Three months! Hooray!
December 2, 2009 § 11 Comments
My blog is three months old today. Yes, that’s right, today we’re getting all meta. I can’t help it. But since it seems like plenty of other bloggers self analyze their blogs, I feel justified in doing it myself. Ok fine, the truth is I couldn’t think of anything else to write about today. But I promise the post will be funny as well as informative. After all, learning is fun!
I haven’t been around long enough to go into some long treatise on the intentions of the blog juxtaposed against the actual posts and the degree to which they have succeeded in implementing those intentions. Besides, that’s totally boring. So instead, I’m going to list a few stats and talk about the interesting things people are searching that lead them to my blog.
Fake it ’till you make it!
December 1, 2009 § 11 Comments
I watched a movie last night that got me thinking. My eventual point will probably spark a few disagreements. That’s fine, not everyone has to agree with me. I won’t judge you for being wrong. Find out what the movie, and the point are, after the break.
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 25, 2009 § Leave a comment
I will be out of town for the Holiday weekend. For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving, I wish you a happy holiday.
If you can, and are so inclined, I recommend watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It take place in New York City but is broadcast nationaly. Why do I recommend watching it? Because I worked on it! I helped assemble the floats. In fact, that’s where I’m off to now, and I’m late, so I gotta go.
Happy Thanksgiving!
“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”
~Fizz
Realm Maintenance
November 25, 2009 § Leave a comment
Clearly I picked the red-headed step child of the Warcraft realms.
Over the past three days Quel’dorei has been playable for roughly 10 hours. This isn’t the first time Quel’dorei has had these issues; even when the rest of its battlegroup is up (Emberstorm), it’s still dead.
It’s not a huge deal, it just doesn’t surprise me that I manage to pick the realm with the worst track record.
Cest’la vie.
Edit: After going over the realm forum post about this situation I feel like I should make an edit to this post. While I am frustrated that my game play has been inconvenienced, I want to make clear that this post wasn’t meant to be a QQ *nerdrage* post. Simply a humorous observation that it seems like my specific realm goes down a lot (regardless of whether the whole battle group goes down or not).
But in addition I wanted to add a couple of thoughts, mainly directed at the posters in this thread. First, making blind accusations and wild assumptions and then stomping around like a 5 year old demanding answers is not the way to elicit a response. It just makes you look like an ass. It’s amazing the things people are suggesting in this thread as a cause to the outages. Everything from a power out, to crappy server hardware, to an earthquake in Seattle. Someone even suggested it might be the nefarious act of a computer hacker with a special hatred for Quel’dorei. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little speculation. Some of the ideas are fairly amusing (a bunch of gnome rogues broke in and stole all the data packets). When I take issue is when people start taking those speculations and start turning them into insults and accusations. Things like, “If Blizzard really cared about us they would build better data centers that didn’t have power failures.” Or “The people over at Blizzard are far to [stupid/lazy/bored/etc] to protect their servers from harm!” It’s just stupid.
Listen folks, just because the servers are down doesn’t mean Blizzard hates you. And, I’m sorry to burst the bubble of those of you who think that technology is infallible, hardware never breaks down, and servers never crash on their own without outside influence, but…sometimes things just break. It’s not negligence, or laziness, or anything like that. If a light bulb goes out in your house do you get mad at the power company for not sending you ‘clean’ power? No, because if you did they would laugh at you. And so would I.
And guess what? Sometimes, problems are tricky, and hard to find. Especially computer problems. Sometimes you think you’ve fixed it, and then find out you missed something else. So the fact that the servers went down multiple times is not evidence that the people at Blizzard can’t do their jobs efficiently.
Now that I’ve said that I would say that it isn’t completely unreasonable to want some form of compensation. I don’t necessarily think that unlimited free character transfers, free loot/badges, or a months worth of free game time is really reasonable, but hey, I certainly wouldn’t turn those things down if they came my way. I don’t even think that extending Pilgrims Bounty is necessary. From what I’ve seen, the achievements only take a day or two to accomplish, and you have a whole week (four days now) to do it. So, chill.
Anyway, just thought I’d clear that up.
“[Insert clever sign off phrase]”
~Fizz
Sometimes, we’re better off without.
November 24, 2009 § 2 Comments
Edit: Just so you know, today’s post doesn’t really have anything to do with Warcraft. I mean, I tried to figure out a clever way of integrating it, but I just came out awkward and a little trite. Nevertheless, I think it’s an interesting story so I’m sharing it with you here. Feel free to skip it though if you want. I won’t be offended.
The Cranky Old Gnome 