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Hurricane Ivan Hits Gaming Hard

Posted by Zonk on from the pinballs-are-people-too dept.

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.

10 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Why not store them in a safer location? by BoomerSooner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Why not store them in a safer location? by Planesdragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, yes. Iron Mountain, MI would be a great place to be a data center. Same as Upstate NY, but more centralized.

  2. Re:WoW Beta... by ZenHarbinger · · Score: 3, Informative

    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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  3. another delay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    motherfuckers will use this to delay hl2 again

  4. WoW Beta by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. You know... by nekoniku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  6. They Aren't Human Casualties, But... by DLWormwood · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...losing 200+ pinball machines all at once, with only some of the case art being salvagable, is a terrible, terrible thing. With the game format almost extinct, restoring these things is going to be a pain, if not impossible.

    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.

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    Those who complain about affect & effect on /. should be disemvoweled
  7. Patch? by isorox · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!

  8. Reporting live from Canada by MachDelta · · Score: 3, Funny

    Next week on Slashdot: Blizzard's WoW servers taken out by Blizzard

  9. They're the same data center by RotJ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Apparently, both WoW and SWG use the same data center. The writeup made it sound like two separate data centers were hit by hurricanes.