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Hurricane Ivan Hits Gaming Hard
Hurricane Ivan's US landfall has affected gamers across the country. The World of Warcraft Beta is still down this week while the data center it's housed in is dried and brought back up. Star Wars Galaxies also experienced outage due to adverse weather conditions. And many thanks to Leon Kiriliuk for alerting us to the Pinball Association Notice that "two-hundred thirty two classic pinball machines and some rare video games were destroyed, including an extremely rare Tattoo Assassins prototype and a sit-down Omega Race!" Update: 09/21 02:33 EDT The World of Warcraft Beta is back up and running with a new patch.
Tornadoes are small but I have a redundant backup of all my servers running at a co-loc in chicago. I also backup and put weekly disks in a safe deposit box at my companies bank. The biggest tornado to hit was in May of 1999 and it was only a mile wide (would be an F6 if they thought that wind speeds could get that high). A hurricane is different, they can be as big as Texas. Storing priceless items in the path of a possible hurricane or any other forseeable natural disaster is very short sighted in my opinion.
The only thing I try to protect in a disaster is the lives of my family and my employees. A good backup/disaster recovery plan may never be needed but where would you be if your business burnt to the ground? Error on the side of caution.
Yes, but in all honesty, the tornado was caused by the hurricane. Ivan caused some massive (drastic understatment) tornado activity (at least in Virginia) on Friday.
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It's Omega Race. I'd throw you into a woodchipper for a sit-down unit.
motherfuckers will use this to delay hl2 again
The servers are back up and were as of 2130 PST yesterday. From what they told us in the forums the servers had gotten wet and had to be dried out properly and then powered up and tested before allowing the Beta testing to continue.
If the worst problem you have all day is that you can't play Star Wars Galaxies, you're having a pretty darn good day.
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
In its own way, it's as bad as if one of the Smithsonian buildings or a Science & Industry museum was destroyed. There's a great deal of technological and popular cultural history that's been lost due to Ivan The Terrible. Ugh.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Insightful?
Ok, I gotta say it:
Overlord post==joke
When modding a joke, you:
A. Mod it funny if you find it funny.
B. Mod it overrated if you're tired of cliche jokes.
C. Maybe mod it redundant if twenty people have already made it in the same thread.
Where do you get insightful in this?
That's truly sad. A lot of those are lost permanently as a result-- only MAME romsets left, and MAME can't truly get the feel for such things as a sit-down cabinet for some of these.
Even worse when some of these are incompleted prototypes that just never made it to the production stage.
A friend of mine works on the AOL Campus in Dulles, Virginia. On September 17th, 2004, one of his coworkers, Steve Gibson (not of grc.com) captured some images of what I believe is the tornado that caused this damage. The photos can be seen here, here, and here, if anyone is interested.
Update: 09/21 02:33 EDT The World of Warcraft Beta is back up and running with a new patch.
So this patch makes it immune to hurricanes? Wow, that's some funky coding!
Next week on Slashdot: Blizzard's WoW servers taken out by Blizzard
Here's a high-res picture of the SWG data center that was hit by a tornado, as seen in those two cell-phone camera photos on the SWG site. I don't know why it's posted on the WoW site, though.
Apparently, both WoW and SWG use the same data center. The writeup made it sound like two separate data centers were hit by hurricanes.