Newslist For MMOValue

There will be a round of realm maintenance for everyone tomorrow, Tuesday November 10th from 5:00 a.m. PST / 8:00 a.m. EST until 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST. This is more or less the “normal” maintenance time we’ve all come to know and love.

The downtime tomorrow should not be taken as any indication that patch 3.3 is dropping; that event is still a couple weeks away at best. The patch tonight was a “tools patch,” that while temporarely screwed things up for the majority of people, wasn’t anything that changed things significantly — at least as far as we all can tell.

If anything else develops of this downtime, we’ll be sure to let you know.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

A little while ago, 2 am Paris time, servers went down in the EU for emergency maintenance. More specifically, “emergency database maintenance.” They’re estimated to be down until 4 am Paris time, which by my estimate is another hour or so. Should that maintenance be extended any further, we’ll be sure to let you know right here on WoW.com.

Many thanks to our followers on Twitter for alerting us of this downtime, because our European staff members are apparently off doing silly things like sleeping. Thanks a lot, guys. Because of that, I’m now inflicting cultural stereotypes on you all in the form of the picture at the top of this post.

Catelet World of Warcraft europe, Realm Status

Reader Jiang sent us a tip about his new iPhone application (App Store link). It’s a realm status application that will track your realm’s up and down times straight from Blizzard’s page so you can check them anytime on your iPhone. And that in itself isn’t that amazing — there are other apps that will do the same thing, and even some that will do it for free (Jiang’s app is $1.99). But Jiang’s app will also deliver Push notifications for you, and that’s something I haven’t seen before in an iPhone app. You can set notifications for multiple realms, and then whenever one goes up or down, you’ll get a notification on your iPhone about it.

A few of the other apps are working on implementing Push notifications, so if you’re patient, you might be able to get them for cheaper (or even free, though it usually does cost money to run a notification server). But if you absolutely want up-to-the-minute notifications when servers go up and down and are willing to put a few bucks towards a piece of iPhone software, there you go.

Castiglione World of Warcraft Realm Status

We’ve had some serious maintenance in the last few weeks, and it looks like they’ve come to an end. The extended maintenance that’s been going on has been to fix the much hyped “Additional instances cannot be launched” error, and by all accounts the bug has been fixed. But let’s not kid ourselves, there’ll be at least a dozen comments claiming differently after this post goes up. But it’s all good, because eventually the cross-server instances are going to take care of that problem entirely.

The maintenance tomorrow will run from 3:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT.

Koeningsmark World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

In an interview over at Slashdot, J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer of WoW, spoke about the Battle.net conversion that’s going on and how it will apply to WoW. One of the more important things he said was:

We have optional Battle.net conversion right now, but that will be mandatory at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Many people have done the conversion already, and many speculated and inferred from past Blizzard comments that the conversion would eventually become mandatory. But now it looks like it’s going to be, and that date is in the “not-too-distant future.”

The conversion process is relatively straight forward, and can be started by visiting your account management page. There have been times when Battle.net enabled accounts were not able to get into the game due to authentication issues, but those seem to be diminishing.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated on any additional announcements concerning the upcoming mandatory conversion

Catelet World of Warcraft blizzcon, Realm Status

According to the in-game announcement, there will be two hours of maintenance tomorrow August 6th on all realms. The maintenance announcement has changed throughout the evening, but seems to have settled on this downtime.

The downtime will happen from 5:00 a.m. PDT / 8:00 a.m. EDT and last until 7:00 a.m. PDT / 10:00 a.m. EDT. This of course assumes that there’ll be no extended super-fracken-duper maintenance put on top of that. And we know just how much Blizzard loves to increase their maintenance periods. If there is you’ll hear it here.

While the maintenance is going on, you can check out WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.2 and read up on all the things you missed, or think you missed. There is also the beginnings of a list of bug fixes; a list that’s sure to grow over the coming days.

Kocherberg World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

There’s a detailed server maintenance announcement for tomorrow, Tuesday August 4th. And off the bat: we still don’t know for sure if Patch 3.2 is dropping tomorrow. You can bet that we’ll be burning the midnight oil waiting to find out, though. (Note, that would be inadvisable. If you attempt to ignite a petroleum product on this ship at zero hundred hours you will activate the fire suppression system, which would seal off this entire compartment.)

All realms will be down from at least 3:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT tomorrow. However a large group of special realms will be down from 12:00 a.m. PDT / 3:00 a.m. EDT until 12:00 p.m. PDT / 3:00 p.m. EDT.

Those special realms are those in the battlegroups Emberstorm, and Whirlwind.

Check after the break if you need to see a listing of which realms belong on those battlegroups, and stay tuned to WoW.com tonight and tomorrow for all the patch 3.2 goodness.

Minor update: The service alert, which is obviously suffering from a typo, now reads in part: “..we expect all realms to be playable by approximately 11:59PM PDT on Tuesday, August 4.” Emphasis added. Hey, at least they’re honest, right?

Update: Blizzard changed their announcement to indicate that only Emberstorm and Whirlwind would be going offline for an extended period.
All the realms which will be offline for an extended period tonight include:

Emberstorm Battlegroup:
Antonidas- Normal

Drenden- Normal

Farstriders- RP

Hydraxis- Normal

Mok’Nathal- Normal

Moon Guard- RP

Nazgrel- Normal

Nordrassil- Normal

Quel’dorei- Normal

Rivendare- PvP

Shandris- Normal

Tortheldrin- PvP
Whirlwind Battlegroup:
Anub’arak- PvP
Blackwater Raiders- RP

Bladefist- Normal

Cenarion Circle- RP

Cenarius- Normal

Darrowmere- PvP

Echo Isles- Normal

Hyjal- Normal

Lightbringer- Normal

Maiev- PvP

Misha- Normal

Ravenholdt- RP-PvP

Sisters of Elune- RP

The Forgotten Coast- PvP

Uther- Normal

Vashj- PvP

Castro World of Warcraft News items, Realm News, Realm Status

Blizzard EU has released a long and detailed statement concerning the recent waves of extended maintenance and how it’s connected to the problems associated with launching instances. For several months players have been plagued with the message “Additional instances cannot be launched.” The message was being caused by overloaded instance servers, and for a long time there was seemingly nothing Blizzard could do about it.

Blizzard’s statement today clearly informs us that all the extended maintenance we’ve been seeing is directly due Blizzard implementing fixes for the problems server-side. While the statement comes from an EU source, once can assume rather easily that it applies to the US as well.

While no timeframe is given as to exactly when this will be done for all realms, it is very good to know that stuff is getting done behind the scenes. And this look at exactly what Blizzard is doing to their servers represents a rare glimpse into their inner workings. Usually Blizzard is pretty tight lipped about what exactly is happening with their hardware.

The full statement after the break.

The full post from Wryxian reads as follows:

Recently there has been a number of extended maintenance periods for certain realms. Some of these we informed you about in advance and some we were unable to until during the actual maintenance period. We want to take the time to explain the reasoning behind these extended maintenance periods, and also those that will need to occur in the future.

These extended maintenances are directly linked to the message we posted in early July (http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=9941934722) about our investigations in regard to instance capacity and our plans to implement hardware modifications to achieve positive change for your play experience. As we said we would do in that message, we are now informing and updating you of our progress.

These modifications are typically a two stage process, requiring two lots of extended maintenance for each group of realms being worked on. For the realms listed below, the first stage was completed successfully on Wednesday the 15th of July during a pre-announced extended maintenance period.

On Wednesday the 22nd of July we also began to complete the second and final stage of this process on the affected realms. However, we encountered unforeseen difficulties in implementing the modifications. We were left with two options; either to further extend the maintenance period well into the evening and thus the busiest playing hours, or to take just a couple of extra hours to roll back the changes so that the realms could be back up and playable quickly. Since we did not want to disrupt your ability to play the game during the prime time, we decided on the latter option.

Since the final stage of these modifications did not complete successfully, we will need to do a further extended maintenance for the realms listed below. This is currently planned for the next maintenance period on Wednesday 29th of July. Because of this, we wish to inform you in advance that the realms listed below will again experience extended maintenance as we implement changes that we believe will bring positive change for your play experience, especially in regards to the ability to enter dungeon and raid instances.

After these modifications are implemented successfully, we aim to post up a feedback thread so that you can share with us your thoughts on how they have affected your play experience. At that stage, we will greatly appreciate it if you are able to help us with your feedback.

Catelet World of Warcraft Blizzard, Realm Status

We saw it last night, and the problems have once again appeared this afternoon. Authentication isn’t working as intended for non-Battle.net accounts. This means if you haven’t transformed your WoW account into a Battle.net account, you’re probably not going to be able to get into the game easily.

The transformation process can be initiated at us.battle.net. It only takes a few minutes and is relatively painless. Converting your account to Battle.net is not required at this time, but I don’t think anyone should be surprised if it is soon.

Malkorix has said that there are problems, and they are aware of the problems, but don’t have any ETA on a fix at this time. He also makes a point to note that converting your account to Battle.net is only a reported and unconfirmed by Blizzard solution. However we can say that we haven’t seen any issues with Battle.net accounts.

We’ll update this post when we have more information.

Castres World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

According to the in-game announcement there will be downtime for tomorrow, Tuesday July 21st. Tuesday also marks one month before BlizzCon 2009, where we’re expecting to hear lots of major announcements from Blizzard. Something cataclysmic, hopefully.

The downtime will be happening from 5:00 a.m. PDT / 8:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT. Unlike previous weeks, there are no additional “special” battlegroups that are being taken offline for an extended period.

If there are unexpected going ons with this maintenance, you’ll see additional information posted here. And for those of you wondering, we’re not expecting Patch 3.2 to drop just yet.

Pic for this article is unrelated, but I wanted an excuse all day to use it and now seemed like the right opportunity.

Castillans World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

The Breaking News box has recently cropped up in-game, announcing tomorrow’s maintenance for North American realms. As you can see in the image to the right, servers will be down from 3:00 AM PDT until roughly 11:00 AM PDT, assuming all goes well. If you’re not sure what time this is in your timezone, use this timezone conversion tool.

You know the drill, guys. WoW.com will, as always, be here all throughout the maintenance to cure your boredom. For you European readers, remember that some of you will be hit with an extended maintenance later on, which we’ve posted about already.

Castille World of Warcraft Realm News, Realm Status