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...

Continue reading "we live!"...

decisions, decisions...

>.>

<.<

yeah... so, we're back. sorta. well, not really. we're thinking about coming back, though. we're having a really hard time deciding if we should or not.

see, life in the real world has been going pretty well... we've gotten back in touch with old friends and made some awesome new ones. we've had the great fortune to meet a wonderful woman. we've done some international travel. we've caught up on some hobbies. we've started learning a new language. we've gotten back into our gym routine. we're probably out doing something at least 3 times a week. all good stuff and exactly what we wanted to reclaim by way of leaving wow a few months back.

of course, we still have times where we don't have anything going on. maybe we don't have plans that night or friends are out of town over the weekend or whatever. naturally, being a gamer we've been filling this time playing games; half-life 2, a little diablo II (seeing the DIII trailer got us excited), nwn2, dawn of war (and all the xpacks) and other random stuff. great games and all, but they just aren't giving us the same satisfaction that wow did (to be fair, they aren't giving us the same moments of frustration either).

there are elements missing that we didn't think we cared about so much before we started playing wow. the sense of being a part of something larger is a big one... being able to interact with other people in-game that have shared the same experiences you have. when you gain a level in nwn, for example, you don't really have anyone to share your "Ding!" moment with. we haven't found that same sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in other games that we have in wow, either. getting our first mount was a memorable moment for us, as was hitting 60 the first time, seeing a new instance boss, etc. part of why those moments were so big was that there were others there to share them with us. another missing part is the whole social aspect. we miss being able to talk with other people while we're playing; chatting with friends, asking someone for advice about a quest or item, etc. we have to admit that we don't miss trade chat, though (or barrens chat, for that matter...).

now, for the sake of completeness we acknowledge that we could side step this whole dilemma by simply finding something else to do with our free time. watch tv, take up gardening, critique porn, wear funny underwear and save the world, etc. we're a gamer at heart, though, and this is how we enjoy spending our free time.

so, that leads us to the big question: should we go back or not. since we're in a rambling mood, we thought we'd lay out some pros and cons from our perspective, listed in no particular order.

cons:

• our biggest issue with wow in the past was being able to maintain a good balance between wow and our social life. being aware of this, we hope it would be less of an issue if we were to go back, but it's something we worry about


• until WotLK comes out, there isn't a lot in wow that we haven't already done. there are a couple classes we haven't delved into deeply, yet, but most of the content we've seen numerous times before


• once we hit 70, we're likely to get bored again. we don't want to commit the time to raiding and pvp's never been much of a focus for us... so what are we going to do when we hit the level cap again?


• we're not sure where we'd want to roll a char again. pvp servers were annoying us last time, but that's also where we still have a few friends. do we roll on a new server and start from scratch or go back to our old server where we know some good people?

pros:

• it's fun!


• it's fun?


• we haven't found another game that's been able to entertain and engross us the way wow has. obviously that's good and bad, but since this is under the "pros" section let's just consider the good part here


• we made some good friends playing wow


• we like the social interaction side of MMOs; being able to share the experiences with like-minded players


• we really enjoy the leveling process, mastering the nuances of a new class and being able to share that knowledge with others. it's something that we think we're good at and that's important to us

this is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it's all we can come up with off the top of our head. our two biggest worries are that we're going to get sucked in again or that we're going to be bored out of our minds once we hit 70 again (a month or two at the rate we level). the bored part is less of an issue; WotLK will probably be out in a few months and if we get bored we simply find something more entertaining to do. as for getting sucked in, we *think* we can maintain a reasonable balance... but we don't know for sure.

so, yeah... we've been thinking about signing back up and rolling a warrior. just for the hell of it. no guilds, no raids, play when we feel like it and we've got nothing better going on.

thoughts?

Continue reading "decisions, decisions..."...

we're not dead, yet

no, we're not dead or kidnapped or caught in a time warp or anything else like that. we are, however, taking a bit of a break from our usual WoW routine. we've taken 5 characters up to level 70 now, all alliance and all on the same server. frankly, we're a bit bored. our two "main"s, harl and zhered, are about as well geared as they can get short of doing 25-man content and while we *would* like to see that content, we're not sure we want to sign up for a heavy raid calendar right now. plus, we'd have to go guild shopping... we hate, hate, *hate* leaving a guild once we've decided to join one, so the "try before you buy" model that a few folks have suggested to us just doesn't really fly. we're one of those "get it right the first time" types, so selecting the right guild takes a lot of time and work. time and work that we don't feel like putting in right now because our interest is waning a bit.

we haven't completely given up WoW, of course. we just needed a change of pace. back in the mists of time, we rolled a blood elf paladin so we could see the new horde starting zone that came along with TBC. we ended up leveling him up to 58, but never got around to taking him into outlands before we shifted back over to playing alliance again on Dark Iron. since we'd been itching to play horde again anyway, we decided to pick him back up, re-spec to protection (he was ret back before ret was FOTM) and go hit outlands as a tank.

it's been fun! totally different play style from what we're used to. we've played every dps class out there and we're used to killing single targets fairly fast and being able to take 2 mobs (maybe 3 if we're playing a class with good CC) without it being too scary. as a pally tank, it's a whole different ball game. now we take 4-6 melee mobs at once and it's actually *easier* for us than doing a single mob at a time. casters, though... casters just suck. we can't mitigate magic damage worth beans and it *does* take us a while to kill stuff. that's the downside of life as a pally tank (no spell reflection). pretty nifty overall, though.

hellfire peninsula feels like a totally new place what with all the horde-flavored quests and some new twists to areas we thought we knew inside out (we had no idea that the orcs near the pools of aggonar were actually a horde-friendly faction!). we've been running around picking up tanking gear from quests and the AH, trying to gear ourselves up for the big show - Hellfire Ramparts. that'll be our first real test of tanking to see if we like it or not. if nothing else, we're looking forward to getting into groups a hell of a lot easier (LF1M, tank! PST).

Continue reading "we're not dead, yet"...