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City of Heroes a ski destination for the weekend
If you live in New England, you've probably spent the past month staring at a wall of unblinking white hatred, playing video games in a desperate effort to feel less trapped. Unfortunately, this past week has been rather touch-and-go for the servers on City of Heroes, making it much harder to escape into the game whether or not you're walled in by frozen water. So the development team is offering an olive branch to players: the ski chalet just outside of Pocket D is being re-opened for the weekend. Running until noon PST on February 8th, the ski chalet will be open to all characters to enjoy, something usually reserved for the winter holiday event. It'll also segue nicely into the start of the Spring Fling event, giving players their annual shot at earning valentine's-themed costume parts and badges. If you're one of the City of Heroes players who has been locked out by the server outages, you'll no doubt be happy for the opportunity to get in some winter fun -- unless, of course, you're still stuck in the midst of the winter's omnipresent snowdrifts.
Tuesday Morning Post: The waiting is the hardest part
You know, you'd think we could be happy all this shiny new Cataclysm content -- but no, we're all about the future. We are all about what is next. We all want more, more, more. Blizzard's probably going to disappoint us again this week, though, as all we're getting this morning is a set of rolling restarts beginning at 5 a.m. PST. Sorry kids, it looks like we have at least another week until patch 4.0.6 drops in our laps. With that said, we're still digging deep into patch 4.0.6 and general Cataclysm stuff alike around here, and while we wait around for the patch to drop, there's still plenty to read up on. Rolling restarts still require at least a few minutes of downtime, so why not get caught up on WoW news while you wait? We have our usual roundup of the latest stuff below.
Tuesday Morning Post: Lunar lamentations edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. I came back from my vacation just in time to start the Lunar Festival, and let me tell you, I was looking forward to it quite a bit. I mean, sure, this means my druid can restock on Moonglow, but the main reason I was hopeful is that I have two characters stuck in the early 70s, and I was sort of hoping that rounding up all the elders would take care of a significant chunk of their leveling and get me out of Northrend that much earlier. Then I visited my first elder and found out that they give neither experience nor money anymore. You may have heard the howls of anguish. So anyway, now I'm thinking I should just level them via archaeology, but doing archaeology a second or third time might actually be worse than doing Northrend a seventh or eighth time. Still, at least archaeology is apparently getting a lot more lucrative in patch 4.0.6. Speaking of patch 4.0.6, no, we do not know when it's coming to live servers. Seeing as maintenance this morning is only from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, it's probably not that week. That said, we do have plenty of other patch 4.0.6 news for you to catch up while the servers are down. Read on for all the latest.
Tuesday Morning Post: Patch 4.0.6 PTR edition
The past week has been largely dominated by discussion of patch 4.0.6, which isn't completely unexpected. The patch only recently made it to the PTR, and everybody loves talking about the new hotness. Cataclysm is old and busted now, right? Nobody wants to talk about that. All right, all right. I wouldn't call it old and busted, but patch 4.0.6 is bringing a lot of change to an already change-filled expansion. Classes, quests, and dungeons are all being buffed, nerfed, and fixed. Follow us behind the cut below to check out WoW Insider's top posts of the last week -- patch news and otherwise.
Tuesday Morning Post: There's treasure inside
Over the holiday break, thanks to all of the companies that sent merchandise our way, WoW Insider gave away more prizes than we've ever given away for any previous event -- and this comes after our absolutely epic BlizzCon party wherein we gave away tons of goodies, and then the Cataclysm midnight release events where we (nearly) cleaned out the very last of our loot codes. However, now that things have calmed down, we've taken stock of the loot codes that went unused during Cataclysm's midnight release and we just might have some leftovers from WoWTCGLoot.com that we'll be giving away here in the Tuesday Morning Post. However, since these are the precious few pieces of loot we have left for now, we're going to run this thing a little differently. To find out how to enter, you'll need to follow us past the break, check out our top articles of the week, and head down to the end of the post.
Tuesday Morning Post: Festive reflections edition
Happy new year, everyone. The feast of Winter Veil is finally over, and though all I really did for it this year was loot my presents on one or two characters, I have to admit I'm still a little sad to see it go. It was fun to see all the festivities. Even poor shipwrecked sailors huddling in damp caves and praying for rescue couldn't resist putting up elaborate Winter Veil trees. That's holiday spirit, my friends, and we could all learn from that. Luckily, we don't have to wait too long for a new holiday. The Lunar Festival will be up before the end of the month. Will we have to go find dwarven ancestors in the depths of Grim Batol? Will zerging Omen at 85 be any different from zerging him at 80 or 70? We'll find out! For the time being, though, we still have a few weeks free of holiday distractions to continue the Cataclysm grind. You'll be rudely interrupted this morning by a series of rolling restarts at 5 a.m. Pacific time, which gives you some to catch up the latest news right here at WoW Insider. Read on for our usual roundup of all the hottest news and best guides from the past seven days.
Skype outage post-mortem puts some blame on the elder Windows clients
If you wish to raise your fist in the air and curse anyone for the massive global Skype outage, direct your anger towards 5.0.0.152. That's the Skype for Windows version that crashed when a December 22nd cluster of support servers responsible for offline messaging became overloaded. While that's the only version affected -- the latest 5.0.0.156 and 4.0 versions were fine, as were the clients for every other platform you can think of -- the number of users running point-152 globally represent 50 percent of all the users. More importantly for the other half of the world, about 25 to 30 percent of all supernodes were affected, too, whose role is establish connections, among others. So... up to 30 percent of supernodes are down worldwide. The other 70 percent were taking on the increased load. The crashed Windows clients were by and large being restarted simultaneously by affected users. All this happened just before the usual daily peak hours and during the holiday season. It's almost a comedy of errors, were it not impossible at the time to call someone and share in the laughter. For its part, Skype goes into detail over how it fixed the current situation and how it plans to be better equipped to handle any future duress. It's a pretty interesting read, we suggest you set some time aside and check it out.
Kodak Pulse email-to-photo-frame system down for days, millions of memories trapped in the cloud (updated)
We definitely know quite a few people (including this very editor!) who bought their parents Kodak Pulse WiFi photo frames over the holidays, since they seem like a perfect way to share pictures without any fuss -- you can just email the frame directly. Unfortunately, it seems like this cloud service has a dark, dark lining: Kodak's backend email servers have been down since at least Christmas Eve, rendering the Pulse's most interesting feature essentially useless. What's worse, that status display above is more or less buried on the Pulse web site, so it's not even immediately clear that the problem is on Kodak's side -- and when things turn back on we're guessing more than one Pulse owner will find tons of duped photos on their frames from multiple email attempts, since the system doesn't confirm email receipt. We've heard a few anecdotal stories about email photo delivery slowing down / stopping during previous high traffic periods, so you'd think Kodak would have sorted this out by now, but we guess not -- we'll let you know when the company tells us about a fix. Update: Kodak emailed us to say things are working again -- here's the statement: We experienced slower performance of the Pulse server over the holiday weekend due to much higher than anticipated volumes. This resulted in a delay of pictures that were emailed to the Pulse frame. We did immediately address this issue and any pictures consumers emailed have since been delivered. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers. It is our goal to ensure a great experience for all Pulse owners.
Tuesday Morning Post: 'Twas the night after Christmas
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! With the Christmas holiday in full swing, things were surprisingly short on the new front this past week. Fear not, though, we're making news of our own. With the end of the year fast approaching, we're spending the days taking a look back at our best work from the past year. Is your favorite article on our list? Now that Christmas is over and the presents unwrapped, did you get all the awesome WoW loot you asked Santa for? If not, don't fear, you might just have a second chance. The 12 Days of Winter Veil are in full swing here at WoW Insider, and we're still giving away all sorts of awesome loot. Just keep watching the site. Just because the news was slow doesn't mean the site was, as you can see. Keep on reading for more news and more guides to gearing your class and running the new dungeons. We do have some rolling restarts to deal with this morning, at 5 a.m. Pacific time, but after you've finished reading, you should be clear to jump right back into the game.
Skype well on the road to recovery, group video calls restored
We almost got to see what Christmas was like before Skype, and it wasn't pleasant. Of course, VOIP and videoconferencing will never replace Grandma Pat's pizzelles, but the technology sure does make pre-holiday planning a lot easier. For its part, Skype hasn't gone into too much detail regarding the nature of its most recent outage (something about "mega-supernodes"), although as of this writing group video calling appears to be back and CEO Tony Bates has announced that customers will be compensated for the interruption of service with free and pay-as-you-go customers receiving credit for a free 30-minute SkypeOut call to landlines, while paid subscribers will get a free week of service. Keep an eye out on the Skype Blog for further updates, and we'll keep our fingers crossed that this year we won't have to learn what New Year's Eve is like without Chatroulette. As for Skype itself, with the way they've been courting enterprise customers they'll just be happy if this doesn't do too much damage to their impending IPO.
Skype outage causing a global disconnect? (update)
We've heard your cries, we've read your tips, and we've even suffered a similar fate ourselves... Skype downtime. According to the official Twitter feed, its engineers are working non-stop. Estimated time of recovery? Nein. Let us know if you're having (Skype-related) issues of your own! Update: Looks like things are starting to return to normal, and Skype's got a new blog post providing some background for today's mishap. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Tuesday Morning Post: For Whom The Barad Tols edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! You know, as things calm down a bit now that we're a few weeks into Cataclysm, I've had time to ask myself one of my favorite questions: What could Blizzard be doing better? Don't get me wrong, Cataclysm's awesome, but there are always a few things to be concerned about. Right now, my big concern is Tol Barad. Tol Barad, as a concept, is pretty awesome. It's an island full of history that old-time Warcraft lore nerds like me can appreciate, and the factions and story are well set up for an epic showdown. Plus, if loot's your thing, the reputation rewards run the gamut from fun to useful. So everything would be great with Tol Barad, except that the mechanics of the battle itself are sort of horrible. Mat's pretty much said what needs to be said on this, so I'll let him tell you all about it. Of course, his wasn't the only awesome article posted on the site in the last few days. As of this writing, there's no scheduled downtime aside from a quick round of realm restarts at 5 a.m. pacific time, but hey, you could stand to take a break and do some reading anyway, right? Continue on for our usual roundup of all the best news, tips, and tricks.
Tuesday Morning Post: Not looking at explosions edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! So hopefully by now, most of us have had plenty of time to get knee deep in the fastest selling computer game of all time. Some of us are level 85, some of us aren't; some have switched over to worgen and goblins or other characters, some of us are too busy not looking at explosions. Whatever your pursuit, we wish you lots of luck and lots of fun. With that in mind, if you're still confused by all the changes in Cataclysm or you're still struggling to level your character, don't worry. We've got you covered. You can always check our Cataclysm coverage page for a roundup of the best guides and latest news, or you can read on now as we cover everything we've reported on since last Tuesday. Don't worry, the servers are down from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, so you'll have plenty of time to read.
Storyboard: Putting the RP out of the G
Roleplaying happens in the game, that much is a given. For some players, it's a supplement to the other parts of the game; for others, it's the whole point of playing. And there's nothing wrong with leaving your roleplaying as just an in-game thing, something you put down as casually as any other in-game activity. But there's also nothing wrong with working on developing your character and her story when you aren't logged into the game, and this week, I'm going to look at some of the more effective ways to do just that. The obvious question about taking RP out of the game in part is the question of why. It could be for any number of reasons -- maybe you can't access your main game computer at a given time, maybe you want to fill in the gaps in your character's life, or maybe you just want to make the experience of the character herself more immersive. Whatever your reasons, there are three main ways to keep your character interactive and living even if you haven't logged into the game proper.
Tuesday Morning Post: Altoholics Anonymous edition
You know, I was just going to take it easy until Cataclysm, even with The Shattering upon us, even with the new race/class combos. I figured I'd grab a few of the new pets on my death knight and just coast until it was time to start leveling. Then I figured, what the heck, let's roll a gnome priest and check out the new gnome starting zone. You can see from the picture above where that ended up. She's level 39 now and still going strong! I'm not the only one who's rolled a new character, either. I've seen a lot of human hunters and night elf mages around, and I'm hearing horror stories of Orgrimmar drowning in a tide of technicolored troll druids as well. That's right, The Shattering is upon us, and apparently all it's really shattered for most of us is any boredom with the game. There's a lot of good stuff going on right now -- and we, of course, have it all here. With today's extended maintenance of 3-11 a.m. Pacific time, you should have time to catch up, right? Read on for a roundup of all the latest happenings.
Tuesday Morning Post: Shattered edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! Patch 4.0.3 was released last week, but everyone knows that's not the big news. No, that was just the first rumblings of change. Patch 4.0.3a only just went up on the PTR, but it looks like it's already headed to the live servers. This means we'll be getting a lot of changes, including the new version of the old world and the new race/class combos. Just to be clear, Blizzard is currently saying that you will be able to race change to those new combos right away, no matter what it had said before. Also coming this patch is a nice 20 percent reduction in leveling experience for the level 70 to level 80 grind, as well as changes to the Loremaster achievement. Daunted by all the changes? Don't worry, with a 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific downtime coming our way, you should have time to read up on all of it. Keep it tuned here for news throughout the morning, and read on now for a look back at what we've already talked about.
Patch 4.0.3a, The Shattering, likely hitting live servers tomorrow
With the announcement of extended downtime for tomorrow already out, the buzz has begun in earnest. We know that The Shattering, the patch that will change Azeroth forever, is coming either this week or the next, and an extended downtime would be the perfect time to patch it in. The Shattering patch will include all the old-world changes coming with Cataclysm, including changes to the Loremaster and Explorer achievements to match, the removal of Zul'Gurub, a reduction in the amount of experience required to level from 70 to 80, and the addition of all of the new race/class combinations. Worgen and goblins will still have to wait for Cataclysm itself, of course. If you don't plan to do any raiding or dailies in Northrend in the next couple weeks on any of your characters, you may also want to move your character to Stormwind or Orgrimmar before the servers go down, as rumor has it that the portals in Dalaran are going away with this patch. If all this change is getting you confused and dismayed, never fear! We here at WoW Insider will be with you every step of the way. Just stay with us for all the latest news and handy guides you need to survive in the brave new world of Cataclysm. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.
Tuesday Morning Post: Elemental extended maintenance edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. We're barreling headlong into the Cataclysm opening event, including fighting in the cities, so if you've been lax in logging on, now might be a good time to start. After all, there's loot and achievements to be had, and stuff. That said, you won't be able to log on for a bit this morning, as the servers are going down for extended maintenance from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST. Personally, I'm blaming this on the fire elementals. I bet they got into the hardware. Luckily, we got your back with lots of good stuff to read from the past week while we wait for the servers to come back up. Keep it right here with us, and we'll get through the downtime withdrawal together, I promise. We have our usual list of hot topics and useful guides below.
Tuesday Morning Post: Elementals everywhere edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. While we're all holding our breaths waiting for Dec. 7, don't think things have slowed down, either. The elemental invasion event is in full swing, with a new phase every week. Before you know it, we'll be seeing Patch 4.0.3 and a whole new world (of Warcraft) laid out before us. Get those last-minute achievements done now, folks, it'll be here before you know it. For now, though, we have a few weeks, and Tuesday morning is as good a time as any to stand back and take stock of what's going in the game we all love. We have the usual roundup of hot news and useful guides straight ahead.
EVE Evolved: Downtime deployment debate
Earlier this week, an explosive argument broke out in the EVE Online community. Following an extended server downtime, it became known that Reddit-based alliance Test Alliance Please Ignore had used the server downtime to protect the deployment of 14 territorial claim units. Ordinarily, these claim units are vulnerable to attack for eight hours while they start up. The owner may choose to either commit a fleet to defend them for eight hours or leave them unguarded and hope nobody decides to knock them down. This mechanic is designed to ensure that a force can't claim or attack a large number of systems simultaneously against opposition, as an alliance can't reliably defend several TCUs at once. By anchoring the structures just before the extended downtime occurred, Test Alliance made them invulnerable for their entire deployment time. A controversial debate then ensued, as GMs stepped in and Test pilots began making accusations of corruption, collusion and favouritism. In this opinion piece, I weigh in on the latest debate to shake New Eden. I look at whether downtime deployment really is an exploit and whether there's any substance to the accusations made against EVE's Game Masters.
