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Tuesday Morning Post: Held in thrall edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. This past week has been one of those weird ones; it wasn't exactly quiet, but there were just a bunch of little interesting news stories vying for attention. It's still not clear if any of them was "the big one," but if I had to pick one, I might go with the news out of the San Diego Comic-Con. Technically, all Blizzard did there was announce some new merchandise, but all the same, for us lore nerds, there were tasty little lore nuggets aplenty to be gleaned. That said, if you really want WoW info from of a con, you'll have to wait for BlizzCon. Luckily, the next one is coming up fast, and Blizzard's just released a new official BlizzCon site. If lore nuggets aren't your thing (or if you prefer to stay spoiler-free), have no fear. There's plenty of other news for you to catch up on. Downtime this morning is from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT again, so why not take the time to read up? We have our usual roundup after the break.
Tuesday Morning Post: Guy Love edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! I recently unlocked the Druids of the Talon dailies on my main, and while doing the daily quests, I've been getting an extra dose every day of the saccharine sweet friendship of Tholo and Anren. They're the Hyjal dream team, nearly always together, nearly always talking about each other. They've got a bromance going that's so huge you sort of wonder if maybe you should just remove the "b" already. I have to admit, it annoyed me at first. Night elves and tauren being all cuddly like that sort of bothered me. The Horde's evil, man. Tauren will betray you, Anren. They're attacking your home in Ashenvale even now! But you know, now that I've gotten to know them a little better, maybe it's not so bad. They're just keeping up a long tradition in the annals of WoW. There's been Asric and Jaadar, Thassarian and Koltira, and now Anren and Tholo. Maybe we could all learn to love each other a little more, just like them. So go ahead. Bask in the warm fuzziness of the bromance. And once you're done, keep reading for the latest WoW news from the past seven days. Downtime this week is from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you'll have plenty of time to get caught up.
iTunes Connect down for maintenance for most of July 13 (updated)
The Mac App Store, iTunes Store, and App Store have all been experiencing fairly serious connectivity issues over the past several hours. Many speculated this was a sign that OS X Lion was about to debut on the Mac App Store, despite plenty of evidence suggesting it won't hit until July 14 at the earliest. Now MacRumors has heard from developers that Apple intends to take iTunes Connect down for most of July 13 for "scheduled maintenance." iTunes Connect will be undergoing scheduled maintenance on Wednesday, July 13 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. PDT. During this time, iTunes Connect will still be available. However, pricing changes made between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT will cause the app to become unavailable for purchase until maintenance is complete, at which point the app will become available at the new price. To avoid interruptions to the availability of your apps, do not make price changes during this time. Lastly, customers may not be able to purchase apps in the Mexico, U.K., Australia, Switzerland, Japan or Norway storefronts during the scheduled maintenance. If this really is "scheduled maintenance," it seems odd that we're just now hearing about it, only nine hours ahead of the downtime. There's no official link between this downtime and the issues Apple's online storefronts have been experiencing today, but the timing certainly doesn't appear to be coincidental. This downtime will be an inconvenience to developers, just as today's intermittent App Store issues have inconvenienced potential buyers. None of this makes for a particularly inspiring prelude to the OS X Lion launch; Lion is around 4 GB in size, and with at least tens of thousands of downloads likely on the first day of availability, the Lion launch day is likely to be Apple's most bandwidth-intensive day ever. Here's hoping the company can get its affairs in order tomorrow. Update: MacStories postulates that the maintenance could be to adjust prices internationally, which have grown disproportionally with international currency fluctuations. An interesting theory, and we'll update you when iTunes Connect is done with maintenance.
Tuesday Morning Post: Choosing sides edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. We're a couple of weeks into patch 4.2, and by now, many of us should have made the ultimate choice. Who did you pick first in the battle for the Firelands? Was it the ancient, mysterious order of the Shadow Wardens, or was it the slightly less hippie than normal flying aces, the Druids of the Talon? I admit, it was a hard choice, but as much as I love Thisalee Crow, I had to side with the Shadow Wardens first. They were amazing in Warcraft III, and I have sort of missed them. They remind me of what the night elves used to be. I have to admit, I was sort of hoping Maiev would magically show up to lead them, proud and powerful, with maybe the ocassional dig at Malfurion for how much of a loser his wife is. Alas, it is apparently not be. But I hoped. Whichever choice you made, right now you have no choice but to wait out the usual Tuesday downtime. This week, it's from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. PDT. While you wait, you can catch up on all the news from the past few days, including guides to some of the new patch 4.2 Firelands and Tol Barad bosses. Check it all out after the break.
Tuesday Morning Post: The week after
It's been exactly one week since the launch of patch 4.2. As we've all come to expect from the high-end raiding community, raiders have already ground Ragnaros into the dust time and time again on normal mode. As of today, we'll start to see legitimate hard mode kills, and it should be interesting to see which guild comes out on top this time around. Most of us are content with much more humble progression, though. My guild finished the week at 3/7, having taken our usual Monday evening raid night off to celebrate some wacky thing called "the 4th of July." I think it's a holiday commemorating Gilneas' shrugging off the hegemony of the Alliance of Lordaeron and striking out on their own? I'm not really sure, honestly. Today's maintenance will be ongoing for a few hours more as of this posting, so if you're feeling particularly bored, don't worry! WoW Insider had some great content this past week that you can catch up on today.
Tuesday Morning Post: By patch day be purged edition
Last week, Ahune busted our instance servers. This week, Ragnaros gets the chance to do the same as we fully expect patch 4.2 to go live as of this writing. Now mind you, I'm not saying servers will crash, but hey -- might as well be prepared, right? Yes, I know that's the wrong raid boss's catch phrase, but I used my only "by fire be purged" joke for the title. As you might expect, downtime is currently scheduled for 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, so even if everything goes smoothly, you'll still have plenty of time to read up on patch 4.2 before the servers come up. I recommend starting with Mat's excellent patch 4.2 roundup. Then you can check after the break for a quick roundup of all the other good stuff from the past seven days. Don't stop once that's done with, though; we'll have plenty more piping hot patch 4.2 news and info for you in the coming days and weeks.
Instance servers busted, Lord Ahune to blame
In between the weather knocking out my power here in Milwaukee, WI, I managed to sit in the dungeon queues long enough to discover that ... they're broken! Thanks to Lord Ahune, instance servers are overall stressed beyond capacity despite Blizzard's constant upgrades over the years. Vrakthris It looks like overall it is due to the influx of everyone running the Fire Festival encounter, plus arenas, and normal dungeons. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2712201373 Our Realm Technicians are looking into it and making what adjustments they can to improve connectivity and performance. If more information becomes available we'll be certain to pass it along. source We have no ETA on when the situation will be resolved, but the most recent post in the above-linked thread was a mere 5 minutes ago as of this writing, so it continues to be an ongoing issue.
Tuesday Morning Post: One week more
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. It seems like we're all just waiting for patch 4.2 now. Everything's in place. We've been given an explanation of all the class changes. We even have a patch trailer. But as much as we were hoping it would drop this week, we have to wait one more week for them to work out the final kinks. Luckily, there's plenty of other news to keep you busy and keep the buzz going while you wait, such as that whole authenticator change. In addition, the Midsummer Fire Festival begins today, and we have an achievement guide for you. For these and more stories, check out our usual roundup behind the break. We only have to deal with rolling restarts this morning, but you can take those few minutes of downtime to read up, right?
EVE Online server offline due to DDOS attack
Just over an hour ago, the EVE Online login and website servers became unresponsive and went offline. A Twitter user purporting to represent the group responsible for the major PSN outage earlier this month is claiming credit for the EVE server outage. According to the user, the DDOS is part of a series of attacks today that has also shut down the Minecraft login servers and The Escapist magazine's website. CCP released an update on Facebook and Twitter stating that the issue is currently under investigation. "EVE Online and related services are currently offline and will return as soon as possible following investigation of some issues." CCP was unable to comment further on the outage but urges players to watch the EVE Facebook and Twitter feeds for further updates as they become available.
Tuesday Morning Post: Ready! Aim! Firelands!
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. With PvP Season 9 slated to end as early as June 21, and a new patch 4.2 update on the PTR that's marked for release, it's probably safe to say that we'll see the new patch before July comes. This week, we're just seeing some quick rolling restarts, though, starting at 5 a.m. PDT. While you wait for those to pass, why not catch up on the latest news? We have updates on the last few changes to go up on the patch 4.2 PTR, as well a look at what the developers are saying over on the official forums. Read on for all this and more.
Skype goes down globally again, Microsoft starts wondering if it bought wisely
Uh oh, Skype's experiencing its second big outage in the space of just a couple of weeks, as we're hearing reports from the UK, Netherlands, and yes, even Bulgaria, claiming the online communications service is down. Our own Skype clients are currently unable to move past the "Connecting..." status note, both on Mac OS X and Windows 7. While we've confirmed it in Europe, the issue seems to be affecting people all over the world. Nonetheless, Skype believes only "a small number" of us have been hampered by whatever's ailing it, and further details should be available soon. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: Our comments indicate issues are also being encountered in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Brazil, Belarus, and Croatia, among other places. Notably, we've also heard reports of Skype functioning in the UK, so it's not down universally -- that supposedly small number of affected users must simply be spread out very sparsely across the globe. Update 2: Skype is now saying that the "situation is improving," and we have also confirmed that the service is back up in at least some places where it was down before.
Tuesday Morning Post: Mass glee edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone, and welcome to the day after Mass Effect Monday. I have just one word for you: OMNI-BLADE. Okay, now that I have that out of my system, it's back to the WoW stuff. Don't get me wrong -- there's some pretty exciting stuff going on here, too. We have plenty of patch 4.2 news, as well as all the usual class, dungeon, profession, and PVP guides and discussions, waiting for you after the break. Scheduled maintenance this morning is from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you should have plenty of time to read it all.
Age of Conan merging U.S. servers today, EU tomorrow
It's server merge time in Hyboria. Age of Conan's launcher indicates that the U.S. servers are offline for up to 24 hours while the American PvP shards (Cimmeria and Tyranny) are consolidated. Tomorrow will see the European servers undergo a similar process, with Crom, Hyrkania, and Ishtar merging into a single PvE mashup and Fury, Aquilonia, and Stygia joining forces as the remaining PvP shard. Funcom has thrown up a server merge FAQ for your reading pleasure during the downtime, and in it you'll find details on everything from duplicate character names to duplicate guild names to the fate of guild-controlled battlekeeps. "Since build spots for battlekeeps are limited on each server, all build spots will be cleared and guilds will be reimbursed the resources for their battlekeep. This is to make sure that the guild gets the needed resources again and every guild gets the same chance," says the FAQ. Read up on all the details at the official AoC forums.
Tuesday Morning Post: Lazy Monday edition
Happy Tuesday Morning, everyone. As I write this, it is the end of a lazy Monday, where much of the USA is just finishing up some awesome barbeque and maybe a beer or two and generally having a grand old time. As you read this, the same Americans are dragging themselves back to work, grumbling all the way. Cheer up, everyone! Look at this way: Most of you probably only have a four-day work week now, which is actually pretty sweet. The big news this week was, of course, the news that tier 11 normal modes will be nerfed come patch 4.2, to allow more people to run the old content. If that bothers you, don't worry, you can run tier 11 heroics in their original unnerfed glory. If that still bothers you, Ol' Grumpy would like a word with you. Oh, and I guess there was that other story about gold farming prisoners. If you're not concerned about any of that old stuff, don't worry, there's plenty more to read and discuss from the past few days. Blizzard's apparently taking it easy this morning too, as we have nothing more than rolling restarts for downtime this morning. So before you ease back into your work week, why not read on?
Skype goes down globally, investigation underway (update: restored)
There's a pretty widespread outage of Skype going on right this minute, judging by the explosion of tweets relating to it. It's not universal, as we've been able to log in and use the internet communicator for both text and video chat, but something's definitely gone wrong. So far, we've noticed our OS X machines are ticking along just fine, but our Windows computers are not. Importantly, we had to upgrade one of our Windows desktops to "break" Skype, which indicates it could be a fault contained in the latest version, but then again, it could have simply been just a case of terrible timing. The iPhone and Android apps look to be unaffected, but skype.com is down and out. Skype is on the case right now and will have more details for us "soon." [Thanks, Manthan] Update: Skype has a solution for bringing tech savvy users back online. It requires deleting the shared.xml file, instructions for which are available for Windows 7, XP and Mac OS X (so yes, Apple computers have been bitten by the same bug too). A simpler fix is said to be in the works as well. Update 2: Looks like Skype is back to normal now. Phew! Update 3: If you're still experiencing issues, a Windows software update is now out and a Mac update will follow tomorrow.
Tuesday Morning Post: Gnome more edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. I'm going to be honest here. Downtime this week doesn't bother me. Do you know why? I'll tell you why. It's because I am just going to be mesmerized by gnomes. The gnomes have me in their grip, and they will not let go. Join me. If gnomes aren't your thing, there's plenty of other stuff here on the site to tickle your fancy, such as the unveiling of Nozdormu's (frankly pretty damn hot) mortal form. I want to know when we PCs get to look like him. Of course, downtime is minimal this week, lasting only one hour, but all the same, it's enough time to take a break and skim a few articles. Check after the break for our usual roundup.
Sprint network is down in some areas, SMS and voice call services affected (updated)
Uh oh, according to the handful of tips we've received, it appears that Sprint is currently having some technical problems on its cellular network in some states. Specifically, customers aren't having much luck with sending text messages, while some are also not able to make voice calls. But don't worry, the carrier's certainly aware of this issue and is already working on a fix, so hang tight and let your fingers take a break -- we'll let you know when things are up and running again. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: Here's a statement we got from Sprint: "We did have some disruption to Sprint SMS traffic earlier tonight, but it wasn't a complete disruption -- we lost partial capacity for about an hour. Engineers immediately began rerouting traffic and after about an hour things went back to normal. There is no significant voice disruption anywhere in the US except for a small part of our Sprint network in the Washington, DC area. That has since been resolved and had no relation to the SMS disruption."
Tuesday Morning Post: Archaeology supremacy edition
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. The patch 4.2 news continues fast and furious, but I'm going to take this opening paragraph to focus a little further. We received the answers to our professions questions for Ask the Devs #7 today, and there were a few doozies in there. Chaos Orbs will be going unbound, for one, perfect news for my two leveling tailors who want themselves tons of Dreamcloth. What really caught my eye, however, was all the archaeology love. As a pretty obsessed archaeologist, I am tickled at the idea of getting awesome dailies, being able to say "it belongs in a museum" instead of vendoring my finds, and being able to focus on those stupid dwarven sites so I can finally get that silly staff for my caster alts. As usual, there's even more awesome news to review from the past week, and not all of it is patch 4.2-related, I swear. Maintenance this morning is limited to rolling restarts at 5 a.m. PDT, but that still gives you at least a few minutes to get caught up. The usual list is after the break.
SOE begins restoring game services
Sony Online Entertainment has good news for fans of its dormant MMORPGs. Service restoration has officially begun for all of the company's online games, forums, and related websites as of May 14th. Earlier today, the company issued a press release with the details as well as a statement from Sony executive Kazuo Hirai. "Our main priority is the safety and security of our customers' personal information. We are making consumer data protection a full-time, company-wide commitment, and have applied enhanced security technologies so that our customers can feel protected and confident about playing our games," Hirai said. SOE provided details on its Welcome Back promotion earlier this week, and today's release provides links to a handy chart covering promotions for all of the company's games as well as a summary of the initial customer service notice and contact information. The promotions include free play time for former (not just active) subscribers to SOE's MMOs, making it a great time to return to an old favorite.
Tuesday Morning Post: Hot off the presses edition
Happy Tuesday Morning, everyone! The biggest news this week is, of course, the dawn of the Patch 4.2 PTR. The long-awaited Firelands raid is upon us, along with a bunch of other cool stuff. While Blizzard's dialed it back a bit on official previews as compared to last week, the dataminers have found a lot of delicious stuff to hold us over. If you don't want to partake of patch 4.2 just yet, don't worry, we have plenty of news, guides, and features for other things as well, including a nice little speculation post on the cast of the WoW movie and a guide to aging your elf. With downtime stretching from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT this morning, you should have plenty of time to read it all.
