Posts with tag wow-europe

Though character service pricing has always seemed high, if you're paying for WoW in pounds sterling then soon you're going to have to pay a bit more. Presumably, this is to bridge the difference in value between the pound and the euro, but Blizzard's description of the price change as an adjustment to ensure they're offering the "best entertainment value" doesn't really sell it -- as pages of unhappy commenters can attest to. If you're in the market for character services, here's the new pricing, in effect April 30th:

Takralus

Name Change .................................................... Current Price: £6 | New Price: £7
Pets ....................................................... Current Price: £9 | New Price: No change
Helms ................................................... Current Price: £10 | New Price: No change
Appearance Change ...................................... Current Price: £12 | New Price: £13
Guild Name Change ....................................... Current Price: £15 | New Price: £17
Character Transfer ........................................ Current Price: £15 | New Price: £17
Race Change ................................................. Current Price: £15 | New Price: £17
Mounts ................................................ Current Price: £17 | New Price: No change
Faction Change ............................................. Current Price: £20 | New Price: £22
Guild Transfer ..................................... Current Price: £25 | New Price: No change
Guild Faction Change ......................... Current Price: £30 | New Price: No change
Level 90 Character Boost .................... Current Price: £40 | New Price: No change
Guild Transfer and Faction Change .... Current Price: £50 | New Price: No change

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From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

This is the story of Apathius, a Romanian student of languages who's made World of Warcraft her entree to the Korean language and culture. "A year ago, I used to be a slightly hardcore raider on the EU realms," she writes. "Being a big fan of anime and all that stuff, I opted for a chance to study abroad in Korea. (Japan was out of the question, sadly, but Korea was pretty close, culture-wise.) So at the start of 2010, I hopped on a plane and came here to start a 'new life,' so to speak. But still, there are huge cultural differences between the Asian world and the west, and for fear that I might not adapt to this new environment, I decided to make WoW one of my mediums for permeating Korean society."

"I thought I knew WoW well enough to get the hang of things quickly, but I ended up having to re-learn a lot of things, especially PVE-wise," she continues. "'Korean Style!' my guildies told me when I first asked them why almost no one raids as a guild here. I was surprised when I heard they PUG heroic raids like Alone in the Dark and Lich King 25-man. But that doesn't mean they're hardcore, as even the casuals do very well. For example, people who had never seen Putricide before went from a 80% wipe to a 5% wipe after three tries. Also, if you're a top-end raider, you can earn about 5,000ish gold per week from raids, because the DKP here is gold, and only gold. The weirdest part about it though, I really get the feeling they take the PVE side of WoW as fun, not as competition, not as something to be taken seriously, just as a means of getting imba gear and seeing new fights."

Join us for one player's quixotic journey through an American game on a European realm from her Romanian homeland to a new home and new realm in Korea.

In what may be the least surprising event of the year, Europe's World of Warcraft servers have gone down almost immediately after the expansion's launch in that region. Even Europe's Battle.net web resources appear to be down for maintenance (or are merely offline due to overwhelming load).

How long will this downtime last? We're not sure, but we will do our very best to keep you updated on European server status. European players, if you have any tips or updates on your server's status, don't be afraid to contact us via our tip line. We love to hear from you!

Update: It appears the culprit is the login/authentication server. Once you beat the login boss, the game realms themselves seem to be running just fine.

Welcome to the Lawbringer, your weekly stop at the intersection of law and Warcraft. I am your crossing guard, trying desperately to not get run over myself.

First, I want to apologize for being a day late, but my week was spent preparing for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. Unfortunately, the test was channeling Illidian. If I get a letter in a few weeks saying that I'm not yet responsible enough to be a lawyer, I will not be surprised.

Anyway, on to this week's promised topic: European Contract Law. We'll be approaching the same topics we covered on my side of the pond: contract formation, contract termination, and unfairness. These concepts form the basis of players' relationship with Blizzard, just like they do in the US. Whether Blizzard has the right to publish information about your avatars, ban you from the game, delete your achievements, or force you to resolve disputes in a mediation are all affected by the laws of the country in which a player resides.

The first challenge in this column is that there traditionally has been no "European" contract law; these issues were decided at a national level through the home country's common or civil law system. Trans-nationalism being all the rage, however, the politicos of the European Union have formed the Commision on European Contract Law which has drafted Principles of European Contract Law. A Common Frame of Reference "toolbox" to help various European legislatures standardize the various laws of contract across the continent to match these Principles. What this means, though, is that this law is in a state of flux -- and I am not a barrister, abogada, rechtsanwalt, advokat, or avocat. Take everything in this column with a big grain of salt. And possibly a margarita to wash it down.

The celebrations have started in Europe and Oceania, anyway! Players in these regions have started to receive their Onyxian Whelps in the mail, along with a letter welcoming them to a new year in Azeroth and a feat of strength upon logging in. This probably means that those of us in the United States (and Canada and whatever other magical lands are in the region) will be getting ours tomorrow. Considering Pilgrim's Bounty also starts tomorrow, it's kind of exciting! It really is a holiday in Azeroth.

The screenshot above comes from Enduser of Ghostlands EU. Since most of us here at WoW.com are US players, we're in dire need of screenshots! If you have any, please send them our way along with your character name (if you want credit for it) so we can add them to a gallery!

Happy Wednesday everybody! After the annoying events of last week when the Battle Bots were ripped from the fingers of European players, things have settled down and are back to normal. With that in mind, it's maintenance time. All the realms are going down from 3:00am to 11:00am CEST.

As always, there's plenty to do and read during this maintenance. There's a nice round up of news for you to read if you are up. Hint: if you are reading this at 3:00am, go back to bed! Those aren't birds singing but owls. Go. Back. To. Bed.

Edit: Our beloved Overlady and Editor in Chief has decreed I also link you to our tattoo, license plate and cake galleries. I don't particularly care for the first two but the cakes are awesome and so delicious. The cake is so not a lie.

Welcome to Wednesday in Europe. While the Americans are still sleeping and dreaming of that next boss kill, it's a brand new day and, with it, a bunch of rolling restarts to boot.

Yes, rolling restarts: it's a different kind of maintenance this week. We'll be getting fifteen minute warnings before the restarts take place between 5:00am and 7:00am CEST so do bear that in mind when you start that wee-small-hours-of-the-morning raid in Ulduar. The rest of the downtime is forum and website-side with both going offline between 3:00am and 5:00am CEST.

So it's a relatively painless bout of maintenance this week, one I fully intend to sleep through. If you're looking for something to read on the bus to school or the commuter train to work, then Daniel W. has plenty for your to browse through. Personally I think it's just an excuse to post that Sailor Moon kitty form although I freely admit the anime fan in me is currently screaming loudly for my own senshi makeover.

Blizzard Europe recently updated their jobs site with a host of new positions which strongly suggest more EU expansion, this time in Italy and Poland. The last major EU release was a localised Russian version of the game which came out last year.

According to the site, Blizzard Europe is looking for Customer Support Representatives in Italian and Polish, along with Customer and Billing Support and Customer and Technical Support. Under their Web Team, they are looking to fill Web Editor positions in both languages, while under Community they are looking for Online Community Representatives. All these positions are based in either Paris, France or Cork, Ireland.

Update: We asked Blizzard about these positions and have been told simply: "no comment".

I enjoy lore, and I enjoy comics. And if you're reading this, you're also probably like me and enjoy the World of Warcraft. So why not combine all those into a nice little contest?

Blizzard EU is running a lore contest for their European customers, with the winners receiving a signed action figure. And sorry North American folks, right now this contest appears to be EU only.

The quiz is a series of 10 questions, and while I won't give away the answers, the answer to number ten, "Who slays Onyxia?" is clearly "You and 39 friends, or just you." Because my solo warrior skills are just that leet.

Head over to check out the rules and enter the contest, after all, you've got nothing to lose!

Update: I wrote this article late yesterday evening, and at the time there was no North American version of the contest. However since then, Blizzard has posted a similar contest for North American residents. Enjoy!

Now while the US forums have had this feature for a while, EU Blue Wryxian has posted that the EU forums have a little more order this afternoon. Rather than clumping the Horde and Alliance guild recruitment threads together, they now have separate areas to, as he puts it, 'increase the usefulness and accessibility of the Guild Recruitment forums'.

Despite his entreaties to the contrary, we're sure it's more to do with furthering the mutual dislike between factions. However that said, it will certainly save a lot of time and hassle.

So if you're Alliance and looking for a guild, take a look here while Hordies can go here.

Earlier this week, the World of Warcraft community sites (multi-regional) updated with a gallery from WoW China. Chinese WoW players participated in an event called, "I Love World of Warcraft, I Love Spring Festival" that combined a passion for WoW with the Lunar New Year celebrations. Chinese players submitted pictures of themselves that incorporated both of these things and the community picked their favorites.

This is, by far, one of my favorite galleries that any of the official community teams has ever done. As a blogger here on WoW Insider, I see every day just how much community has been built up around this game, and I know very well that there are faces behind the characters. I've met many of my guildmates in person, and I hear similar stories every single day through WoW Insider's tipline. I love seeing the faces behind the characters, and that is exactly what this gallery does. Sure, they posed for these things and they're not exactly candid, but it still shows that the game is very personal.

We're all players, but we're also people. I much prefer galleries that display that, rather than yet another mount gallery. Mount galleries are cool and all, I just like this better. Go on, check it out!

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

One of our questions today comes from a reader who's moving to London for a couple of months, and I just wanted to take a moment to say that I've always wanted to go there. Consider yourself very, very lucky! London has all kinds of great things I've always wanted to see, like Big Ben, Stonehenge, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, and Papah?naumoku?kea. One day, hopefully, I'll get to go myself!

Let's get started, hm?

SithVicious asked a pair of questions...

"Will Blizzard ever allow cross server chat?"

Tipster Nimm writes in to let us know that several EU battlegroups have been having serious issues after mergers that occurred post-patch 3.02. The mergers have seen a number of battlegroups acquiring servers with other language-dominant populations, which has resulted in a number of French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian-dominant servers (among others) all in the same battlegroups. While this is probably necessary to a certain degree to guarantee equal Alliance/Horde populations for quick queue times, it's become something of a communication nightmare in battleground matches, particularly those with lots of players using Cyrillic characters. As the player Thoughtless from the Karazhan realm asks, "Can you imagine how hard it is to organise any sort of teamplay in AB with player ???????? from <????????> guild cha(t)ting "?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?????" in BG chat?" Nimm also notes that differentiating between ??????? enemy players is a nightmare.

We knew that Blizzard was closing four EU realms (Stonemaul, Molten Core, Shadowmoon, and Warsong) and transferring remaining players to other realms in response to Russian player migration to Russian realms opened late summer 2008, and the problem's partially the result of that (which has already resulted in the inevitable "In Soviet Russia, battlegroups merge you" joke). A few amused people are rising to the occasion by translating such phrases as inc 5 schmiede (inc 5 blacksmith in German) or proposing a revival of Esperanto, but the Russian language pack would be the only possible solution for the ???? problem. There's been mention made that this is only a temporary fix on Blizzard's part to faction imbalances on battlegroups, but if you're on an EU realm that's seen a recent battlegroup merge, just be aware that Babelfish might be a useful tool in the near future.

Despite the extensive problems and human violations rights perpetuated by the Chinese government, some in service of the Olympic games themselves, most of the world seems to content to settle in and watch the Beijing Olympics one way or another. Apparently, that attitude has spread to Blizzard itself.

Currently on the European and Chinese servers, there are NPCs at each major Battlemaster area in the capital cities who proclaim that Battlegrounds are hosting some type of "Spirit of Competition."

For simply participating in a battleground, you are sent a Competitor's Tabard, which features 4 multi-colored rings on a white background, a clear reference to the Olympics itself. If you win a battleground during this time period, you may also have a chance at receiving a gold medal which summons a spirit of competition, which looks like a small Chinese dragon according to tipster Ichthallus.

This competition does not appear to be live on the US Servers, nor has anyone from Blizzard spoken up to reveal if it ever will be as of this writing. We'll have to watch and see what happens. As Blizzard does not appear to be an official Olympic partner, there is some concern from some quarters that this could simply be a copyright issue. It's also possible that this was meant to be a Chinese servers only event, and it only accidentally got onto the EU servers.

Thanks to everyone who sent us tips on this!

EDIT: Belfaire has confirmed that this event will be coming to US and Oceanic servers starting at Midnight server time. Thanks to those who let us know in the comments!