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European weekly maintenance: September 2nd 2009
It's nearly the middle of the week once more as well as the start of September. Can anyone else smell autumn yet? The days are getting cooler (thank you!) and the nights, darker. It will be the Harvest Festival in a couple of weeks with free food outside Ironforge and Ogrimmar and there are only so many days till Hallow's End and Christmas/Winter's Veil (sorry, I couldn't resist). However the onset of autumn, as well as being my favourite time of year, also means more time to play WoW. Just not on Wednesdays.This week Blizzard will be taking all European realms offline from 1:00am until 11:00am (CEST). However a selection of realms will be down for longer "to address instance capacity." These realms will be offline from 1:00am to 3:00pm on Wednesday and 3:00am to 7:00am (CEST) on Thursday:Agamaggan, Aggramar, Al'Akir, Arathor, Argent Dawn, Aszune, Azjol-Nerub, Bladefist, Bloodhoof, Bloodscalp, Burning Blade, Burning Legion, Crushridge, Daggerspine (oh boo, that's me), Deathwing, Doomhammer, Draenor, Dragonblight, Dragonmaw, Dunemaul, Emerald Dream, Sunstrider, Twilight's Hammer and Zenedar.
EU battlegroups experiencing language problems after mergers
Tipster Nimm writes in to let us know that several EU battlegroups have been having serious issues after mergers that occurred post-patch 3.02. The mergers have seen a number of battlegroups acquiring servers with other language-dominant populations, which has resulted in a number of French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian-dominant servers (among others) all in the same battlegroups. While this is probably necessary to a certain degree to guarantee equal Alliance/Horde populations for quick queue times, it's become something of a communication nightmare in battleground matches, particularly those with lots of players using Cyrillic characters. As the player Thoughtless from the Karazhan realm asks, "Can you imagine how hard it is to organise any sort of teamplay in AB with player ???????? from <????????> guild cha(t)ting "?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?????" in BG chat?" Nimm also notes that differentiating between ??????? enemy players is a nightmare.We knew that Blizzard was closing four EU realms (Stonemaul, Molten Core, Shadowmoon, and Warsong) and transferring remaining players to other realms in response to Russian player migration to Russian realms opened late summer 2008, and the problem's partially the result of that (which has already resulted in the inevitable "In Soviet Russia, battlegroups merge you" joke). A few amused people are rising to the occasion by translating such phrases as inc 5 schmiede (inc 5 blacksmith in German) or proposing a revival of Esperanto, but the Russian language pack would be the only possible solution for the ???? problem. There's been mention made that this is only a temporary fix on Blizzard's part to faction imbalances on battlegroups, but if you're on an EU realm that's seen a recent battlegroup merge, just be aware that Babelfish might be a useful tool in the near future.
Guildwatch doesn't have time to play games, either
And yet we play World of Warcraft all the time. You wouldn't think this tiny little tell, above, would cause a guild to rupture apart, but in fact it did exactly that -- Runforyalife sent this tell to someone, they posted it on the forums, and the next thing you know, the GM had kicked Run right out. For his part, Run regrets what he said (we think the GM is a little testy, and whoever posted the tell is at fault, too), but there's a point to be made here: even the little tells you send in game can cause big trouble.All this drama and more after the break. We've got good news too, though: there are guild downings aplenty, as well as a few recruiting notices (though it seems recruiting has slowed down with the Wrath beta in full force. If you've got a tip, send it to wowguildwatch@gmail.com as always. Click the link below to read on.
Realms are up
Good news, everyone! Several realms are up and running, with more coming online shortly I'm sure. This means you can get your World of Warcraft fix for the week starting now. And lets be honest, for any serious WoW player the week starts on Tuesday afternoon when the servers go up, and lasts until Tuesday morning when they go down.There is no patch 2.4.3 on the live servers yet - expect that in the next couple of weeks. Additionally, if there are any server stability issues to report on throughout the day you'll see a couple posts go up here.Happy Tuesday!And for the record, I've been wanting to use Buddy Christ in a post for a while, but haven't been able to find an excuse yet. Him seeming all happy for something (like the realms being up) felt like a good enough reason for me.
Extended maintenance for April 1st, 2008
There will be extended maintenance today, April 1st, on all the realms from 3:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. Hopefully this will fix many of the issues appearing over the past week – and just give the servers some breathing room. There have been many bugs reported, some of which you can read about in the various hotfixes that have been pushed onto the servers in the past week.Also, this downtime is not an April Fool's joke. It has been expected.Of course, we don't know what the Blizzard April Fool's joke will be yet. When we do find out, we'll get word up right away here at WoW Insider.
Extended maintenance extended
A fresh popup from the in-game breaking news section tells us that the extended maintenance has been extended until 12:30 p.m. PDT. They are hard at work getting patch 2.4 ready.If Blizzard is actually able to pull this patch off with these short down times, I believe it'll be the first one that they've not had to extend maintenance by hours and hours and hours. I for one am hopeful that they'll be able to do this, and am looking forward to some afternoon romping around Sunwell Isle.Our coverage, and your comments and tips, have been non-stop today! Keep checking back with us throughout the day and the evening for the latest. We'll be sure to post and let you know when the servers are up – whenever that may be.
Free character transfers
Blizzard CM Bornakk announced that the following free character transfers will be available from Wednesday, February 13th at 12:00 p.m. PST until Wednesday, February 20th at 12:00 p.m. PST. Of course, these times are fully dependent on Blizzard reaching their transfer goals.For the PvP servers, you can move from Illidan, Mal'Ganis, Skullcrusher, Smolderthorn, Tichondrius, and Warsong to the Anetheron server. For the PvE servers, you can move from Aman'Thul, Dath'Remar, Khaz'goroth, and Nagrand to the Caelestrasz server.Be sure to move as soon as possible! The transfers have been known to shut down early when Blizzard reaches their goals.
Character copy is up!
After a wild night of server issues, I decided to log onto my account page and try to copy my warrior over to the PvE test server. Lo-and-behold, after a few tries, the copy request went through! Horray!Of course, it says that the queue is 4 days long. I seriously doubt this, as this is often wrong. Hopefully later today many more of us will be happy little World of Warcraft campers with shiny new Sunwell toys.While you're waiting for your character to be copied over, you can check out all our patch 2.4 coverage. From our picture galleries of Sunwell Isle and goodies found while combing through the patch files, to the latest about the many new recipes and all that new loot, WoW Insider has got you covered!Update 12:22 p.m. EST: My character was copied over, in less than 12 hours. Some players are still reporting that they cannot get the copy screen to work, so it looks like Blizzard might have taken it down again. However if you're really itching to get on the PTR, it might be a good idea to check back every 15 minutes or so.
Lots of connectivity issues tonight [Updated]
The world server is apparently going up and down, and many servers are experiencing connectivity issues. Blizzard lists the realms that are not working well at the start up screen. But as I'm finding out over on Anvilmar, the problem has spread there too.According Isradun, multiple realms are being restarted now. There are additional posts on the WoW Realm Status forums that indicate they've already been at this for a while. However, as I've tested, no fix appears to be working perfectly yet.We'll keep this post updated for you with the latest.Update, 12:05 a.m. EST: Apparently the realm issues are subsiding, although no Blizzard update yet. Some reports are still trickling in of issues in the Nightfall and Reckoning battlegroups.Update, 12:18 a.m. EST: Blizzard saw what I said and decided to start crashing realms again. Multiple Tech Support Forum posts report things are not well, again.Update, 1:08 a.m. EST: Everything appears to be working now. Blizzard has removed the opening announcement, and the spam on the forums has quited down. Enjoy the night!
