Monthly Archives: April 2006

Lagfree Carnival of Gamers

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To Me Food Give April 2006’s edition of the Carnival of Gamers is available on n3rfed, cleverly illustrated with pseudo-screenshots of game conversations.

Don’t go read it now! If you’re going to play Warcraft tonight, save that link for the corpse run after Blackwing Lair’s Broodlord … y’know, when the instance starts to sputter and your casters use those famous last words, “I’m not sure this is going to work with the casting lag”, and you all decide to give it a try anyways because you don’t want to sit in the Suppression Room forever, so you dive in and shortly thereafter, your third tank starts getting his (or her) beatdown while the healers stare at perma-casting flash heals, and after the last rogue and hunter has been wtf-pwnt and you’re facing a run from the Searing Gorge graveyard through no fault of your own (this time), THEN take some time to read through the varied entries in this month’s Carnival.

I know you’ll be tempted to have the entire guild file an in-game petition, but reading the Carnival is a much better use of your corpse-recovery time and less likely to get your account banned for foul language.

I Need to Make a Sight-Seeing Alt

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World of Warcraft patched in weather effects one week ago and I have yet to see any of it. I just realized this.

Here’s the problem I think: in the past week, I’ve been in Ironforge, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Onyxia’s Lair, Zul Grub for enchants, and ummm, on a griffin flying to those areas.

Game weather was only patched into these ten zones:

* Elwynn Forest – don’t go there, fly through zone
* Tirisfal Glades – don’t go there
* Dun Morogh – again, don’t go, fly through
* Darkshore – pass through zone
* Alterac Mountains – sometimes I get dumped here after PvP so slim chance there
* Stranglethorn Vale – pass through on the way to ZG loot farm
* Feralas – don’t go
* Un’Goro Crater – don’t go
* Tanaris – don’t go
* Winterspring – don’t go
* Ahn’Qiraj – AHA!! We usually go here, not this week so far. My big chance!

I’m not saying they should patch weather into Blackwing Lair; I’m just saying I need to get out more. Geographical isolation appears to be another hallmark of a raiding guild: “Weather? What weather? They have weather in this game?!?!?”

Here’s some other markers of a raiding guild, in a small discussion on the Warcraft forums, “Definition of a hardcore raiding guild”. As for my own guild, we don’t know EVERYONE’s cell phone number and earned vacation days is whacked (why in the world would you need a vacation?), but we qualify on just about every other definition mentioned in that thread.

Occasionally we’ll have a short recruit drive. Usually it’s for priests and druids, you know how that goes if you’ve ever been in a raiding guild — always the healers burning out. Anyways, our recruit team will sometimes describe our guild as a “Friendly, family-type raiding guild”. The fuck? Ya, we’re a family like the mafia is a family.

They should just be blunt with people: we raid, ALOT, and you’ll never get to see the game weather again.

Fixing Azeroth

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UPDATE: The migrations and downtime have been rescheduled for Thursday, April 6 at 12:01 AM PST.

Very little of this makes sense to me — mostly that 20+ realms have to be downed for (up to) 24 hours with four other realms migrating to new server hardware — but maybe it’s something that only hardware nerds would understand. Condolences and congrats as follows, per Blizzard drone, Ordinn:

First off, we’d like to thank everyone who helped us test our new hardware on the public test realms over the last month. The testing allowed us to move forward ahead of schedule with the improvements outlined at the beginning of March: (link). We were able to bring the new World of Warcraft site live more than a week early, which in turn allowed us to open 12 new realms over the last two weeks.

The next step in our ongoing efforts to increase game performance is to migrate a set of realms to the new site this Wednesday, April 5, beginning at 12:01 AM PST. The migration could take up to 24 hours to complete, so we will be crediting players with active accounts who had characters on these realms as of 12:01 PM Monday, April 3. The realms that will be affected are listed below.

The goal with this realm migration is to further balance our player population between multiple World of Warcraft sites. Our estimates about the noticeable impact of this individual procedure are conservative, but it is nevertheless a necessary step that will then allow us to move forward with the subsequent portions of our overall plan.

Following the migration, we plan to next week offer character transfers from existing realms to fresh realms located at the new World of Warcraft site. These transfers will allow additional players on realms that had been experiencing intermittent performance issues to continue their character progress on the new hardware. This will in effect help us further disperse our population and continue improving performance on our most severely affected realms.

We’ll provide you with additional status updates as often as possible as we continue implementing the plan we announced this past January (link).

Realms that will be down but not migrate:
Aggramar
Andorhal
Anetheron
Burning Blade
Burning Legion
Dentarg
Duskwood
Earthen Ring
Eonar
Eredar
Executus
Gilneas
Gorefiend
Haomarush
Kargath
Laughing Skull
Lightning’s Blade
Llane
Malygos
Scilla
Shadow Moon
Steamwheedle Cartel
Thunderhorn
Thunderlord
Turalyon
Ysera
Ysondre
Zuluhed

Realms that will migrate:
Archimonde
Dalaran
Khadgar
Mal’Ganis

Yes, that’s in a little less than 12 hours from now. Ordinn didn’t recommend this, but if I played on one of those realms, I’d empty game mailboxes, pull my auctions, make sure all my e-souls were firmly attached to their e-bodies and I’d log off early.

Accidents will happen and screenshots, petitions and emails have never saved me.