we live!

pardon our absence; we were on vacation in vietnam until last sunday eve, hence the lack of updates recently. vacation is all kinds of awesome. we highly recommend it!

today's topic? patience.

today is maintenance day and, like many maintenance days in the past, it's run overtime because blizzard ran into a snag of some sort. we managed to get on for a bit around 10:30am PST (technically before the maintenance window was scheduled to complete), but then the servers were shutdown about 15 minutes later. boo, but at least we got a few quests done.

we pinged the realm status page a few minutes later to see if the servers were back up... no response. we checked the realm status forum... down. we checked the general forum... request timed out. uh oh, that's going to be bad... sure enough, realms have been down all day. someone at blizzard is having a very bad day, we think.

cruising through the forums (when they worked) made us realize that an awful lot of people have far too much time on their hands and no idea what to do with it. so, here are a few suggestions for things to do (or not) when the servers are down:

• don't get your panties in a twist. life exists beyond WoW.


• play another game.


• read a book.


• go outside (ok, so winter's coming and maybe this isn't the best idea...).


• talk to your friends... in person.


• call your mom.


• talk to recruiters all day (we're in the midst of job hunting. yay us.)


• don't think you know more about how the game works than the blizzard staff and wax poetic about what they should be doing to fix things.


• don't harass the the forum moderators demanding answers, refunds, heads on platters or lollipops; first of all, they're the messengers and not the engineers working on the problem. second of all, it makes you look like a complete ass to berate someone that has no more control over the situation than you do regardless of who they happen to work for.


• do understand that wow is a hugely complex piece of software and no one person at blizzard or anywhere else knows how all of it works. applications this size are developed by tens if not hundreds of engineers. it's often a miracle they work at all, let alone work well. we're in the business; we know. there are lots of places for issues to creep in and slip through testing and that's not even accounting for the production environment where the software actually runs, which is managed by yet another group of 10s of people.


• don't clutter up the forums whining and moaning about how blizzard has ruined your entire day because you couldn't log into WoW. if your life is that dull, now's a great time to pick up a back-up hobby. you know, just in case the power goes out or something...


• do realize that as a customer you have the right to express your displeasure with the service up to and including canceling your subscription. if you're really that upset about 1 day of downtime then make good on all your threats to quit and do it. the WoW community will not miss you.

by all that's unholy, enough with the bitching! WoW has exceptional uptime for a service that doesn't have lives on the line (and even those still have bugs). I'd be willing to bet that the servers are up at least 95% of the time outside of scheduled downtime. facebook and twitter don't even have uptime numbers that good! all you folks complaining have no idea how lucky you are that the servers and the client run as smoothly as they do. instead of ranting about how blizzard has ruined your day due to extended downtime, maybe you should be thankful that you're even able to play the game at all. you could be much, much worse off...