Fortunately, this "mY Generation" show from Australian TV is a little more fair with WoW than the last bit we saw. Though the stereotyping of an entire generation and the video effects grate after a while, it's a generally better look at what it's like to be a World of Warcraft player. It would be nice to see, for example, these kids going out to a movie occasionally or interacting with other people (since most of WoW's population actually does that), and it would have been good to hear from more than just that scientific woman talking about the average playtime -- why all the focus on how many hours /played these people have and not what it feels like to play during those hours? But as far as mainstream reporting goes, it starts out as a pretty good description of what it's like to be a WoW player.
Part 2 and part 3 start to fall down, though, and by the time an intervention rolls around, the show gets a little more biased. I have to say, it would be fun to see a documentary done in this way for someone who watches TV 20 hours a week -- "We wanted to hang out with her, but she said the season finale of Top Model was on. She's a completely different person now!" Somehow, staring at a screen and doing nothing is still socially acceptable, but according to television itself, staring at a screen and interacting with other human beings isn't.
We've posted about this issue quite a few times, and strangely enough, though Tseric told us way back that things would never change, it just might be fixed. Oceanic players, including Chri who kindly tipped us about this, are reporting that their maintenance has been moved from the usual Tuesday evening prime time (which is early Tuesday morning for us in the US) to early Wednesday morning their time. In other words, they didn't have to suffer their servers going down during playtime this week.
Unfortunately, there's no official word on this yet, so we're not sure if it's just this week, or if Blizzard just didn't have to restart this servers this time around, or what it was. But we do know that Oceanic players are cheering loudly that they didn't have to suffer mistimed maintenance this week, so hopefully Blizzard is taking action as promised on this one.
So very good news for Oceanic players, especially since the lag and shutdowns have been a huge problem for them in the past. If this really is a official change, hopefully we'll see Blizzard confirm that they've finally responded to all the player problems down there.
It's a relatively painless Tuesday Morning this time around for those who play in what are the early morning hours at Blizzard HQ. This time, most US servers will just recieve a quick rolling restart at 5 AM PDT, about half an hour from now, which should result in no more than 15 minutes of downtime. However, there are some servers that will get 2 hours of downtime: Agamaggan, Azshara, Baelgun, Dark Iron, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Greymane, Kalecgos, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Sargeras, Staghelm, Twisting Nether, Ursin, and Wildhammer.
Also, here's something that should please a lot of Australian players: Their realms won't get the rolling restarts until 5AM AEST -- which translates to noon PDT. That should translate to lots of time for night owls to finish their raids before the restarts kick them off.
So in that 15 minutes to 2 hours of down time you'll have to go through, or if you're stuck at school or work, here's a few WoW Insider articles from the last week that are worth checking out. First, last week's major news and views:
The WoTLK Friends and Family Alpha is underway, and we have the leaked patch notes.
Death and Taxes, the premiere US WoW raiding guild, disbanded. That set a few of us to pontificating on the problems of raid guild drama here and here.
Gamers on the Street logs onto U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.
Oceanic players continue to snarl this week at continued server performance issues that cramp their play. Oceanic subscribers playing from the other side of the world have dedicated servers, yes – but the servers are physically located in North America, and no consideration seems to have been given to shifting maintenance and resource-intensive background processes to non-peak local hours.
Needless to say, a good number of Oceanic players are up in arms over spiraling post-2.4 performance issues. Blue reps continue to take the heat from red-hot flames, reflecting a continued determination to work through the problems. We decided to pop in on a couple of Oceanic servers themselves, away from the heat of the forums, to see what the player temperature seemed to be.
What does the Australian media have against World of Warcraft? First, they profile two people who have "had their lives ruined" by WoW. Now we have this wonderful article on terrorism by Natalie O'Brien in the Australian, which includes this paragraph: "Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments. Zuccato told an Australian Security Industry Association conference in Sydney that people intent on evil no longer had to travel to the target they wanted to attack to carry out reconnaissance. He said they could use virtual worlds to create an exact replica and rehearse an entire attack online, including monitoring the response and ramifications."
Uh ... okay. I have no idea how that would come close to happening with WoW. I can see how something like that would work with Halo or America's Army. But WoW doesn't allow you to generate your own content like Oblivion or such, so you couldn't create a functional model of a city or other terrorist target. We don't have weaponry that is "identical to real-world armaments", unless you count the bombs you can drop on Halaa.
The fine people of the WoW General Forum have picked this one up, suggesting that you wait for five sunders before assassinating a political leader and make sure to take the portal to Washington, DC. What do you think of this article?
The Australian media is at it again (why is Australia such a hotbed of this stuff?), with another report on how playing online games can horribly ruin your life. This time, they profile a guy named Mark Nichols, who apparently "played out his days in a virtual world... while his real life crumbled to pieces." Not surprisingly, he blames the game.
The best part is when he mentions WoW itself: "Then I heard about a game called World of Warcraft. That's when it all went south." Before he played WoW, he was apparently logging four hours a day in Half-Life, which is enough to make any sensible person reconsider what they're doing. But he was compelled (no choice involved, obviously) to install and play the game anyway. You can imagine the rest-- he loses his job (because, playing on a US server, he'd rather play during the day), loses his girlfriend, gains all kinds of weight, and generally becomes a mess. All because of the game. The last part is great, too: "Games have eaten away at my 20s and I was in stasis for a while," he says. "Hopefully it's not too late." As if the rest of his life will be completely ruined just because he chose to install a game.
"I do hate the term 'real life' when used in the context of 'gaming ruining real life.' WoW is real life. It's a real-life entertainment activity just like knitting, watching TV, going to the movies, gardening etc. I do wish people would stop saying their 'real-life' was falling apart. I'm sure if you watch too much TV or go to the movies for 12 hours a day it can't be good for you either or your relationships."
Well said. If you're playing WoW for 12 hours a day-- stop now. Just uninstall the game and walk away. Leave the rest of us to enjoy the game responsibly, and have a good time without the media buying the stupid line that it's the game's fault for ruining this guy's life.
Several of you sent in your midnight launch photos, and we managed to get a tiny cross-section of this event from around the world (any players from Europe or Asia care to send your photos? we'll add them in!) -- the US, Canada, and Australia. Click on for some photos from your launch events.
A few weeks ago we wrote about the difficulties encountered by Oceanic players -- maintenance and lag during their prime time hours as well as severe overcrowding on Oceanic flagged servers. Well, this Thursday, Oceanic players can look forward to the opening of a new Oceanic flagged realm (Dath'Remar, PvE), as well as free character transfers from all existing Oceanic realms (Aman'thul, Barthilas, Frostmourne, Jubei'thos, and Khaz'goroth). Will a single additional realm alleviate the issues occurring regularly on the other five realms? Come Thursday, we'll find out.
Perhaps you're not aware, but Australian and North American World of Warcraft players share the same realms. This has created all sorts of troubles for the Australian player approaching the game. Firstly, sharing a game-space with North American players means that many players are in a time zone far separated from your own, and finding instance and raiding groups during the hours when most of the players are sleeping is a problem. Secondly, regularly scheduled maintenance, set during a low activity time for those on the right continent, hits right during prime playing time. While, more recently, Blizzard has been rolling out realms specifically flagged "Oceanic" and set to Australian time zones, they're still located with the rest of the North American realms and subject to the same maintenance schedule. And with few Oceanic servers available, they've become flooded with players and subject to lag and instability. Whether Blizzard will be able to fix its Oceanic mess or not... well, we'll see.
We've 
The Australian media is at it again
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