Posts with tag free-time

If you're one of the people who tried to play this past Tuesday, you experienced the same thing as the rest of us. The servers, they were just plain dead. Even since then, the instances and world servers have been a little less than friendly. This was all to put in Patch 3.1, but there were definitely some hiccups along the way. The game just hasn't been running smoothly, and some folks haven't been able to play at all.

Bornakk dropped by the forums to tell us that they plan on doing something about it. All World of Warcraft accounts in good standing will get one day's free play time. Your account has to be based in the North American, Latin American, or Oceanic servers, but it will definitely show up in your Account Management login within the next few days. Totally classy move on Blizzard's part, in my opinion.

EDIT: EU and Russian servers, too!

Blizzard's been on shaky footing this week with all the downtime, from their forum issues to in-game mail problems, and even their main site has had trouble. But there's good news for those affected by the outages (everybody?): we're all getting an extra day of playtime. Tyren says that they believe the problems are now fixed, and that players will recieve a free day of gameplay sometime within the next two weeks.

Personally, I wasn't affected much, but free gametime is free gametime. The real test will be this evening and this weekend -- if Blizzard can keep their realms up even under the pressure of so many people checking out the expansion, it'll be a feat. But odds are that, considering how many players are likely to try checking out Northrend in the next few days, the shakiness is not quite over.

Is it just me or has it been a long time since Blizzard passed out some free game time? Reader Jim T. emailed me about a conversation he recently had with Blizzard's customer service -- he was disappointed with the lag, the queues, and the downtime on his server lately, and checking in about how he might get a refund or credit. The customer rep told him that while they didn't give out individual credit, they occasionally do give out game-wide credit for downtime mistakes.

Which is true -- Blizzard will occasionally give out a free day to folks affected by major unexpected downtime or server issues. But while they used to do it fairly often, by my recollection, they seem much less inclined to pull the trigger on a refund lately. On the one hand, sure, Blizzard does a better job than they used to -- last Tuesday's maintenance lasted quite a while, but it wasn't anything compared to the days the servers used to be offline a few years ago. On the other hand, though, there's no question players are being affected -- by queues, by problems logging in, and by lag on the instance servers and elsewhere.

Of course, we have no idea if Blizzard has an actual rule for when they give out free gametime and when they don't -- at this point, the criteria for giving players a refund happens to be "when they feel like it." Which is all right, we guess -- it's their company, of course. But it does seem like the criteria has changed -- we used to get refunds all the time, and even with all the problems lately, Blizzard hasn't decided to give customers any game time back.