Azeroth Gets Blue Screen

Well then.

My original intent, of wrapping up my series on Recruit-A-Friend with screenshots of me taking a level 44 and a level 23 both to 59 in the space of 3 minutes by simply clicking "gift level" over and over were dashed by a complete failure on Azeroth's part to exist yesterday.

Normal Tuesday maintenance got extended to 6, then to "indefinite", then to 11pm, then to "soon", then back to "indefinite" in an odyssey of broken expectations, and the game was not back online until after I had gone to bed. Apparently, Blizz loaded the game up once, and quickly realized that everything in the mail system was completely gone, including millions of gold from the auction house. So they took the servers down, then brought them back up again without the mail, promising that they would replace everything that was lost. Unfortunately, they had to bring them back down again after realizing that somehow a big chunk of the PvP epic gear had lost its pricing data, causing players to storm the PvP vendors for piles of free gear. Now the servers are back up, and all the gear received from the bug has been taken back.


What it sounds like happened is that Blizzard's techs were presented with a choice: we can either load an older backup of the servers that still has the mail data, or we can load the most recent backup without the mail, but with everything else intact. Considering that I got my Tier 6 shoulders two days ago, I'm happy they went with the latter. Now they have to go back through that older backup, determine what mail is missing, and manually create and mail all of that stuff to the players to get everything squared away. Kudos to Blizz for being willing to put in the necessary effort to fix their mistakes. When you've got their kind of monopoly, it would be all too easy to just tell your customers "tough shit, it's not like you're going to quit and go play something else".


I honestly am not that bothered by server outages. They are rare enough that I still feel like I'm getting my money's worth. What's one evening when I've been able to log in every day without a hitch for months? If it were to become a more consistent thing, then it would be an issue for me. But as it stands, I was glad to spend the evening with my girlfriend, and then play Penny Arcade episode 2 for a few hours (which, by the way, rocks).

(omg.) Wrath (omg.) is coming out TOMORROW (OMG!!!), but I'll be stuck at work most of the day, so I'll probably wrap up the RAF series tomorrow. Not that you'll be here. You'll be in Northrend. You bastards.