Posts with tag extended-maintenance

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. We seem to have settled into a nice, mid-beta groove with Mists of Pandaria. There's nothing earth-shattering going on, maybe, but we're still getting a steady diet of awesome news coming our way and the promise of even more as the beta continues. Overall, it's a pretty exciting time to be a fan of WoW.

Scheduled realm maintenance this morning is from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you should have plenty of time to get caught up the week's news. Keep reading for our usual roundup.

Mists of Pandaria news and features

• Check out these awesome new jewelcrafting mount models. And if that's not enough, there's even a super-expensive version.
• There are also new emote animations for female pandaren.
• Here's a video of some more awesome new mounts coming with Mists of Pandaria.
• Josh takes a look at five super-exciting new monk abilities.
• When's Mists of Pandaria's release date? We took a look at past patch and beta development cycles for clues.

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. The beta invite floodgates have opened. If you didn't get a beta invite yet (or even if you did), have no worry. Our tireless team is constantly scouring the beta, ready to bring you the latest news and guides to exploring the new areas, using the new features, and taking in the sights of Mists of Pandaria.

You can check after the break for a special Mists of Pandaria section, along with a roundup of the rest of the past week's news. Downtime is currently scheduled for 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you should have plenty of time to read through it all.

Mists of Pandaria news and features

• In the latest Dev Watercooler, Ghostcrawler explains the new Mists of Pandaria loot systems. He also explained spec-specific quest rewards.
• Have a look at our gallery of screenshots from the pandaren starter zone.
• Check out our overview of Temple of the Jade Serpent, one of the first new dungeons in Mists.
• Pandaren totems have been uncovered.
• We also take a gander at the new Dungeon and Raid Finder UI.
• Check out some of the awesome new archaeology items from the beta.
• We have a gallery of pandaren male customization options. We also have a pandaren male facial hair gallery. Finally, we take a look at male pandaren hairstyles.
• New quest markers should making questing pretty fun and easy. There are even quest markers for the world map.

For the past few weeks, Blizzard's toyed with us just a bit. Monday night bought a posted announcement of extended downtime, only for the morning to feature naught but rolling restarts. As of this writing, we're once again starting with a 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST downtime announcement. Will it stick this time? I suppose by the time you read this, we'll know.

Still, it's a win-win situation. If I'm right, I'm right. If Blizzard changes back to rolling restarts, we get to play the game again sooner. In the meantime, there's still stuff to read while the game's down. The biggest news we've gotten out of Blizzard thus far has been one of negatives: BlizzCon is gone, at least for this year. This means we'll have to party even harder in 2013, but what do we do in the meantime? For now, I suggest we catch up on reading. We've kept busy even with the dearth of news, offering guides and opinions you'll want to read. While you wait for the servers to come back up, why not read on? Our usual roundup of the best stuff from the past seven days awaits.

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. The steady trickle of blue posts hinting at the possibility of maybe kind of sort of somewhat having some new news about Mists of Pandaria keep coming, but they also speak of a long time before we get something like an alpha test or any meaty updates. And so we are in something of a drought, and it looks like we'll be journeying toward Pandaria for some time yet.

Of course, that's not say we've had no news at all. The Dragon Soul nerf news came down the pipe this week, for example, and as you might expect caused a whole lot of uproar. In addition, the Lunar Festival has started up for the year, and we have our usual achievement guide ready to guide you. We even have an interview with a guy who made 1 million gold and gave it all away. Realm maintenance this morning is a nice, extended 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST, so you'll have plenty of time to get caught up on everything. Read on for our usual roundup.

Realm maintenance has been extended until 2:00 p.m. PST 1:00 p.m. PST today (4 p.m. EST, 3 p.m. CST). It's the week after a major content patch, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise to anyone.

We recommend catching an episode of Community on Hulu while waiting for the realms to come back up. Actually, we don't -- I do. Hopefully, this makes up for the terrible faux pas I made in The Queue today.

We'll update this post with any additional information we come across. Otherwise, just hang tight!

Update: 1:00 p.m. PST -- Maintenance extended until 2 p.m. PST.

Extended Regularly Scheduled Maintenance

10:10 a.m. PST - We will be extending the regularly scheduled maintenance time in order to perform additional database checks. We anticipate all realms will be available at approximately 1:00 p.m. PST.

source

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Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. You'd think it'd be a slow week this time around. Gamescom was last week, and Blizzard doesn't seem to have done much at PAX. Patch 4.3 isn't on the PTR yet. Still, Blizzard managed to get enough news out.

The Darkmoon Faire is getting a huge revamp in patch 4.3, with new quests, new games, the ability to semi-powerlevel your professions -- and most importantly, a monkey with a fez. Forget fighting Deathwing; I gotta get me a monkey with a fez.

The other good news today is that scheduled maintenance is lasting from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT. That may not sound great, but that may mean we'll get patch 4.2.2 on live servers, which itself means we're one step closer to patch 4.3. Of course, if I'm wrong about that whole patch 4.2.2 thing, that just means downtime sucks a little more this week.

Either way, you should have plenty of time to catch up on all the news you missed in the past seven days, so join us after the break for our usual roundup.

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! I recently unlocked the Druids of the Talon dailies on my main, and while doing the daily quests, I've been getting an extra dose every day of the saccharine sweet friendship of Tholo and Anren. They're the Hyjal dream team, nearly always together, nearly always talking about each other. They've got a bromance going that's so huge you sort of wonder if maybe you should just remove the "b" already.

I have to admit, it annoyed me at first. Night elves and tauren being all cuddly like that sort of bothered me. The Horde's evil, man. Tauren will betray you, Anren. They're attacking your home in Ashenvale even now! But you know, now that I've gotten to know them a little better, maybe it's not so bad. They're just keeping up a long tradition in the annals of WoW. There's been Asric and Jaadar, Thassarian and Koltira, and now Anren and Tholo. Maybe we could all learn to love each other a little more, just like them.

So go ahead. Bask in the warm fuzziness of the bromance. And once you're done, keep reading for the latest WoW news from the past seven days. Downtime this week is from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you'll have plenty of time to get caught up.

It's been exactly one week since the launch of patch 4.2. As we've all come to expect from the high-end raiding community, raiders have already ground Ragnaros into the dust time and time again on normal mode. As of today, we'll start to see legitimate hard mode kills, and it should be interesting to see which guild comes out on top this time around.

Most of us are content with much more humble progression, though. My guild finished the week at 3/7, having taken our usual Monday evening raid night off to celebrate some wacky thing called "the 4th of July." I think it's a holiday commemorating Gilneas' shrugging off the hegemony of the Alliance of Lordaeron and striking out on their own? I'm not really sure, honestly.

Today's maintenance will be ongoing for a few hours more as of this posting, so if you're feeling particularly bored, don't worry! WoW Insider had some great content this past week that you can catch up on today.

Last week, Ahune busted our instance servers. This week, Ragnaros gets the chance to do the same as we fully expect patch 4.2 to go live as of this writing. Now mind you, I'm not saying servers will crash, but hey -- might as well be prepared, right? Yes, I know that's the wrong raid boss's catch phrase, but I used my only "by fire be purged" joke for the title.

As you might expect, downtime is currently scheduled for 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, so even if everything goes smoothly, you'll still have plenty of time to read up on patch 4.2 before the servers come up. I recommend starting with Mat's excellent patch 4.2 roundup. Then you can check after the break for a quick roundup of all the other good stuff from the past seven days. Don't stop once that's done with, though; we'll have plenty more piping hot patch 4.2 news and info for you in the coming days and weeks.

Happy Tuesday Morning, everyone! The biggest news this week is, of course, the dawn of the Patch 4.2 PTR. The long-awaited Firelands raid is upon us, along with a bunch of other cool stuff. While Blizzard's dialed it back a bit on official previews as compared to last week, the dataminers have found a lot of delicious stuff to hold us over.

If you don't want to partake of patch 4.2 just yet, don't worry, we have plenty of news, guides, and features for other things as well, including a nice little speculation post on the cast of the WoW movie and a guide to aging your elf. With downtime stretching from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT this morning, you should have plenty of time to read it all.

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. With the Rise of the Zandalari trailer out and an official release of the patch notes and major feature descriptions, it seemed pretty obvious that patch 4.1 was dropping today.

Then we got an ominous blue post: The PTR is still up. Testing will end "soon." It's unclear what exactly that means, but by the time you read this, hopefully we'll know for sure.

In the meantime, we do still appear to have extended maintenance going on from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific, so regardless, you'll have time to catch up on the news. There's a lot of juicy patch 4.1 stuff to keep you busy until they finally give us the patch, as well as other stuff, including a few fun interviews and a look at some of our favorite old content. Take a look at it all after the break.

We weren't expecting it, but it came just the same. Dropping in like a thief in the night, the patch 4.1 PTR showed up early last week and began slowly worming its way into the news cycle and into our hearts. There's a lot of pretty amazing stuff coming in with it. Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman are back as heroic dungeons. You can walk right into Old Ironforge. Hunters can tame hydras. The Wintersaber mount grind is getting easier. There's a whole ton of new pets and mounts, along with achievements for collecting more of them. There's a new looking for guild feature. We may even see a caster legendary. There's also hints of a new Hallow's End, and with it, new lore for the Forsaken and the worgen.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, of course. You can check out more articles on all the latest changes behind the break. With realm maintenance lasting from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST this morning, you don't have anything better to do, right? Be sure to stayed tuned throughout the day and coming weeks for more news as well.

Happy Tuesday Morning, everyone. Hope your Valentine's Day was awesome. Patch 4.0.6 has been out for a week now. Despite a few nasty bugs early on, Blizzard seems to have ironed out most of the kinks, and hopefully by now we've gotten used to the newness. Besides, the ups and downs of patch 4.0.6 are nothing compared to the furor that erupted over the moving of The Exalted title. Blizzard later reneged, of course, but it was a pretty huge storm while it lasted.

If you're still trying to get your head wrapped around all things patch 4.0.6, fear not. We have you covered. You can check out our initial guide to the 4.0.6 patch, as well as all the other articles we've been writing this week, after the break. Maintenance this week is from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific, so you should have plenty of time to get caught up.

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. I heard you were all tired of seeing pictures of Alex's RIFT characters, so I figured I'd break up the monotony by showing you a picture of my RIFT character. But yeah, forget what I said in WRUP. I spent my entire weekend playing RIFT. Specifically, I was playing a ranger/bard/marksman who looks suspiciously like Kevin Sorbo. My opinion of the game is pretty close to Alex's, so I won't say much else except to note that I want Blizzard to steal rifts, and I forgot how much I missed playing a bard.

That said, I'm not too bummed that the beta is over (for now), since we got plenty of juicy new stuff coming after today's extended downtime. Patch 4.0.6 should be dropping today, and you should definitely read over the patch notes. There are long-requested (or unrequested) buffs and dreaded nerfs a-plenty.

In other news, Love is the Air on the live servers as well, along with quite a few bugs related to said holiday. Luckily, most of those bugs should be fixed in this patch, and we'll be able to stop obsessing over Cairne and Magni's deaths again. We also got a surprisingly early announcement for BlizzCon 2011. All these stories and more await you below. With today's extended downtime of 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, you should have plenty of time to read it all.