Category: World of Warcraft

[World of Warcraft] With the weekend filled with plans away from home, I did not have any time for online gaming. When I finally got home tonight I decided to spend a little time back in WoW. It felt good to be back.

I levelled my Undead Rogue to 23 (that’s him in the title above) and for a change of pace I played a female Night Elf Druid up to level 5. The Druid is on a totally different server than my normal server. I started her on a Role Play server. I don’t normally play female characters so this may be interesting. It was one of those cases where I had a character already envisioned in my mind and the name I came up with did not feel right as anything other than a female. I don’t really plan to play the Druid too much, but I just wanted to try something different tonight.

On another note, well wishes go out to my good friend Inhibit. He’s been fighting off illness for a little while now. Hope you feel better soon, bro.

[World of Warcraft] I have been logging into WoW every day that I could, just to see if I can. So far so good. If they keep the servers up like this before my account expires, I will cancel my cancel. Or something like that…

[World of Warcraft] I read over the patch notes for the upcoming (when??) patch for WoW. I’m glad to see it is very long. I’ll make some comments here on the notes and their impact on me and my desire to reactivate my account:

“Diremaul, a new dungeon for players level 56-60”: No impact at all. There is a lot of high level content out there for me.

“Meeting Stones are located outside of each dungeon to help players find a group to adventure with in the dungeon.”: Well, this looks interesting. After playing in the CoH static group I am really finding out how much I am tired of soloing. If this makes it less painless to find a group for me, that is a plus. However, it still leaves me at the mercy of stupid players.

“All dungeons now have a cap on group size to limit the number of players that may enter the dungeon.”: No impact.

“General”: Nothing here impacts me.

“PvP”: No impact here either.

“Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Warlock, Warrior changes”: No impact to me.

“Rogues changes”: Nothing here seems like a bid deal to me as a Rogue. I did not have my lockpicking up to a point that I was struggling for ways to improve it, but it is nice to see more ways added.

“Shaman changes”: All changes seem minor, nothing makes me want to play my Shaman.

“Monster changes”: Nothing here appears to have an impact on my play and levels.

“Item changes”: Holy cow I did not know there are so many items in this game I have never heard of. Since I never heard of them, the changes really mean nothing to me.

“Profession changes”: Sama as the item changes.

“Raids and Dungeons”: No impact to me.

“Quests”:Lots of changes there which is good, but most of them are above me so I had nothing to complain about before. I do like the added Dungeon description in the quest log.

“Pets, Faction and Reputation”: Meh.

“User Interfaces changes”: Lots of nice stuff here. Improvements are good to see. I still don’t understand the removal of /bug from the game. It seemed like a nice painless way to report a bug. How many people would do that, but would not bother to go to the website later to report it? I bet a lot of people would.

“World Environment”: Nothing really of note to me.

“Flight Paths”: Nothing of note here either.

“Bug Fixes”: Lots of them, and good to see. However the most important issue for me: server instability and downtown is not listed in the notes at all.

Account will remain inactive until I see the improvements in the servers that I want to see.

Saw this on the World of Warcraft tech support forum:

We addressed an issue that was preventing players on a select number of realms from logging into the game correctly. However, if you are still experiencing problems logging into your realm, we want to provide you with a quick and easy work-around.

First, open your config.wtf (located at the default, or where you chose to install the game C:\Program Files\WorldofWarcraft\WTF) with the Windows Notepad, and delete the “realmname” entry that appears. Once you have done so, please log into the game again, this time choosing a realm that is separate from the one that was giving you trouble. At this point you should be successfully connected and will be free to select your realm which previously appeared inaccessible. While it may not fix your problem the first time, please keep trying, choosing different realms in place of your old one each time.

I don’t even know what to say about a fix like that.

[World of Warcraft] Payment on this account has been canceled‚ however this account can be used for playing until the current subscripton period ends.

I really hope they get their servers working some day so I can come back and feel good about it. But I felt I had to do something. I won’t pay for this level of connectivity any more.

Blizzard says they are #1.

With a subscriber base of more than 750,000 players and peak concurrency of over 250,000 users, World of Warcraft is now the biggest online game in North America.

Last night I logged into City of Heroes but my friend was not playing. So, I decided to check in World of Warcraft for a bit. It gets stuck on the authentication screen. So I give it 15 minutes and try again – same problem. I go back to CoH and play solo for a while. An hour later I try WoW. This time I get past the authentication screen, however it gets stuck at the loading characters screen. Back to CoH. An hour later, I try WoW one last time. Finally, I got in. Three minutes later the screen locks up and I get disconnected from the server.

I log back in only to see that the world is down. Five minutes later I get in and the general chat was filled with people saying “another disconnect? wtf?”. Five minutes later another disconnect and I’m done for the night.

Blizzard rep comments on the forum: “Players on certain realms may get disconnected from their realm briefly in a continent dump.” Oh I see, thanks. Er, what?

I should mention that I had no crashing issues with CoH this time.

[World of Warcraft] I was told that I could level my rogue’s lockpicking skill by picking a locked chest that is in a pirate ship near Ratchet. I went in and started picking the lock. Going along smoothly until I stopped at 110 skill. I was told you can get up to 175 here but I appeared to be bugged. I tried about 40 more times in a row with no skillup and decided to petition the problem.

The GM responded later on that it is working as intended. Nuts to that, I thought. Heck, the lock was still yellow to me which tells me I should still gain skill on it. I totally knew he was wrong.

I decided to read the WoW forums today to see if I could prove the GM wrong. After digging through 29 pages of discussion on lockpicking I found my answer: Lockpicking is capped at 5X per level. I am level 22 so 5×22=110. Damn, it *is* working as intended!