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You can get the patch right here if you'd rather not use that horrible Blizzard updater (no idea how long I'll keep that mirror up though). Then go on and copy your character over to the test realm.

Besides, the whole credit card factor actually keeps most annoying kiddies out of MMORPGs.

Ha-hah-hahahahahahahaahahahaha!

Ever heard of "game cards"?

With this version of the honor system WoW seems only to be concerned about discouraging players from killing innocent bystander NPC's (their definition of a dishonorable kill); which they could do by simply turning off their PVP flag. They care marginally about griefing, and even less about general PVP rules of engagement.

I'm convinced that people within WoW don't play the PVP game. Keep a watch out, if there are imbalances in the PVP game, this will certainly magnify them.

PvP Honor ranks and corresponding rewards listed here.

Official images of PvP armor sets Wow, sexy.
Official images of the new mounts
Official listing of PvP weapons No pics though. :(

PvP Honor ranks and corresponding rewards listed here.

Official images of PvP armor sets Wow, sexy.
Official images of the new mounts
Official listing of PvP weapons No pics though. :(

PvP Honor ranks and corresponding rewards listed here.

Official images of PvP armor sets Wow, sexy.
Official images of the new mounts
Official listing of PvP weapons No pics though. :(

PvP Honor ranks and corresponding rewards listed here.

Official images of PvP armor sets Wow, sexy.
Official images of the new mounts
Official listing of PvP weapons No pics though. :(

This is a pretty big chance of pace for Blizzard. It took 90 days for their first content patch to come out - they had originally promised new content every month.

Unfortuantly they made this claim and the people who play non-stop or since beta have been trying to hold them to it. They were in such a hurry to get the last patch out, that it broke the game for a bunch of users. Check out this 17 page thread about it.. Error 132

Here is another one if you are really interested.

Another bug that made it in was now after the last patch if you cast resurection on someones pet you get resurection sickness. How could they not notice that? I don't think they had much in the way of internal testing before the last patch, and that is why the test servers were made public.

I'd rather see them release content on a 3-6 month basis that works, than break some part of the game every month trying to rush stuff out.

This is a pretty big chance of pace for Blizzard. It took 90 days for their first content patch to come out - they had originally promised new content every month.

Unfortuantly they made this claim and the people who play non-stop or since beta have been trying to hold them to it. They were in such a hurry to get the last patch out, that it broke the game for a bunch of users. Check out this 17 page thread about it.. Error 132

Here is another one if you are really interested.

Another bug that made it in was now after the last patch if you cast resurection on someones pet you get resurection sickness. How could they not notice that? I don't think they had much in the way of internal testing before the last patch, and that is why the test servers were made public.

I'd rather see them release content on a 3-6 month basis that works, than break some part of the game every month trying to rush stuff out.

Maybe not actual advertising, but pretty damn close:

http://everquest2.station.sony.com/pizza/

To which Blizzard responded on 1 April:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/panda ren-xpress.html

I missed this the first time, but, click on the screenshot of the Gnome in the PvP section, and you'll get a great screenshot of "Kairbair" (the Gnome) standing in the middle of Silverpine Forest talking to herself about all the pretty flowers and how she hopes she safe. While an Undead Rogue stealthed behind her about to put an end to her flower-picking.

No, the market really wants PvP. At least the people play World of Warcraft do, as the PvP servers are at least twice as full as the limited PvP servers and the RP servers put together. Go look at which servers are "high population" and which are "low population"

actually, right now the area with the most "low population" servers is PvP. almost all of the PvE servers are medium, i think 2 at low, while PvP has 16 at low. PvP also has 17 at high, which makes sense since they will want to play with more real people than PvE. Since I don't know what exactly the population densities mean I don't think this really says anything one way or the other about which is more popular. I just wanted to point out that you are full of shit.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/

I said "whining about PvP". I get sick and tired of the carebears bitching about how someone decided to attack their town's NPCs and how this is so unfair. Well, fight back! What, that involves PvP? Aw, too bad, you might have to play against someone that you can't "manage aggro" against.

PvE players invariably are players who simply don't possess the skills required to handle a PvP environment. The only enemies they can kill are the computer controlled ones, and they're absolutely shocked to discover that a skilled human player can continuously own them. So instead they play on PvE servers and look down at all the real gamers as "griefers".

Suck it up. Be a man. Play some PvP, or accept that you have no skills.

I've played on a PvE server. I got tired of watching horde and alliance characters standing there and just doing /rude and /spit at each other and then wandering off since none of them were capable of dealing with real human opponents.

Hell, look at Blizzard's realm types page. See the image of the priest? It's alt text is "care". It's standing to the left of a bear, with the appropriate alt text of "bear". Even Blizzard thinks PvE servers are for losers.

Get a FREE in-game fortune cookie with every order from Pandaren Xpress! Warning: fortunes may come true...

The text of the fortune cookie, besides your lucky numbers is :

A change in lifestyle will lead to new possibilities for romance

A very cool April's fool joke, with clearly some thought put in it : I would have never fallen for it though (not a WOW player anyways).
Kudos to Blizzard for putting quite some time in a seemingly simple joke.

Here goes the link:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/panda ren-xpress.html

Blizzard did make the page look pretty good

FUNNY!

Pandaren Express

Here, ya big baby: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/panda ren-xpress.html

Here.

Here it is:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/panda ren-xpress.html

Here is a sample of the close to 200 links posted on Complete April Fools Day Reference

kylewenda.com - the government records your phone calls... scary
google.com - Google releases Google Gulp
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
slashdot.org - Say 'Cheese' to Google Satellite at 10AM
habitablezone.com - Terrible News: The UN has voted to close down the Internet!
ebay.com - Google Gulp Invite
sswug.org - Run MSSQL on your xbox and linux
worldofwarcraft.com - Panda Express joke making fun of EQ and its /pizza
techtree.com - Apple hires DVD Jon

Wait why did I decide to play again?

Not to be rude, but you have heard of WoW, haven't you?

Well, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. If only it were as easy as walking in to the server room and sacrificing hundred dollar bills then yes, the problems would have been gone by now.

In the grand scheme of things five months is a relatively short period of time to work the bugs out of a large system like the WoW server farm.

Most of the servers that have been affected by the worst cases of downtime are the highest pop servers and they do need to resolve those problems and satisfy those customers even if that means closing those servers for new characters.

I don't know what industry you are in, but I am in the IT world and every time you have to patch a system, no matter how many times you have done it on the test bench, you hold your breath and cross your fingers. Multiply that by the number of inter-related systems that Blizzard is running and you begin to see that it is actually pretty amazing how quickly they are able to rectify those issues without having to resort to a rollback.

As to the end game, man, just chill for a sec. Did you even stop to look at the in game world while you were rushing headlong to 60? They are working on the content as is plainly evident by a cruise over to http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/. In fact, the patch yesterday introduced some of that content.

Your information is out of date. The following transfers are currenty allowed:

• Arthas to Nathrezim
• Warsong to Bonechewer
• Bleeding Hollow to Crushridge
• Illidan to Stonemaul
• Blackrock to Daggerspine
• Stormreaver to Stormscale
• Shattered Hand to Bloodscalp
• Mannoroth to Destromath
• Blackhand to Windrunner
• Whisperwind to Azjol-Nerub

Warsongers have been trashing my home server of Bonechewer for many days now. Trust me, transfers are active.

I guess your server isn't on the list, though. Sorry.

Imagine you are a hero from WC3. You only control yourself, but must rely heavily on your party/guild to make real progress. You get to be in the mind of one character in the be scale of the war. I must say, it's great fun if you can immerse yourself. (And Alliance vs. Horde is well played out, from one on one fights to whole scale raids on opposing towns). This will be more so when Battlegrounds and the PVP Honor System hits.

Imagine you are a hero from WC3. You only control yourself, but must rely heavily on your party/guild to make real progress. You get to be in the mind of one character in the be scale of the war. I must say, it's great fun if you can immerse yourself. (And Alliance vs. Horde is well played out, from one on one fights to whole scale raids on opposing towns). This will be more so when Battlegrounds and the PVP Honor System hits.

Blizzard Character Transfer FAQ.

People from high population servers are being given the option of a transfer to a Blizzard selected lower population server free with gear. This isn't the "Pick any server" transfer people were hoping for, but it should help ease out the congestion on the high load servers.

That and there's a huge new content patch coming off the test server in a few days. Things in the game are looking good. Good news for those of us still hopelessly addicted.

This news comes with mixed feelings. Lots of people playing this great game? Awesome! Poor choices in handling load? Not always so great. They currently opened channels from one High Pop server Arthas to our Low Pop server Nathrezim. This has caused much friction from Nathrezim, who chose low pop for a reason, and this influx is bound to cause issues (and they keep gold and items, so further market saturation issues). However, I feel it's worth noting, some of the Nathrezim's are being wholely inapproproate. The realm forum is full of posts complaining. And the IRC channel has had some real childish behavior.

This news comes with mixed feelings. Lots of people playing this great game? Awesome! Poor choices in handling load? Not always so great. They currently opened channels from one High Pop server Arthas to our Low Pop server Nathrezim. This has caused much friction from Nathrezim, who chose low pop for a reason, and this influx is bound to cause issues (and they keep gold and items, so further market saturation issues). However, I feel it's worth noting, some of the Nathrezim's are being wholely inapproproate. The realm forum is full of posts complaining. And the IRC channel has had some real childish behavior.

http://www.legaltorrents.com/
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopoc/dsk _oc_download.html
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/bittorrent/ download.html
http://www.ferrago.com/
http://syd2.ausgamers.com:6969/
http://www.filerush.com/
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/blizzarddo wnloader.html
http://www.slackware.com/torrents/

Who is the one living in the bubble here? Personally, I love being able to download popular files quickly. I guess you'd prefer to pay fileplanet for the privilege, hmm?

I can't believe you won't shut up about this.

Read that.

Now try and tell me horde players are mature.

That is not possible. The servers has been down for the whole day. Like every day.

I know MMORPGs are never visual powerhouses, but quite frankly, the two-year-old FFXI looks better [than World of Warcraft].

Have you ever played FFXI, or just seen screenshots? FFXI most certainly does not look better than WoW. FFXI manages, somehow, to have the most washed-out environment that I've ever played in. Everything looks like it was done in pastels. There's no color, anywhere.

Even better, the environments are exceedingly bland. Each zone will basically be all solid one color. (Well, solid texture...)

I wish I could point out screenshots, but FFXI - doesn't offer any! (Well, that's not entirely true, there's a "screenshot gallery" link that opens a JavaScript popup, but that apparently is for user-submitted screenshots that are supposed to have some theme. And they actually all look worse than the game really does, due to the scaling and JPEG artifacts created by the game's screenshot JPEG compression routine.)

WoW has a nice screenshot gallery which won't really help explain what I'm talking about. I guess the best bet is to go here and watch it pan around a zone and note that the zone basically always looks the same.

The screenshot I linked to for WoW is an oasis in The Barrens. When you move away from that, you're in a large grassy plains surrounded by mountains. It's really quite beautiful.

The art is WoW is flat-out better. The interface is much easier on the eyes and easy to use. The graphics are, simply, better. The only thing I'll grant you is the player models. Honestly, I like the player models in FFXI better. But when it comes to the overall artwork - the scenery, the user interface icons, the monsters - WoW's art is better.

Most of us have moved away from plain web-based stuff a while a go and moved into the wide-world of G U Is, movies, and graphical games.

Though I do enjoy being sarcastic on /.

He said "smart" not "moron with a degree in 'web design'", which is what most of those are. "Ooo, look, I can make text dance with an applet! I should develop applications with my 1337 5|<|11z!"

The only Java application I can think of in wide use is Eclipse, which is really amusing when you realize it's only useful for developing Java applications.

No one in the real world uses Java for anything serious, unless it winds up becoming fraught with problems. (Remember how their forums go down every other day? Guess what they're written using...)

Your best best would be either RTS's (I recommend Rome: Total War ) or an MMORPG ( Everquest 2 or World Of Warcraft are both fine choices.

The Blizzard online store has copies avaliable again.

There are restrictions from buying from the store depending on where you live, however.

Also, they did note that they are slowly releasing copies again in this forum post.

So... did you buy it or not?

If you haven't yet and decide to, two suggestions:

1) Visit http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/serverstatus/ during peak play time (nights and weekends) and look for servers with "Low" population.

2) Visit http://www.wowcensus.com/no_realm.php and choose a server on which you can try to balance the faction populations, using your list from #1.

Fixed link.

I don't have a copy of the EULA, not owning the game

You can still RTFEULA: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html :-)

Read the Terms of Use. The EULA allows the transfer of the GAME, but nowhere does it allow the transfer of the SERVICE.

They aren't using Access, as you probably know.

The real problem is that they ARE using Tomcat, which is well known for its stability and robustness.

We know this thanks to stack traces the account server has, at times, given. You can also tell by going to www.worldofwarcraft.com and seeing it try to set a cookie named JSESSIONID. JSESSIONID? Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like what Tomcat uses for session management...

Isn't the point of protesting to get noticed? I'm pretty sure a GM coming on and telling the protesters to stop destroying their server is a reasonably easy way to tell that you have been noticed.

So why the fuck didn't you log off like they asked? For god's sake, did you expect to march until they fixed the "problem" right then and there? Were you expecting a goddamn midnight blitz of programmers to swarm down upon the server machine and magically make it all better? You made your freaking point, what do you want to do now? Destroy the server because of your class envy? (nearly every other post was about how Rogues were so "uber l33t").

And what's this crap about "I pay for the game I can do whatever I want"? I thought we were out of elementary school, kids, I thought we knew better than to piss off the park ranger and then try to piss ON the park ranger when he told us to stop chopping down the goddamn trees.

You can't honestly expect any type of "fair use" policy to apply here people. You're destroying other people's right to play who may not give a flying fuck about your class yet you expect that you should be treated quite the opposite when it comes to YOUR right to play (i.e. the GMs shouldn't kick you off).

From what I see, your issues have been addressed...so...find another outlet guys:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w ow-warrior&t=85008&p=1&tmp=1#post85008

I posted this a few days ago on my AQFL Web site:

Death_Knight's thread (screen shots [nice ion canon] and comments) mentions a FilePlanet (account required -- free or subscription) video file link (87 MB) with Gnomevasion in World of Warcraft. Here is the video file description: "What happens when you take 300 players, throw in teamwork, voice communication, a server crash, and one of the greatest guilds of all time? You get Gnomevasion! In this video members of Sturmgrenadier form up on an alternate server in WoW when their home of Bleeding Hollow goes down. Hilarity ensues when each and every member wreaks chaos on an unsuspecting server with pink-haired pig-tailed gnomes! Download this video and witness the true power of a Gnomevasion."

Non-FilePlanet sites: #1, #2, and #3 (BitTorrent files).

Funny music video! It is two minutes and 20 seconds. Check it out!

So how can watching BSG be your excuse for not watching Enterprise?

I technically could watch both (could even tivo it if they overlapped), but I have limited TV-viewing time with all the WoW I've been playing lately :)

The overwhelming success of World of Warcraft has brought hundreds of thousands of people together to adventure in Azeroth, and concurrency numbers are well beyond what we expected or even hoped for. Unfortunately, this high concurrency, especially when concentrated on a small number of realms, initially caused issues with our hardware infrastructure. We were able to streamline our code to increase performance in the weeks following launch. However, the holiday season nearly doubled our player base, and it quickly became apparent that in order to handle not only the current player base, but all future players as well, we needed to make some upgrades to our infrastructure.

Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.

In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.

The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our players this weekend. This process coincides with our constant efforts to improve the current performance of World of Warcraft, and sometimes issues can arise when implementing these improvements. We will do our best to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, and we once again thank you for your patience and understanding.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html The EULA is updated for each patch. The one from the box is outdated and the new one is availible on the WoW site.

You do make a reasonable argument, unfortunately, others have made it and lost in court - courts allow these sorts of arrangements because they are far more efficient (as the article mentioned) than requiring Blizzard (or anyone) to post an employee at Best Buy to sign a contract with everyone who tries to buy a copy of their game.

But because you don't get to read the terms of the contract until you open the box, the law imposes some restrictions on companies using shrink-wrap licenses. For example, the software company must refund your purchase money if you do not agree with the terms of the contract. As someone else mentioned, Blizzard customer support will make those refunds. As for the use of lay language in the EULA, go read the WoW EULA. It's definitely not in legalese - they use very readable language. In fact, they even did a pretty nice job of formatting the EULA so you can see all the different clauses and conditions.

Lastly, you are the one agreeing to the contract. It's your responsibility to make sure you understand what you're agreeing to. If you don't understand something, you need to find out what it means, or be willing to live with finding out later (like when you're sued or banned). Relying in court on the "i didn't read it" or "i didn't understand it" defense will usually not get you very far.

you should carefully read the following end user license agreement before installing this software program. by installing, copying, or otherwise using the software program, you agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. if you do not agree to the terms of this agreement, promptly return the unused software program to the place of purchase, or contact blizzard customer service at (800) 592-5499 for a full refund of the purchase price within 30 days of the original purchase.

It's the Terms of Service you agree to online when you give them a credit card number and say 'Yes, I Agree' in order to play. Whatever questionable status EULA's may have, if this isn't enforceable then no online contract is.

Read it yourself.

If you don't agree to that, then you don't click through, don't create an account, and do something else. This is a valid, 2-party contract. Deal with it.

Are you confused with EA Ultima Online series? Blizzard has had many hits that they do not expand even though players want them. Starcraft players have been waiting for Starcraft II for years and still only one expansion was ever made for it. The same for Diablo. About the only game that had 2 expansions was the latest Warcraft ( not WoW ). Also EverQuest has had about 10 expansions (exaggerating but not far off) and people still get it. About the only thing in the works right now in WOW is the Battlegrounds upgrade which will allow players to have benefits from joining in player vs player battles. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/battlegrounds-p art2.html