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Tuesday Morning Post: Cataclysmic content edition
Happy Tuesday Morning, everyone. While it was not perhaps a deluge, we did get a few tidbits of Cataclysm news this past week, beginning with the latest Twitter Developer Chat, where the devs dropped hints on such sundry topics as the purification of the plaguelands, cross-realm mail and raids, submarines, a new caverns of time instance, the new class/race combos, and the dance studio. Then we got a very nice info-dump with an informative post on the way statistics will work in Cataclysm. We've already started breaking down what the stat changes mean to various classes and specs, and if your class hasn't been analyzed yet, chances are it will be today or tomorrow. Combine that with some new info from the Patch 3.3.3 PTR, and Blizzard's really packed on the news this cycle. It's only rolling restarts this morning, but don't you deserve a break anyway? Check out our roundup of all the news after the break while you wait for your server to restart and for Ghostcrawler to deliver your moose.
Rolling restarts for January 23rd, 2010
It looks like we have some quick play disruption coming our way this Saturday morning, as Blizzard has announced rolling restarts for all realms at 5 AM pacific, or Noon pacific for Oceanic Realms. Judging by Ghostcrawler's words in a recent thread, this is likely meant to jump start the resilience hotfix. Either way, if you're one of those folks weird enough to get up early on a Saturday morning, you may as well grab another hour or sleep or so, since you may not be able to jump on WoW for a 15 minute window. There's still no word on Tuesday's downtime, so maybe we were spoiled by the past couple of weeks. Then again, maybe they're just seeing if they can get that minor patch ready for a release this week too. Either way, keep it here, and we'll keep you informed.
Tuesday Morning Post: The BlizzCon cometh edition
Good Tuesday morning, everyone! So it looks like we have at least one more week of Patch 3.1. But here's the good news: We're just about to hit August, and August is BlizzCon month! And of course, I know you're all looking forward to the premiere event of BlizzCon, the WoW.com meetup. That's right, we're back and better than ever, and we got a sweet new spot for the shindigs. You can see all the details here and then proceed to make your plans or be jealous as your ability to attend dictates.But seriously, we still got a ways to go until BlizzCon, and hopefully a shorter ways to go until Patch 3.2, but in the meantime, we have a few rolling restarts and a handful of short downtimes to get through. With that in mind, here's some news to keep you busy while you wait for your server.
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The Tuesday Morning Post: Later, losers!
Danny Whit is usually the one sitting here writing this thing up for your maintenance day entertainment, but he's out of the office today. Where is he? I wish I knew. Last time I saw him he put on a pair of shades, gave me a thumbs up, then jumped out of our office window and landed on a sweet hog three stories down. He yelled something in Greek, then rode off into the sunset. So... here I am. The craziest part of it all? The window was closed. He didn't even have the decency to open it and now there's a draft. Thanks a lot, Danny.Servers are down, and will remain down for a number of hours as patch 3.1.3 rolls out and many servers receive significant hardware upgrades. As long as you're here, you might as well make the most of it. In case you've missed it, here's the best of WoW.com from the past 7(ish) days.Hot News and Features Blizzard revealed a few big details regarding the upcoming Patch 3.2, entitled Call of the Crusade. Speaking of Patch 3.2, it's going to bring us one of the most anticipated updates to the game in the last year or two. New Druid forms! Okay, okay, so only some people were looking forward to those, but still. Totally anticipated. First they revealed the Tauren bear forms, and then the Night Elf bear forms. New cat models still TBA. WoW Europe now has the option to merge their World of Warcraft accounts with a Battle.net account! Speaking of our European friends, some of them are now experiencing cross-language battlegroups.
Tuesday Morning Post: Three days' grace
The one little problem with having a nice 3-day weekend is that getting back into gear after it's over can be a bit tough. But here we are, back on the chain gang, nose back on the grindstone, and all that good stuff. Anyway, there are rolling restarts, as well as some minor maintenance on a handful of servers. If you're reading this from work though, it probably doesn't matter as much, since you can't play WoW regardless. Unless you're one of those lucky dogs that has a job that lets you play WoW. In which case you may have trouble doing that this morning. Okay, anyway, if you're on those servers or can't play for some other reason, you'll want something to pass the time until you can play, which is where we come in. Here's a roundup of some of the best and most interesting stuff from the past 7 days or so:
Maintenance and Restarts for May 26th
We have a maintenance announcement for Tuesday morning, but it's a little weird, so bear with me here. First, starting at 1 AM Pacific, the Authentication server will undergo maintenance. That means if you have a battle.net account, you won't be able to log in. But hey, we can hope this'll take care of all those unable to log in problems later, right?So anyway, that lasts about 4 hours, until 5 AM Pacific, at which time rolling restarts will begin for all realms, lasting for no more than fifteen minutes per realm, you know the drill. But wait, there's more! A handful of servers will be going down for a 3 hour maintenance window from 5 AM to 8 AM Pacific. They are as follows:
Rolling restarts for April 23rd, 2009
Another round of rolling restarts will be hitting realms in a few hours, starting at 5 AM PDT. Rolling restarts tend to be relatively painless, so you can probably expect your home server to be back up within a few short minutes unless they're doing something other than the simple restarts.These restarts have been happening very frequently lately, but as long as they're helping realm stability I really can't complain. For all the trouble Patch 3.1 has been, they're certainly working pretty hard to get things under control, and I can respect that.
Tuesday Morning Post: Seriously, You should read this book edition
If I may be allowed to indulge in a little self-aggrandizing on this fine Tuesday morning, I'd like to posit that the best article written this past week was posted on Sunday and written by me. This article is the review of Christie Golden's new Warcraft novel, Arthas. Now, before you accuse me of the sin of Pride, I should say that Alex totally agrees with me, so it's all good. Besides, I had some awesome inspiration courtesy of the book. But my point is, you should go read the review, then go pre-order your copy. It's a pretty good book. If you're a lore or fantasy fan, there's a pretty excellent chance you will not be disappointed. That said, the release date is still a couple weeks off. This means that, in the meantime, you have no Arthas book, so you'll probably want to do the next best thing and read some WoW Insider, like during that 15 minute window while your server's down from rolling restarts this morning. Or longer if you're on one of the servers that may or may not get extra downtime. Here's a few reading suggestions:
Realm maintenance for March 10th
We've had clean and easy rolling restarts on Tuesday mornings more often lately, but this week we won't be so lucky.. The servers will be going down for maintenance at 5:00 AM PDT and are estimated to be back online at 11:00am PDT. Will servers be back up on time this week? Maybe, maybe not! We can certainly hope so.As usual, if anything unexpected unfolds throughout the maintenance period tomorrow, we'll be here to let you know what we know, which might not be much more than you know but you never know, you know?
Tuesday Morning Post: On a scale of 3.1
It's been about a week since the 3.1 PTR dropped, and we've already had one small PTR Update and a couple more patch note updates. We haven't seen any major earthshattering new patches yet, but hey, we've had more than enough juicy new stuff to mull over anyway. We're expecting a new round of class changes to hit the PTR soon, but this morning, it's sort of quiet, especially on the live server side, where all we have is a few rolling restarts. Yeah, but anyway, on with the topic of the week, and likely of the next few weeks, patch 3.1. You'll want to keep our guide to 3.1 bookmarked if you haven't already, and after the break, you can check out a list of some the best articles from the past week, both 3.1-related and otherwise.
Rolling restarts for Tuesday, March 3rd
Tomorrow's downtime should be minimal, with only rolling restarts announced for the morning starting at 5:00 AM PST. Realms should be down, they say, no longer than 15 minutes, so hopefully that will prove true!Maintenance or not, WoW Insider will be here all day as usual. Should something go wrong and we're left serverless for awhile, or you're simply locked at work (or school) for the day, we'll have something to keep you busy and help you slack the day away. Why? Because we love you, baby.
Tuesday Morning Post: The calm before
It's now been one week since patch 3.0.8a was deployed, and things are at least calmer around the game. Whether that's because the bugs were actually fixed or because people are just tired of complaining about them is a whole other issue. But at the least, this week will probably be another uneventful one. Of course, the Month of February itself will actually end up being a bit busy, as you can see in our February event roundup. Whether we'll add a 3.1 PTR to that list of events remains to be seen, but here's hoping.Whatever else, there's not going to be much going on this morning. downtime is a set of simple rolling restarts starting at 5 AM Pacific. Proudmoore and Tichondrius players do have to suffer through an extra hour's downtime, though. Luckily, you have WoW Insider to browse while you wait. As usual, I've rounded up a list of some of the best stories and content from the past seven days after the break.
The restarts, they will be rolling
In game announcements have let us know there will be rolling restarts tomorrow morning. The restarts will happen at 5:00 a.m. PST / 8:00 a.m. EST. Each realm is usually down for only 15 minutes.There will be additional realms that will be down for longer maintenance. Currently Tichondrius and Proudmoore are listed as needing to be down for an extra hour. Additional realms will eventually be listed on the official Service Status Forums, although nothing is up there just yet.We'll update this post, and keep you updated throughout Tuesday morning if this turns into anything else other than just a restart.
Keep your fingers crossed, rolling restarts on the way
All realms are undergoing a series of rolling restarts, with each realm going down for approximately 15 minutes. The entire process should conceivably last no more than an hour. I suppose we all saw this coming considering the stability issues realms have been experiencing since Patch 3.0.8 dropped yesterday. Most realms continually crashed because of a bug in Wintergrasp but have since stabilized at the cost of disabling the battle for the zone.Hopefully these restarts fix most of the issues that came with the latest patch -- I kind of want to actually win Wintergrasp without taking down the entire server. A series of restarts fixed the Death Knight bug yesterday, so we hope to see Azeroth return to normal after this.
Rolling restarts for Tuesday, December 30th
You can all rejoice, because we have no maintenance to worry about this morning. According to the login screen, the only thing we need to worry about is rolling restarts. It's a very nice change from the last couple of weeks of extended maintenance, so take advantage of it!Of course, that doesn't mean a whole lot for us here at WoW Insider. We'll still be here all morning, giving you guys (and gals) at work or school plenty of distractions to occupy your day. Here's hoping that everything goes smoothly and the servers actually restart, rather than just roll. Like, on the ground. You know, broken. Get it? ...No? Crap.
Breakfast topic: Forgive and forget?
Wrath has been out for about a month now. We were excited about the game, but boy were we angry. We had restarts, extended maintenance, server queues, and whole host of other anomalies. Blizzard's solution was to address as many issues as they could and give us each three days of credit. There are still problems with random disconnects, server lag, and some other bugs. There's still work to be done, but it's getting better.The one thing that I'm still very frustrated with is the evade issue. This seems to happen to me far more frequently than it did pre-Wrath. I hate it when a mob resets just as it would die, particularly when it's an elite. It always reminds me of Jester diving below the hard deck. I have nothing to do but try to kill the mob again or move on to another one that's (hopefully) not evading.Over all though, I'm happy with Wrath of the Lich King. There are some dreadful quests, but some awesome ones as well. A lot of things are reused, but many are new as well. I'm over being mad and back to enjoying the game. But Blizz, if you're reading: please stop the mobs from bugging out and going home.Now readers, it's your turn: Do you forgive Blizzard yet? What will it take to make you happy with WoW?
The Queue: Bloody rare
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.We had no maintenance today, what a pleasant surprise! Rolling Restart Tuesdays are always a nice breath of fresh air. Or wait, was that what regular maintenance Tuesdays are for? Hmm. I can't keep this 'fresh air' concept straight at all so let's just start on the Q&A. Etcee asked...Can you explain exactly how rare spawns in Northrend work? I've heard multiple theories - from "Every 20 or so hours for spawn," to "Only one rare mob is alive at a time, and the next one doesn't spawn until that one dies," etc.
The Tuesday Morning Post: It's quiet. Too quiet.
So. Here we are. It's coming up on a month into the expansion and... I don't know, it's sort of quiet. Well, I mean, not too quiet. We have plenty of stuff to do. About half of you are still trying to make it to 80. I say you when I mean us, because I haven't quite made it there myself. In my defense, I'm leveling a Death Knight, so I started handicapped. But anyway, I mean quiet as in, there seems like we should get some earth shattering news soon. Maybe a 3.0.4 PTR if nothing else. But I shouldn't complain, we have a whole expansion to keep us busy for a while. Still, I'm going to make a prophecy anyway. 3.0.4 before the new year. You heard it here first. In the meantime, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with news from the past week. You can read while your server's down for the 5 AM rolling restarts:
Breakfast Topic: Realm (in)stability
In general I've been pleasantly surprised at how stable my own realm has been since the launch. Yes, we've had queues, restarts, lag, and yes, we've also had an insanely annoying subgroup of people with absolutely no scruples over stealing quest spawns (to be fair, this isn't Blizzard's fault, unless you count their refusal to allow us to kill members of our own faction. I have been sorely tempted over the last few days). But in general, play has been pretty trouble-free apart from the crowds you'd expect at all the usual quest hubs, and the response to the expansion has been universally positive from everyone to whom I've spoken. Wrath, at least on my own realm, has gone live to a very happy and excited bunch of players.But with a look at WoW Insider's inbox, I'm not sure it's worked out that way for everyone. We've seen a spate of recent complaints about server crashes and giant queues, and this weekend we've gotten a lot of them from people playing on Oceanic servers particularly (one of our readers, James Flannery, wrote in to tell us about an Oceanic server queue that went from 86 to 161 minutes during the half hour that he'd already been waiting). While in general I think it's safe to say that Wrath's launch went much more smoothly than Burning Crusade's did, I'm not sure everyone's benefited despite Blizzard's efforts. Possibly it's a function of Wrath being even more popular than anticipated in certain regions. If you play on multiple servers, which realm(s) seem to be doing best and worst? Have queue times (if they existed) and server lag improved for you?
Rolling restarts for selected realms this afternoon
Fresh from the news bulletin upon login is an announcement of rolling restarts for a handful of realms this afternoon. At 12:00 noon PDT the realms of Dreadmaul, Caelestrasz, Nagrand, Aman'Thul, Barthilas, Thaurissan, Dath'Remar, Frostmourne, Khaz'horoth, and Jube'Thos will be going down for restarts.Many people have still continued to experience connectivity issues and major lag since patch 3.0.2 dropped nearly two weeks ago. Instances seem to be a particular problem with people not being able to zone in, getting disconnected upon loading, or generally having issues with mobs and other objects appearing correctly.I wouldn't be surprised to see more realms added to this list today, and perhaps some extended maintenance (if not an outright patch) this upcoming Tuesday.
