The Cranky Old Gnome

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

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

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.

For those with time to kill

There is no post today.  Clearly you were misinformed.

So far, I like this feature. It’s informative enough to help you get where you are going, but lightweight enough that it doesn’t get in the way. You can turn it on/off with a simple mouse click, and I really like the new tracking and map feature. Blizzard has poached another addon, and is doing it well. It’s not very customizable (i.e. no level/zone/group filtering, etc), but if all you want is to know where your quests are, this is a way to do it without having to download and maintain an addon.

I also want to say that I love love the new map.  The fact that I can make it so it’s not full screen (meaning I can move my character and interact with things with the map up) was the main reason I went with a map addon in the first place.  So while there’s still not the same level of customization, I will definitely use it if I need to conserve memory.

The new LFG feature?  Well I’m going to have to wait till it goes live to address some of my concerns about it.  However, I do like the interface.  It’s easy to use and understand.  I hoped in and with a few seconds was whisked away to a random heroic (Halls of Stone to be exact).  But I realized I didn’t want to be in a random one.  I wanted to try Forge of Souls.  So, I bailed.  But the pulls hadn’t started yet and I was just dps-ing so I imagine a new replacement was found fast.  I got two debuffs from it.  One started from the time I entered the instance.  The other started from when I left.  Both lasted 15 minutes and did the exact same thing: made it so I had to wait to queue up for something else.

After you queue, you get a little eyeball icon attached to your minimap.  If you hover over it you will see 5 slots (tank, heals, 3 dps).  When those slots are filled up, the icon lights up.  It also tells you what you are queued as.  If you right click on the eyeball LFG icon you can select “leave queue.”

The one really annoying thing is that once your group is all together, if one person doesn’t click accept in however long, you get dumped back into the queue.

I’ll let you know what I think of the Forge of Souls…if I ever get in it.  This is the first time ever I’ve waited for a dps.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz