We are all rather critical of Blizzard at times. After all, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time in the game; especially the WoW Insider staff on patch days. We expect things to work in a certain type of way, and we expect that when we encounter a problem, things will be solved ASAP.
Nothing is wrong with these expectations we have, and indeed we should have them. After all, we want this game to be the best game possible. For many folks it's the only one they'll play. The happiness and smooth sailing in game is principally the responsibility of the customer service department at Blizzard. They're the ones to fix our issues when something goes wrong.
Drysc, one of the most visible community managers, made a wonderful post earlier this week on exactly what happens in Blizzard's support services. The full post and response are worth taking a second to read. The bullet points of his posts are as follows:
There is a mechanic in game that we are all aware of, and one that exists for a good reason: when we attack a mob, we get the mob's loot. That's the mechanic. If you're solo grinding mobs out in Shadowmoon Valley for some Primal Fire, you want to be sure you're the only one that can get the loot. The same goes for groups – if you're grouping and killing Murmur in Shadow Labs, you want to be sure that everyone is going to get his pretty blues.
But what if the mechanics of the boss fight dictate that you won't hit the boss? In fact, what if successfully killing the boss means that you have to stand on the opposite end of the playing field the whole time? You don't hit the boss, you don't get the loot – but you've done everything right. In this, the game mechanic does not represent fair play, nor does it encourage success. In fact, the mechanics are a complete contradiction of each other.
I've recently encountered this problem, and it's a real pain. Read on after the break for what happened, and what can be done to solve it. It's rather long, but this is a serious problem that Blizzard needs to fix, and all the facts need to be laid out completely and in a way that is full of thruthiness.
Thank you all for the encouragement I received in response to my recent keylogging experience.As a whole the experience was just dreadful.As I mentioned on last week's WoW Insider Show podcast, I am still afraid every time I log in that I will get the "The information you have entered is not valid" error.For the most part things have settled down, but the fear remains.
The worst part of the keylogging episode was that my Shaman was transferred from a PvP to PvE server.After about a week in limbo my beloved Tauren was returned to her proper place.I was extremely relieved.Unfortunately that's the only thing on my account that Blizzard was kind enough to restore.They refused to return any of my gear or gold and did nothing about the items ninjaed from the guild bank.I appealed their decision with several emails.Those appeals were ubiquitously denied despite logical arguments and heart-filled plights.I thought it was all over, for better or for worse.
I got more bad news in my email box the other day:
Many of us, both in and outside of the United States, have been having serious connection issues with the game recently. Not only can we not connect to the game, but we can't even get on the main World of Warcraft website. This can be particularly infuriating because we can't go and find help. When I got dropped in the middle of Kael'Thas (the real fight, not the weeksauce one in Magisters' Terrace), I wanted to take my computer out to a field and yell obscenities at it about PC load letter.
WoW Insider feels your pain! After all, imagine having to write about WoW only to find out you can't get into WoW.
I wanted to answer a lot of the comments about what people can do. First and foremost, we're not Blizzard. So we can't really say for sure what's going on. We can make educated guesses through. Continue reading after the break for what you can do and where you can go to solve this problem.
The world server is apparently going up and down, and many servers are experiencing connectivity issues. Blizzard lists the realms that are not working well at the start up screen. But as I'm finding out over on Anvilmar, the problem has spread there too.
We'll keep this post updated for you with the latest.
Update, 12:05 a.m. EST: Apparently the realm issues are subsiding, although no Blizzard update yet. Some reports are still trickling in of issues in the Nightfall and Reckoning battlegroups.
Update, 12:18 a.m. EST: Blizzard saw what I said and decided to start crashing realms again. Multiple Tech Support Forumposts report things are not well, again.
Update, 1:08 a.m. EST: Everything appears to be working now. Blizzard has removed the opening announcement, and the spam on the forums has quited down. Enjoy the night!
All the World's a Stage is a column for cooperative minds, playing with roles every Sunday evening.
Roleplaying a new character can be hard, even for advanced roleplayers. Usually you only begin with the fragment of a character, some vague idea of what you want your character to be like. Even if you have a pretty clear idea of your character already in mind, you may discover that actually playing that role in communication with others causes issues to come up that you never could have thought of all on your own.
Thankfully, roleplaying is a cooperative activity. Unlike PvE and PvP, there is no "versus" in RP. Even if two characters are bitter nemeses, still their characters must cooperate with one another to share an interesting story. Otherwise, they will find themselves "god-modding," or roleplaying in such a way that they don't give one another any room to improvise. (Two god-modders may fight something like this, using custom emotes: "Darkmystery stabs Elfman and cuts out his heart," followed by, "Elfman dodges Darkmystery's sword and then rips his head off," and so on.) These people aren't really roleplaying in the same way that two people shouting at each other in different languages are not really communicating. Roleplaying's very nature requires that each person work together with every other person, or else it isn't really roleplaying at all.
Though the rare "god-modder" can attract a lot of attention, in fact most roleplayers are quite eager to cooperate and assist one another as much as possible. For every one drama queen or king who simply must be the center of attention at all times, there are 5 roleplayers standing in the background listening quietly, wishing that someone else would talk, and 15 more who went off to roleplay their own stories instead. Most roleplayers reach out to each other for support, suggestions, background story ideas, and are more than willing to lend a helping hand in these areas to anyone who asks. Such mutual reciprocity forms the foundation of what roleplaying is all about.
These are awesome, and yes, I wish I could buy one, too. Cypher shows off these ribbons she made over on livejournal, and says that whenever she drives around with the Horde one on her car, fellow Hordies scream "For the Horde" at her as she drives by. Sounds about right! For the Horde!
But she says she made them for her and her roommate-- does she keep them both on the same car? I don't know how the whole "Blizzard-created logo" copyright thing would work (and I'm not quite down with putting stickers on my car), but selling both of these as magnets would be a great idea. Very awesome.
Apparently patch 2.0.5 came out overnight last night or early this morning. A lot of users are getting an "Unable to validate game version" error (pictured above) along with a myriad of other connection problems. The official forums are also down, or so slow as to be effectively down. I'm going to guess that perhaps your game version is fine and this will sort itself out in the next few hours as the patch gets distributed.
Thanks to everyone for submitting this as a topic suggestion, there's too many of you to credit directly.
UPDATE 10:54 from the in-game Breaking News: "The 2.0.5 client-side patch has caused issues with our authentication system. These issues can cause players to be suddenly disconnected from the game, as well as prevent them from logging in to the game. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible and will provide you with updates as soon as they are available."
UPDATE 11:30 The realms are accessible, or at least mine is. The forums are also back online and usable.
Tseric announced today the Blizzard support hours for the upcoming holiday long weekend. For those of you who can't access the official forums, the post is re-printed below and continues after the break.
What have your experiences been like with Blizzard's support team, both in-game and through their email and support forums? I've personally only used their Mac support forums, where the team has been incredibly responsive to the userbase. Let us know how Blizzard's been treating you, and if you think their support hours will have any affect on your gaming experience.
From the forums:
The Warcraft Series (including World of Warcraft) Battle.net Open Technical Support Forum Live Technical Support will be available for a half-day this coming Friday, December 22th from 9:00AM-3:30PM Pacific Standard Time (PST) and will be closed on Monday, December 25th due to the national holiday. Please note that while the Technical Support department will be unavailable, our GM Department will be available at all hours throughout the holiday season.
If you're running WoW on a Mac and trying to listen to iTunes while playing, you've probably hit the same problem Timi over on Kirin Tor has: the controls ain't just workin' quite right.
Sure, crossrealm BGs are cool, but for a few people, ingame iTunes controls were an even more awaited feature. The dev team didn't get it exactly right, however-- Tigerclaw tries to explain why over on the forums, but I couldn't get much farther than "a Plan-B version was shipped using 'osascript'... to solve the blocking/deadlock issue" before I gave up and reached the same conclusion you probably will: Blizzard shipped something out that didn't work the way they wanted it to (that snickering you're hearing right now is people who played Hunters right after WoW's release, when the class wasn't even close to done).
Even if it isn't working right, however, it still seems to be working, as Timi finds a solution after a little tweaking. Tigerclaw, of course, promises the next major patch will bring relief (have we heard that before?), but if you want help, you can probably find it on the support forums. Meanwhile, Rollak offers us another program that does something even Blizzard hasn't done yet-- control iTunes while playing WoW in Windows. Pretty slick-- maybe that's the guy Blizz should hired to implement this feature next patch.
Because I just can't get enough of this subject, the Dallas Morning News has an article online today about the by-now-familiar subject of online gaming addiction. Remember the article we linked to a few weeks back about the Amsterdam Clinic that had opened a program for gaming addicts? Well, they're not the only mental health professionals who are addressing the problem. This article contains quotes from several other workers in the field who claim that the number of instances of 'technology addiction' (the catch-all umbrella that gaming addiction apparently falls under) is on the rise, with no end in sight. Dr. John O'Neil of Houston sums things up with a telling quote:
"In a way, the Internet is like Las Vegas," he said. It offers anything you want; it seems like the perfect place to cut loose for anonymous fun; and it's open 24 hours a day."
My opinion on the subject is the same as it's always been: anything can be harmful if one becomes too deeply involved in it, and there are many other factets of the internet that can be just as all-consuming to the easily-addicted: chat rooms, online gambling, and, of course our old friend pornography are all things that can cause disruption in one's life if they are indulged in to excess. Of course, people have been addicted to sex & gambling for centuries; this whole video game thing is still pretty much uncharted territory. Maybe that's why I find this stuff so fascinating...or maybe I just like to read about people who make me look less addicted...
We are all rather critical of Blizzard at times. After all, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time in the game; especially the WoW Insider staff on patch days. We expect things to work in a certain type of way, and we expect that when we encounter a problem, things will be solved ASAP.
There is a mechanic in game that we are all aware of, and one that exists for a good reason: when we attack a mob, we get the mob's loot. That's the mechanic. If you're solo grinding mobs out in 
Many of us, both in and outside of the United States, have been having serious connection issues with the game recently. Not only can we not connect to the game, but we can't even get on the main 
The world server is apparently going up and down, and many servers are experiencing connectivity issues. Blizzard lists the realms that are not working well at the start up screen. But as I'm finding out over on Anvilmar, the problem has spread there too.
Tseric 
If you're running WoW on a Mac and trying to listen to iTunes while playing, you've probably hit the same problem Timi over on Kirin Tor has: 
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