season rewards will be resent to the correct teams and players. By resending the rewards players who already have an Armored Nether Drake will simply receive duplicates. As these are unique items the new mail messages can only be deleted. The Arena titles will also be applied again, and players will have the correct title available to them after the maintenance. We appreciate everyone's patience in awaiting this resolution, and apologize for any inconvenience or frustration that it may have caused.
Patch 2.1.2 live, more downtime for Frenzaclysm
As predicted by Nethaera, patch 2.1.2 is now available for download, although of course the realms are still down for a few more hours. The patch weighs in at 42 MB (at least the Mac version). Full patch notes are after the cut; here's the differences from the original PTR patch 2.1.2: Players will no longer slow down to walking speed when closely following another player. [Karazhan] Fixed a bug that caused the Karazhan chess event's movement spell cooldowns to not display correctly. [The Eye] When Kael'thas Sunstrider is engaged in combat, the doors leading into his room will now properly close. Fixed a memory leak that may occur when a player alt-tabs out of the game, engages a screensaver, or locks their machine. In other realm news, the Frenzy and Cataclysm battlegroups are going to require 24 hours of downtime to complete their merge. The downtime apparently began at 3 AM PDT today, and is scheduled to end at 3 AM tomorrow. Affected servers are Azuremyst, Area 52, Auchindoun, Blade's Edge, Blood Furnace, Coilfang, Exodar, Shattered Halls, Terokkar, The Scryers, The Underbog, Velen, and It Came from the Blog's own Zangarmarsh.
Downtime and you.
You may be at work, busy as ever. You may be on the road, on a sales trip or vacation. You may also be at home, repetitively clicking on that button that might just let you into the virtual world we all love. Click, click, click...and the result is always the same: "Unable to connect to server." What do you do during your downtime? I, personally, enjoy a few hours with Youtube. If I really feel the withdrawal symptoms, I may even start clicking on game-play links...you know, just so it feels like I might be playing if I squint hard enough. Need some good ideas on how to pass the time?
