Posts with tag crash

Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Reader UI is no stranger to UI crashes and corruption issues. Believe me, I've had my fair share of UI crashes that completely and utterly obliterated my entire setup. It is a sad state of affairs when your settings just decide to up and leave on you. Not fun, right?

Losing your user interface in a crash or through some corruption issue is annoying and demoralizing, to be sure. However, rebuilding usually takes less time than you think and sometimes adds new and unique aspects to your UI that weren't there before. In destruction comes organized rebirth, or something like that.

Icewalker sent in his UI with the sad tale of UI failure and starting over, which I felt for. Poor, innocent UIs getting corrupted, probably from Old God influence, just puts me in a bad mood. So today, we will take a look at Icewalker's new, basic UI and grieve together for all of those user interfaces lost in senseless crashes and the wanton ways of home computing.

As you might have heard, Razer WoW gamer Swifty, along with numerous other players, were banned due to server disruption violations during one of Swifty's live streams that crashed a server. While Swifty acknowledged that he never intended to crash the server, Bashiok responded to the bans by stating that even if no one intended to crash servers or disrupt gameplay, the emote spamming and influx of players brought down many servers.

Swifty livestreams events with his guild on occasion and even hosts parts of the stream himself. Being the WoW gamer celebrity that he is, his stream attracts a good number of viewers. His own YouTube video response to his ban acknowledges between 4,000 and 5,000 people were watching his livestream. People flocked to the server, and the disruptions began. A number of players, including Swifty, were banned. Over the course of the day, Blizzard reviewed the information and decided to unban Swifty.

The opening announcement on the login screen has just let us know that there is urgent maintenance being performed on the authentication servers. The maintenance will continue until 1:00 p.m. PDT / 4:00 p.m. EDT.

During this time you may or may not be able to log into the game. Pretty much the luck of the draw and beyond your control.

Account management and posting on the forums will be offline during this time as well, so the troll's trolling will have to terrifically terminate 'till temporally soon.

We'll update this post when things are back to normal, or if there are additional issues.

So you're on the PTR wanting to enjoy all the gooey goodness that is Patch 3.1. You have this urge to go to Dalaran. I mean, it's so pretty right? And there's a bank there, and your hearth stone is probably set to their as well if you don't have a Ring of the Kirin Tor.

Wrong. Move.

There are hundreds of reports coming in from around the net going up on the official Blizzard forums, tons coming into the WoW Insider Tip Line, and the problem has been experienced by every staff member here that's been on the PTR.

You can move no more than a few dozen paces in Dalaran without there being a critical error that causes WoW to crash.

There were some early reported rumors that the problem is linked exclusively to ATI video cards, but I can say beyond a doubt that such is not the case – I have an nVidia GeForce GTX 260 I'm getting crashed every few minutes while in Dalaran.

Patch 3.0.8 is here! So welcome to the new patch -- much like the old patch, only with more lag, crashes every 20 minutes, and plenty of other entertaining bugs! (Don't you just love patch day?) You would think that, by now, we'd have learned that patch days tend to be a bust for playing, but most of us at WoW Insider HQ rushed to log in as soon as the realms were back online, ready to enjoy some 3.0.8 goodness. Boy, were we in for a disappointment. (Though as some of you may have noticed, it was a great time to catch up on old world achievements, since the Wintergrasp bug was only crashing Northrend.) For those of you who decided to spend your Tuesday outside of the game, you managed to miss out on plenty of patch day fun -- but you may be just in time to enjoy stable playtime as Blizzard has scrambled to get things working again. (If you haven't picked up the patch already, here are some download mirrors to help you out.) Were you in-game on Tuesday night? If so, what were your experiences? Get any playtime in?

Reader Tyler sent this image our way without any information on its specific location, so we're on our own for this one. However, there's only one place in Azeroth with quite that look -- the Tanaris desert. But where did this little plane come from? Who piloted it and who crashed it? It's one of those little details in the Azerothian landscape that has no story behind it -- it's just there.

Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing a copy to aroundazeroth@wow.com, with as much or as little detail as you'd like to share with the world!

So, how are the servers treating everyone a month after the expansion release? Alleria's actually gotten (knock on wood) significantly better, with only one hard server disconnect last weekend. It seems that all of our instabilities are on weekends, last weekend's was Saturday, the weekend previous was on Sunday. There have also been no queues for the last two weeks, even during prime times, lag has been "acceptable" for me anyway.

How are your servers treating you?

The vast amount of coverage I have seen on The Burning Crusade rollout has been positive. I'm having very negative experiences. For the first time since I started playing Warcraft I got to bed early last night. Not because a raid got cancelled, or because I was tired, but because I couldn't actually do anything.

Every quest spawn in Outlands was camped. As a warlock, I'd typically get a couple DoT's on a mob, and some warrior would charge it. DoT's don't tag mobs until they do damage. It was taking, oh, 20-30 seconds for DoT's to tick because of the breathtaking lag. So I'd do about half the damage on the mob, the warrior would do the other half and get all the quest credit. Excellent. At least I was still out mana for the cast.

So I rolled a new Draeni. Every quest spawn in the Draeni starting zone was camped. As a mage, I'd typically get 8 seconds into a 10 second frostbolt cast (did I mention it was laggy?) and a shaman would earth shock the mob, and I'd kill it half and get no credit. Nobody wanted to group, because of the XP penalty.

The Outlands and the new starting zones are all on the same server. How do I know that? They all crash together.

So I went back to my warlock, back to Outlands, and decided to get a guild group together to try the Ramparts. We zone in, the server crashes. Twice. Before the first pull.

Then I get clever. I go to bed early, use flextime for the early in-early out and get home at 4. That would give me 3 hours of playtime before prime time. And they rebooted the servers this afternoon. I got 20 minutes in before the waves of crashes started again.

I'm moving one of my level 60's over to a different server. A server that isn't crashing the outlands over and over and over again. Maybe I'll hit 70 there. Because it's not happening on my main server. So far this patch has been a uniformly horrible experience for me.

Anyone else having bad experiences? Vent (but keep it civil) below.

US realms Bonechewer, Eldre'Thalas, Firetree, and Skywall were taken offline for a little less than an hour today for unspecified emergency maintenance.  Checking the realm forums shows that all four realms have a collection of complaints about crashes and unexpected downtime this week, as well as a persistent rumor that the four realms live on the same server cluster as the public test realm - and thus experience heavy stability hits whenever the PTR goes live.  While Blizzard doesn't release server information of this nature, it's an interesting coincidence that these realms seem to be having additional stability problems since the PTR came online again.

Does anyone from these servers have an opinion on whether performance takes a hit when the test realm goes live?  Without detailed technical information being released from Blizzard (quite unlikely) we may never know if this is actually the case - but in the lack of other information, educated guesses may be the best we can hope for in the way of news.

Tseric informs us that the realms Aegwynn, Akama, Chromaggus, Draka, Drak'thul, Garithos, Hakkar, Khaz Modan, Jubei'Thos, Kul Tiras, Korgath, Malorne, Mug'thol, Runetotem, and Thorium Brotherhood have been taken down for urgent, but unspecified, maintenance.  Further the continent of Kalimdor seems to be having serious technical difficulties - reports in the general forums suggest that the continent may be crashing (or causing player disconnects) as frequently as every thirty seconds.  Ouch.  Thank goodness there's a lot of cool stuff in the Eastern Kingdoms - just hope you didn't log out in the wrong place...

Alright, I get ticked off when I'm playing video games just like anybody else, and there have been dozens of times that I wanted to pound my keyboard into a pulp & toss it out the window...but unlike you & me, this kid actually does it. I haven't seen this much unbridled rage since Howard Dean; I guess Ritalin hasn't made it to certain parts of Europe yet.

Have some earplugs ready for this one...