Good news, everyone! Several realms are up and running, with more coming online shortly I'm sure. This means you can get your World of Warcraft fix for the week starting now. And lets be honest, for any serious WoW player the week starts on Tuesday afternoon when the servers go up, and lasts until Tuesday morning when they go down.

There is no patch 2.4.3 on the live servers yet - expect that in the next couple of weeks. Additionally, if there are any server stability issues to report on throughout the day you'll see a couple posts go up here.

Happy Tuesday!

And for the record, I've been wanting to use Buddy Christ in a post for a while, but haven't been able to find an excuse yet. Him seeming all happy for something (like the realms being up) felt like a good enough reason for me.

I know that I wasn't the only one that did a double take today when I opened up WoW and saw the "Breaking News" maintenance announcement that included a tidbit about the realm Dreadmaul undergoing hardware upgrades for Wrath of the Lich King.

I find this interesting for several reasons. First, the expansion hasn't even had a release date announced yet and they're already making hardware changes. Now this is obviously a good practice – getting ready for things before hand – but then again, if it's not going to be released in October / November of this year all these hardware changes could be done later and for much cheaper. No matter if you agree with my pricing analysis or not, it is definitely a bit odd to hear about hardware upgrades when the release date hasn't even been made public yet.

A friendly reminder that there will be a number of rolling restarts for U.S. realms this morning starting at 5:00 a.m. PDT, and lasting until 6:00 a.m. PDT. Several realms will be offline for approximately 15 minutes (if everything goes okay). This is a welcomed event as some servers have noticed stability issues in the past couple of days.

The U.S. realms that will be restarted are: Arathor, Azjol-Nerub, Bloodscalp, Bonechewer, Boulderfist, Bronzebeard, Crushridge, Daggerspine, Darkspear, Draenor, Dragonblight, Dragonmaw, Dunemaul, Eldre'Thalas, Fethermoon, Firetree, Frostmane, Gurubashi, Nathrezim, Scarlet Crusade, Shadow Council, Shadowsong, Silvermoon, Skywall, Smolderthorn, Spirestone, Stonemaul, Stormscale, Suramar, Terenas, UIdum, Windrunner

If there are any major down times that come up, WoW Insider will let you know will all due haste.

Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. See that up there? That's Grid. Honest. No, really. The names have been blanked out to protect the wicked.

Ok. Stop the QQ'ing right there. I know WoW Insider has covered Grid before and mentioned it last week, and even I've talked about it in passing. What's the difference now? I'm covering nitty gritty, the stuff you need to know to make your raiding life easier. We're talking a full-body assault on one of the most popular healer raid frame addons out there. And it's our secret, kk? 'Cause the Addon Spotlight people will prolly kill me if they caught wind of it. If there's no article next week, you know someone ratted me out.

Grid has long been worshipped as the ultimate compact raid frame, a place where all of the information you need to know about your raid is provided in a single display. In fact, Grid's raid frame so small only those with binoculars strapped to their head and serious affection for tiny squares have been able to use Grid right out of the box. For those that have neither, they tend throw in the towel at the first sign of the configuration menu. And that is what I intend to stop. Put your textiles back on their racks and prepare to become a... /insert dramatic music... MASTER OF GRID!

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

A big reason I love writing for this Web site is you, the readers. Whenever I write a column and ask you for feedback, you always provide some insightful comments. And whenever I fail to mention an important point, you guys always manage to catch it and comment on it. It's a supportive and intelligent community here, and it certainly makes my job easier!

Last week, I wrote about the "right stuff" to look for in a good officer candidate. I mentioned five traits to value in a candidate: maturity, generosity, good communication skills, emotional intelligence, and game knowledge. Necessarily, that means someone who is immature, greedy, barely literate, emotionally stunted, and a total noob would have the "wrong stuff." But, as several readers pointed out, there are other warning signs that someone will make a bad officer.

In a regularly-scheduled world, the servers would be up and we'd all be playing WoW 2.3 right now. But did any of us really expect that to be the case? Turns out maintenance has been prolonged until 1:00 2:00 PM PST, two three hours later than the previous estimate (Drysc). But let's try to look at this in a positive way. Now you have more time to:

• Figure out how you'll work around the Sweeping Strikes/Deathwish swap
• Look for AddOn updates (or write some updates, if you're a mod author)
  
• Plot your guild's takedown of Zul'Aman
• Just plain get excited about the changes

What are you going to do with your free downtime extension?

Thundgot, one of the EU CMs, has confirmed that the character transfer cooldown has been reduced for the EU realms (and raised for the US Realms, as here it was previously one month, and three months, and six months before that). Currently, the cooldown for both EU and US transfers is three months. That means that any character you transfer has to stay put for at least three months before it can be moved again, which most players (and Blizzard, obviously) seem to agree is a good period of time.

And on the heels of that news, Thundgot has also posted that free character transfers are available on select EU realms, as listed below:

From: Frostmane, Grim Batol, Kazzak, Outland
To: Boulderfist, Burning Blade, Daggerspine

From: Stonemaul, Warsong
To: Shadowmoon

First free character transfers in a while (the last I can find were these Oceanic transfers). Since BC was released, it seems like Blizzard has a pretty good hold on population control (or maybe it's just that the populations aren't changing that much anymore). I remember when free transfers used to come almost every week on US servers, but nowadays they are few and far between.

[ via MMO Champion ]

Maintenance is going on right now on some servers, so now's a good a time as any to ask a question I've never really considered before: why 5 to 7 am PST on a Tuesday morning? Why did Blizzard choose this time to refresh and update the servers every week?

The obvious answer is that that's when the least number of players will be bothered, and indeed, that's what the wise and kind Nethaera says. But there's no way that time is always the lowest population every week, and sometimes maintenance, as it will today, runs long anyway. Why not Wednesday morning, or Sunday morning, or Thursday midafternoon, or Saturday evening? Actually, that last one would be a problem. But you're always going to inconvenience someone, so why not move it around a little and give those Tuesday players a break?

Neth says they're "always going to choose to do what needs done for the most benefit of the health of the game and servers." Which is fine by me-- back when I worked in retail shifts, I usually had Tuesday mornings off and couldn't play, but with my 9-5 now, it doesn't bother me anyway (and the recent changes to have restarts rather than downtime help, I'm sure). But are you someone who's been screwed out of gametime every Tuesday? And if you're not, would you mind giving up your playtime one week just so the folks on Tuesday morning wouldn't have to deal with the downtime and the restarts?

I used to raid heal using mainly the CT_RaidAssist emergency monitor. Call me a bad healer if you want; it was a lot nicer than having 40 health bars all over my screen. The emergency monitor is not clickable in WoW 2, and thus began my hunt for a way that I could see everybody's health and still see the fight. CT_RA bars, Blizzard's bars, and the like were all out due to being simply too big. Furthermore, I find them a bit overwhelming, making it hard to spot who's low on health. I mostly heal main tanks, but I like to be able to easily see if a Rogue or something takes a big hit. So where does one turn for a set of raid health bars that's small, legible, and informative?

As usual, this Wednesday is maintenance day for European players, and it also marks the second in a batch of hardware upgrades for selected servers -- upgrades which have already caused an extended extended maintenance. These upgrades are long-overdue by many players' reckonings, with plenty of stories of fatal lagspikes during raids or other adventures flooding the forums.

Reader Hammer writes in with a few other complaints of note (thanks!):

• The main wow-europe.com website is frequently down, with many parts of the site either bad links or inaccessible -- including the all-important Account Management section.
  
• Several servers are repeatedly experiencing problems and random downtime; poor Draenor is an example. Here's hoping the upgrades help with this.
• The new forums may look good, but they're often down -- for example, when the EU login server was broken for several hours yesterday, nobody could get on the forums to find out more. The forums, designed for European players, run on American time, adding extra confusion.
  

We Europeans may have been sitting smugly through US players' tales of woe for the last few months, but it looks as if the game's popularity has caught up with itself on our continent as well as across the pond. So, it's not just the Americans and Australians who have material for complaint; Asian players haven't spoken up yet, but we'll give them time.

I knew I should have just gone AFK when I went to get something to eat. Because, sure enough, as soon as I come back & try to log on, I get the good ol' "unable to connect" message.

There is a message from Blizzard on the login screen that states 'We will be performing emergency maintenance on our login server this evening which may result in an inability to log in to the game', along with a bunch of other stuff that doesn't make me feel any better. Apparently, the maintenance is extended until 11PM PST. And there's not a darn thing on TV....

*UPDATE* The message has been changed to read 1:00 PDT, as of a few minutes ago. Totally weak...

*UPDATE* Make that 4:00 PDT. Yippee...