Category Archives: World of Warcraft Journal

The Pale Light of the Greater Moon

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Lunar MoongladeBy now, you’ve probably read about the World of Warcraft’s Lunar New Year’s Festival, loosely based on the Chinese New Year’s celebrations.

The cities are redecorated, there are kinky quest rewards to be had, and best of all, there’s a teleport system included with your Lunar Festival Invitation linking the major cities … available to you once every 10 minutes, 20 minutes if you have to pass through Moonglade on your way. (Hearthstone is available once every 60 minutes, do the math.) I love kinky quest rewards as much as the next guy, but I LOVE practical, even if I’m only shaving a few minutes off travel time.

Screenshots of the decor and the sights are available in a Flickr Lunar Festival photo set.

Take some time this weekend to see the Lunar sights for yourself. Spectacular.

I want some of what Blizzard is smoking..

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In yet another transparent attempt to convince the masses that they have any idea on how to curtail the queue’s plaguing most realms, Blizzard has limited character creation on quite a few servers:

For the next several days we will be limiting character creation on the following realms to alleviate recent performance issues and hopefully decrease queue times.

Previously, I had mentioned that this was due to Ahn’Qiraj events and ‘Pilgrimage’. This was not entirely accurate. The realms being addressed with this measure have been seeing a great deal of traffic recently and we wish to relieve some strain during prime time by restricting character creation on these realms.

I apologize for any confusion this may have caused. The list remains the same, which may make things more understandable in this new context.

Aggramar
Archimonde
Blackrock
Burning Blade
Burning Legion
Cenarius
Dalaran
Deathwing
Doomhammer
Earthen Ring
Eonar
Eredar
Frostwolf
Gilneas
Gorefiend
Hyjal
Icecrown
Kargath
Kel’Thuzad
Khadgar
Kil’Jaeden
Kilrogg
Laughing Skull
Lightbringer
Lightning’s Blade
Llane
Mal’Ganis
Malygos
Mannoroth
Medivh
Ner’zhul
Proudmoore
Shadow Moon
Silver Hand
Thunderhorn
Thunderlord
Tichondrius
Uther

Curiously some of these realms really don’t have major queue problems, yet others with 600+ daily queues are absent from the list. Since Blizzard does its best to never provide any actual information, I can only assume they are using some flawed method to determine which realms are most in need of relief.

I hope nobody is naive enough to believe this will have any effect on the queue’s and that barring massive hardware and bandwidth upgrades the queues and latency issues will never be gone. A little useful information would have gone a long way to help Blizzard’s image in our eyes, sadly they have once again dropped the ball.

(Archive of forum link 1/23/06)

The AQ Hangover

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Here’s the fallout from last night’s grand tour of Warcraft’s Medivh realm … no new character creations on Medivh or Mannoroth (currently 2nd place in the war effort). Caydiem wrote:

We’re aware that many realm communities are becoming excited as the War Effort nears completion. Several players, wanting to see the event, have created alternate characters on the realms closest to completion and have trekked out to Silithus in order to bear witness. While we respect your enthusiasm, we do need to take steps in order to allow the realm communities who have worked for this completion to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

As such, we are temporarily shutting down character creation on Medivh and Mannoroth. If you have characters there already, you will be able to create new ones without a problem, but those without characters will not be able to create new avatars on these realms until the event is complete. We may implement additional measures as the situation warrants. This should hopefully cut down on the latency experienced by large crowds and allow the industrious communities of these two realms to experience the opening of the gates.

Keep in mind, also, that there’s more to see than just Silithus when the event unfolds — there’s no need to gather all in one place. Keep your eyes and ears out for events around the world!

‘Tis true! There are other events/scripts around the world after the turnins are completed. You just can’t go see them on Medivh or Mannoroth unless you’re already a resident. I would have gone to watch the NPC march out of Orgrimmar, for example, but at level six, I was kinda short on cash to catch a flight outta Silithus.

The AQ War Effort:

The War Effort Progress Chart — the update lags actual completion by several hours (bleh)
AFK Gamer AQ Convos — Flickr set of the convos from last night’s War Effort completion on Medivh
AFK Gamer Medivh War Effort — Flickr set of the tailgate party on Medivh

A few more shots will be available later today on Flickr as I edit and upload.

EDIT: Other screenshots from last night to view at Gaming Horizon as collected by Tim Grube, aka Psxtim, not a very RP-ish name at all if I must say so. P.S. There’s the AFK Gamer team hanging out in the herd of cattle. Won’t see us running around with fancy mounts and repaired equipment at these events. We’re phantoms.