Posts with tag closed

Bornakk and Maaven posted a thank you note to everyone in the Public Test Realm (PTR) forums this afternoon. The PTRs are now closed since patch 3.0.2 is coming out tomorrow. It was an interesting note in that it made sure to mention all of the feedback that they've gotten.

The feedback for this patch (and Wrath of the Lich King in general) has been different from previous times. There has been a ton of constructive, well thought out posts on the official forums about all the changes. Often times they've attracted the attention of Lead Class Designer, Greg Street (aka Ghostcrawler), and the discussion that results from such series of posting are quite enlightening and entertaining.

So no more PTR, a nice little thank you from Blizzard, and a whole lotta patch to look forward to tomorrow.

July 3rd, 2008. This will either be a blessed day for a lot of us WoW addicted folk, or one of some major disappointment. According to the German site allvatar, they spoke with Blizzard's German assistant community manager Gnorog. He reportedly said that the community managers now had permission to announce the Wrath of the Lich King closed beta as starting on July 3rd.

Now before you go and tell your friends and family what really is important to you (because lets be honest, WotLK beta > 4th of July, right?) you need to consider that this is nothing more than a big ol' rumor.

This information came from Gnorog when he was at the World Wide Invitational in Paris this past weekend. I know that Gnorog exists and is a German community manager, but I can't confirm that he was at the WWI (although I'm sure he would have been). We get a good amount of beta and release rumors every day here at WoW Insider, and half the time they refer to people that aren't even real. So this rumor gets +10 for referring to a real person.

The announcement on the login screen tonight tells us that the realms will be down for extended maintenance on Tuesday May 6th, from 3:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. It's curious how extended maintenance used to last from five until eleven, but now lasts an extra two hours – from three until eleven.

Today we've seen the PTR (Public Test Realm) go down, and then come back up again. Earlier we thought this was a good indication that patch 2.4.2 was going to be released on May 6th, however with the PTR still being up, we don't believe that will be the case. Of course I could be completely wrong here – and we all might get a shiny new download screen tomorrow morning.

Only time will tell, and stay tuned to WoW Insider for the latest. We'll also keep you abreast of when the realms come back online, and any lingering issues that may arise.

If you were expecting to trash around in the Sunwell Plateau this weekend, think again. According to a Daelo post, Blizzard has taken the instance offline for the next couple of days.

While I can understand the Blizzard dev's taking the realm offline here or there, and taking down an instance for an extended period of time during the week, it does strike me as odd that they would choose to remove access during the weekend – a prime playing time for a lot of folks. And I know that I and many of my friends only raid weeknights, so we have ample opportunity to test out the content on the weekends.

Nonetheless, we can all look forward to reentering the Sunwell on Monday. If this changes, expect to see an update on WoW Insider.

While it looked like the new 25 man on the PTR, the Sunwell Plateau, was going to be staying open after a few closures in the recent weeks, luck would have that it's not.

Daelo announced a short time ago that the instance will be locked until further notice to fix a bug in Lady Sacrolash and Grand Warlock Alythess. What this bug is exactly, we don't know. But I'm sure it has to be quite a good one for them to lock everyone out of the place.

Keep an eye out on WoW Insider. We'll let you know when the Plateau is back up and patch 2.4 is ready for more action.

In their never-ending war against the evil gold farmers of the planet, Blizzard has announced that during the month of May, over 30,000 accounts have been suspended, removing over 30 million in gold from the economy across all servers. Now, just look at those numbers for a moment: 30 thousand accounts closed. That's a number of subscribers that many small game companies would love to claim as their entire playerbase, and those are not only just the cheaters in WoW, but only the ones who got caught! And 30 million gold out of the economy...that's...well, I'm actually not sure what the hell that means, because I'm not an economist. i'm sure Ben Stien could tell you.

In any case, the bottom line is, don't cheat, or Blizzard will get you. If they're lucky. You can read the full announcement at the official homepage right here.