downtime
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The lights are out in the City of...
Time for a little nap. All of the US game servers for CoX have been brought down for extended maintenance. NCsoft is anticipating a full 6 hour downtime window, which started at 6 AM Pacific (9 AM Eastern) this morning. The lengthy downtime is required in order to upgrade the server hardware talked about in The 2008 State of the Game address.Hopefully the lights come back on when they flip the switch later today.
WoW Armory fixed for now
For those whose characters weren't updating or showing up at all, you'll be happy to hear that the promised fix to the Armory has been implemented today. However, CM Eyonix warns that it may take "some time" for all characters to update.It's been interesting to see how this Armory downtime has affected gamers. You'd expect frustration from not being able to check on your toon's equipment, reputation or talent build from outside the game, but there was also all the other ancillary activities that rely on the Armory. Everyone's favorite new gear planner, Warcrafter.net, came to a standstill. It's still not up to speed yet (at least not on my main, which is finally showing up on the Armory.) Many signature generators either stopped updating or broke entirely. And our Raid Healing columnist, Marcie Knox, had to make level 1 alts on different realms to inspect gear of cross-server guild applicants.The tentacles of the Armory spread deeper than we may have thought.
Patch 2.3.2 going live
Is patch 2.3.2 going live today? Though there's no official word, signs point to yes. US realms, currently undergoing maintenance, have a generic downtime message on the login screen (as seen above) and no patch download starts for those attempting to log on. but if you try to log on, the patch 2.3.2 download (approximately 5MB) will start. However, European players, whose maintenance doesn't start until tomorrow, are getting a different login screen message:This Wednesday there will be an extended maintenance to apply patch 2.3.2. Please note that all European realms will be offline from 03:00 until 11:00, Paris time (CET).Since we've never seen a patch go live in Europe that hasn't gone live in the US, this is pretty strong evidence that today is patch day. Patch 2.3.2 will include some class tweaks (primarily for Hunters, Mages, Shamans, and Rogues), some UI changes which may mean you have to pick up updated addons, bug fixes and more. See the full patch notes (linking to the PTR notes, as the live notes aren't up yet) for official details.Update: The patch is now downloading for US players.
Armory delays abundant, fix expected
What's up with the Armory lately? I've always had a problem getting in there (the pages load super slowly, although I'm pretty sure that's just all the database pinging they're doing), but lately, players have been reporting lots of character progress missing from The Armory. I spent all day yesterday on my Hunter ploughing through Hellfire Peninsula's big gear giveaway, and none of that new gear shows up on my profile. One of WoW Insider's writers hasn't even seen one of her alts on the Armory-- that's 40+ levels worth of missing info.To be fair, the Armory is more or less an extra service, and Blizzard knows there are problems and is supposed to be working to fix them, so there's not that much to complain about, really. Unsubstantiated rumors being passed around say Blizz is working on updating the code to allow level 80 characters (for the expansion), but the fact is that we don't know what's going on-- they could be adding in even more features that we don't know about (like, say, what the Figureprints folks get, or a nifty little API system). But, as a WoW Insider writer told me, at least there always is one way to see what's up with any character in the game: make an alt, run out to where they are, and /inspect away.Thanks to everyone who sent this in!Update: Looks like we lit a fire under somebody over there-- the Armory is redirecting to a maintenance page at the moment.
Expecting stability
I think I've mentioned before that I really enjoy Sanya Weathers' blog about running communities for MMO games, and in her latest post, she makes a great point about stability and expecting it from the games we play.The example she uses is Xbox Live, which isn't technically an MMO, but does, as she says, constitute a "massive, multiplayer experience." Microsoft has had trouble over the holidays keeping it up and running, and now they've decided to give out a free download to compensate players. How, says Sanya, can they be surprised at this point that they'd have a surge of users over the holidays? Isn't it common knowledge at this point not to play MMOs when a new expansion comes out or when new users show up in droves?But then she shares the real insight: this shouldn't happen any more. MMOs are no longer a niche business, something we should have to suffer hardships just to play these games. As she says, "it's time to expect our toys to work when we plug them in."Of course, any IT guy will tell you that downtime is unavoidable-- accidents happen, and predictions are just predictions. Anyone expecting anything to work all the time is going to get disappointed. But at this point, if you have a game (or a system, or a service) that is supposed to be "massive," you have no excuses when everybody shows up to play.
NCSoft do the time warp, again
There's no reason stated, but NCSoft are changing their entire billing department's time zone from Eastern Standard Time (EST, -5 hours GMT) to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, = GMT) starting tomorrow, a difference of about five hours. As it's just a time zone swap, nobody will lose or gain any hours they've already paid for, but depending on when you opened your NCSoft account you may be billed a day later in future. It's very important that you don't think about why they'd make this change, how you can go five hours into the future and not gain any extra time, or why the acronym doesn't match the full phrase. Trust me.
Tabula Rasa servers down for hotfix [Updated]
Tabula Rasa players hoping to enjoy some shooty MMORPG action after work will be a disappointed, as all four of the game servers are down for maintenance as of 5 p.m. EST this evening. According to a note on the official site, the servers are being brought down to apply a hotfix that will fix an error that was causing syncing problems between backpacks and footlockers, and another that was preventing players from accessing the new Faultlever instance.You'll have to forgive us for being skeptical, but we suspect that there's problem more to this. If they're really dead set on fixing these problems (and the syncing issue has been around since launch, which is why we're curious about the apparent urgency), why would you bring the servers down during prime time, instead of in the early morning when nobody is playing?[Update: No sooner do we put this story live than the servers come back live. Huzzah!]
Why maintenance on Tuesday mornings?
I don't really think that Drysc has to justify downtime (seeing as it on Tuesday mornings for most players, not to mention that with all the changes we've seen come down lately, downtime has definitely been justified), but he does it anyway over on the forums. He's right-- things used to be a lot worse (I can definitely remember having a secondary realm to escape to when my main realm was down), and with the two week cycle Blizzard has going on right now, actual downtime is few and far between. Sure, it means that every Tuesday morning you've got to go for a walk rather than play the game, but that's definitely not a bad problem to have.Sure, if Tuesday morning is a time you usually play, it's not that much fun (I remember I always used to have Tuesday mornings off when I worked retail, and every week I forgot, and tried to sign on before realizing the realms were down). But until Blizzard figures out how to update the game while it stays live, the situation we've got now ends up being a pretty good solution.
Tabula Rasa servers down, rabble rabble rabble! [Updated]
In a bit of news that I am quite displeased to report, Tabula Rasa appears to be having server troubles this evening, as both Western servers, Cassiopeia and Orion, have gone offline for some seemingly unscheduled maintenance. When we first sat down to write this post, the European server Centaurus was down as well, but has since come back online. We're hoping that this is just a freak incidence of somebody tripping over a power cord or something, and not a debilitating outage. The Bane can't be trusted on a server by themselves all weekend.No word from Destination Games yet, but we'd expect an update soon. In the meantime, I'll be... I don't know, reading a book or something?[Update: As of 10:37 EST, the servers all appear to be online and in working order. Back to battle with you, soldiers!]
Turbine apologizes for downtime with gifts
We reported yesterday that Turbine's login servers for The Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Asheron's Call were down all day. They've since come back online, and Turbine has apologized to the subscribers to those games by giving them some small gifts.Players of all three games will have their subscriptions extended by one day, essentially making yesterday free. Additionally, players will receive in-game items. DDO players will each receive one Candy Cane with 30 charges of Moderate Heal. LotRO players will receive five Hope-boosting Scented Candles. And AC players will get increased drop rates (that's the superior gift, we think).Listen, Turbine; you can't buy our love!Wait, increased drop rates? Okay, never mind, maybe you can.
Login servers down, forums explode
People are reporting trouble logging onto the game tonight, and quite a few threads have hit the forums. Drysc reported at 11:41 pm PST that the problem was all solved, but I still had trouble logging on for a while after that, perhaps due to the volume of other players also trying to get on and play as well after taking most of the holiday off.What really amazes me, however, is the shocking level of vitriol you can witness over this. I guess Blizzard could take it as a compliment that if people experience even a few hours of login trouble, they get, well... extremely testy.Now, I love WoW and I had trouble getting on tonight. But instead of, well, losing control of my temper I went and played Mass Effect for a few hours. I am awful at it, but it's still kind of fun. Then I managed to get my insomnia freak on once the servers finally came back up. (One level to go and my second shammy is 70! Woot!) I guess what I'm saying is, there's a right way to react to this kind of thing, and this is not it.
Maintenance extended three hours
In a regularly-scheduled world, the servers would be up and we'd all be playing WoW 2.3 right now. But did any of us really expect that to be the case? Turns out maintenance has been prolonged until 1:00 2:00 PM PST, two three hours later than the previous estimate (Drysc). But let's try to look at this in a positive way. Now you have more time to: Figure out how you'll work around the Sweeping Strikes/Deathwish swap Look for AddOn updates (or write some updates, if you're a mod author) Plot your guild's takedown of Zul'Aman Just plain get excited about the changes What are you going to do with your free downtime extension?
Pirates of the Burning Sea experiencing a bad spot of weather
SOE has been having technical issues with its Station game portal today. The issues particularly affect the Pirates of the Burning Sea community. According to a post on the game's official community site, "fans may experience challenges submitting User Content, posting on the Pirates of the Burning Sea forums, as well as difficulties logging into beta."They assure us that the technicians are working hard to fix the problem, though, and that we can expect things to be fine and dandy again soon enough. But until then, beware ye landlubbers, there be harsh weather upon the burning sea today. Arrr!
The keepers of virtual worlds
We would probably faint at the sight of Blizzard's internet bill every month, but the folks at TeliaSonera are very familiar with how much bandwidth World of Warcraft uses-- they run the network for Blizzard over in Europe. Gamesindustry.biz has a short interview up with one of their reps, and it provides a pretty interesting look at the daunting task of keeping virtual worlds online 24/7.They don't get into specifics on any games (unfortunately, though I'm not surprised), but Vlad Ihora says that the best thing developers can do is keep their server plan flexible. TeliaSonera will actually rent out servers to up-and-coming MMOs with the option to later buy if their game does well, or release if they didn't need as much as they thought. Flexibility is a huge benefit at the server farms, too-- Ihora says they can switch on a few extra gigs of bandwidth in just a couple of hours if necessary.When you enter into a virtual world, with the snow on the mountains twinkling in the background and the vile monsters bearing down on you, you probably don't think often about the hundreds (if not thousands) of servers in place bringing the experience to you. But Ihora and his company sit in an interesting place-- in charge of keeping virtual worlds up and running for all of us to enjoy.[Via incgamers]
Tranquility is flipping out
It must be all those new crazy Mac and Linux people-- the EVE Online server, Tranquility, is going mad this afternoon. EVEMon is telling me it's up, it's down, and then it's back up again. Probably doesn't hurt that this is primetime in Europe right now, and of course the new Revelations 2.3 patch dropped today.But if you were planning on doing some mining or ratting anytime this afternoon, better make other plans. Tranquility is taking a beating right now, and it probably won't be super stable again until the Europeans head to bed. If it's like this today, we can't help but cringe at what might happen next month.
DS Daily: Handhelds and MMOs
We know a lot of DS owners who also play WoW MMOs. Are you among them? Back when this blogger was caught up in the throes of Final Fantasy XI, a quick bout of something-or-other on the DS was perfect filler for all the time spend waiting -- for airships, for people to gather for events, for time to pass, etc. Particularly convenient were "chore" games like Nintendogs or Animal Crossing. Waiting for everyone to get it together before you rolled out to fight a big nasty? Get your daily fruit-picking done while you wait. People still not there? Dig some holes. Etc.Now, it's been a while since we've been caught up in an MMO, but we're sure that some things haven't changed, and that waiting is still part of the drill from time to time. Were we alone in filling the moments with a second game, or do some of you DS owners take this route?
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Breakfast Topic: Downtime games
Last night, a warrior guildmate trying to score her Dungeon chest armor piece had her entire group drop before the final mob fight in Arcatraz. Four of us responded to her call for replacements and together we took down the giant cockroach from the planet Xenon, but we lost the priest in the final moments. The key to Arcatraz doesn't work from the inside and the priest didn't have the key. While the keyed rogue hearthed out and headed back to the zone entrance, the rest of us had to kill the time before we looted.First, we used the joke emote and commented on the lame repetitive jokes the human females have. Then we brought out the illusions (furbolg, druid bear form dancing, shrinking). Then came the pets (sleepy willy, sprite darter; etc.) Finally, the conversation turned to mat gathering for epic recipes. This would have been a perfect time for a mini-game. Eventually, the rest of our group arrived and, to the warrior's delight, her chestplate dropped. A happy dance later and we were off to return to whatever we were doing before.But this led me to wonder: what do you do during enforced downtime?
Blue Notes: Compensation and soulbinding
As we had all hoped, players with characters on the realms that received the 48-hour maintenance earlier this week will have a two-day playtime credit applied to their accounts:To compensate players for any inconvenience caused by the downtime experienced as a result of this week's 48 hour extended maintenance, we will be issuing a 48-hour time extension to all players who have accounts that are currently active on the following realms.Aggramar, Argent Dawn, Arthas, Azgalor, Bleeding Hollow, Bloodhoof, Burning Blade, Burning Legion, Durotan, Earthen Ring, Elune, Eonar, Eredar, Gilneas, Gorefiend, Kargath, Laughing Skull, Lihgning's Blade, Llane, Lothar, Madoran, Magtheridon, Malygos, Mannoroth, Medivh, Shadowmoon, Shattered Hand, Skullcrusher, Stormrage, Thunderhorn, Thunderlord, Trollbane, Warsong, Zul'jinAlways good to see Blizzard doing the right thing. In other news, a few items are going to become BoP in patch 2.2; existing instances of them will be soulbound to whoever has them when the patch hits. From Eyonix:In the next major content patch the following items will be flagged as Bind on Pick-up (BoP). They are currently not bound at all. If you possess one of these items, be sure it's on the character of your preference. Felbane Slugs Recipe: Elixir of Major Agility Formula: Enchant Bracer - Superior Healing Hellfire Shot So make sure you transfer those to whoever you want to have them as soon as possible. The background downloader being active, it's possible the patch could hit as early as next Tuesday (though I doubt it).
The biggest bargain in the AH
Now that the 48-hour downtime has begun for "selected realms", which unfortunately includes my home turf of Magtheridon, I feel I can release this delicious orange of wisdom for future downtimes. Blizzard GMs have confirmed that auctions do indeed continue during downtime. Specifically, this means that if you find an auction with an extremely low bid using Auctioneer and bid on it right before the server goes down, you can pick up that item insanely cheap. Hopefully, this method has netted me two stacks of Arcane Dust for the low, low price of 1 silver 10 copper. Since other realms may be suffering the same 48-hour downtime, this plan may help ease the pain of two days without WoW by knowing you're at least making some gold! Edited to fix link.
Patch 2.1.3 released
After having had some fun on the PTRs, patch 2.1.3 has gone live this morning. It's still pretty much a small bug-fix patch; here are the notes:World of Warcraft Client Patch 2.1.3General Read in-game mail will now be kept for thirty days instead of three. The Warlock spell Incinerate has had the performance of its graphical spell effect improved. The "Show Launcher" option has changed so that it now defaults to "On". Players will now see the launcher when running WoW by default. User Interface Improved the performance of conditional macros, slightly increasing the framerate. Fixed a crash triggered by many unit frame AddOns. Bug Fixes Fixed an issue with the movement of Archimonde's Doomfire. Fixed the wand missile art on most Shadow based wands to show the correct graphical effect. Infinity Blades will now despawn properly when the encounter with Kael'thas resets after a wipe. Gan'arg Underlings and Felhound Defenders are now properly classified as demons. Enjoy your not crashing as much and your better-performing-graphics Incinerate, when the realms go back up.[thanks, Kompost]
