Blizzcon, 24 Hour Maintenance, Etc.
So, Blizzcon ticket sales have come and gone yet again. Living up to tradition, only those who managed to get into the queue in the first couple of second were able to buy tickets. An unfortunate number people buying tickets were, as usual, doing so only to resell them on eBay for ridiculous profits. These two days of ticket sales ran the usual gambit of trepidation, hope, victory, defeat, joy and raging anger. At the end of it all though, we managed to get tickets. We had quite a list of folks in guild wanting to go this year, and thanks to our own good fortune and the help of friends with extra tickets, we were able to fill all the requests.
So, yes, The Glaivecow will be at Blizzcon 2010. I’m looking forward to meeting some guildies in person for the first time, as well some friends from Twitter that either weren’t able to go last year or who I didn’t get to meet up with. Blizzcon has become a big annual event for me since going for the first time in 2008, and it’s something I’m very thankful to continue being able to attend. I’m planning on making blog posts from the con, so hopefully there will be enough *new* WoW info to talk about.
Moving on… a quick word about the 24 hour maintenance so many people are seeing on their servers today. Please, please, please stop bitching about it and demanding a refund for one day of game time. Why?
1) One day of game time, even at the most costly payment option, is less than 50 cents.
2) Any scheduled down time is 100% covered by the various things you agree to when you sign up for / play WoW. If you are alerted to it in advance, they can do whatever they want with the servers.
3) This maintenance is required to update hardware for Cataclysm. If it doesn’t happen today, it WILL happen eventually, and if your server isn’t down today it will be down in the coming weeks.
So there you have it. Please stop being entitlement bitches. You have no legal or ethical leg to stand on, and if you’re really that hard up for 50 cents, you probably shouldn’t be spending $15 a month on a game anyway.
And now, some guild news updates.
I’m very happy to announce that Team 2 (10-man progression raiding) has successfully downed Sindragosa last Sunday! They’re now on Arthas, and the plan is to start attempts on him this coming Sunday. When he’s down, we’ll have 20 Kingslayers in the guild making two Arthas capable 10-mans. I’m excited!
Team 1 has been working on the frostwyrm mounts, and knocked out a good chunk of achievements last night. Did you know Portal Jockey doesn’t work if she hits 100% HP while people are in The Dream? Well, it doesn’t… and that sucks. Other than that, it was a very productive achievement night.
Also, a former guildy who had previously departed due to events covered in a previous post about the importance of communication has opened a dialog about returning to the guild. It looks very likely that he will in fact be returning. It’s always nice to see folks who departed under regrettable confluences of errors committed by multiple parties return to the fold. Feels a bit like closure.
Finally, I got a bit of an interesting whisper last night. I was approached by what I consider to be the second furthest progressed Horde 25 man guild on the server and asked if our Kingslayer 10-man team would be interested in joining with their 15 top people to make a run at Arthas 25. It’s extremely flattering for another guild to say they consider yours to be the top 10-man Horde guild on the server. However, since we are using our 25-man lockout, we couldn’t really agree to the offer. The possibility of future collaboration was left open though, and I hope we do get a chance to work together at some point. I think it could be a lot of fun.
So how are you spending your 24 hour maintenance day if your server’s one that’s down? Did you get Blizzcon tickets? How’s your guild’s progression going now that the 20% buff’s active?
The Glaivecow 
Did you know Portal Jockey doesn’t work if she hits 100% HP while people are in The Dream?
…bwah? I got my Portal Jockey while inside the Dream. Did you miss a portal?
Nope. Got every portal… I was the 3rd portal goer and I saw both healers in there with me every single time. But she ticked up to 100% just as we entered a portal spawn and we did not get the achievement. It was most annoying, but several posts on WoW Head mention the same thing happening to other people.
While in maintenance, i play Minecraft (minecraft.net). Best indie game i’ve found so far, and still quite in development (in Alpha stage) ! Even the price isn’t much high if you decide to purchase it (get access to ‘indev’ and ‘infinite map dev’ clients).
My SO tried both times to get tickets, clicked refresh madly, and ordered them the second the order window came up. If it wasn’t for scalpers, we stood a real chance to get them, but did we? No. Honestly, I don’t know how you guys managed it. I’ll be the first to admit that the damned scalpers buying ginormous lots and screwing the rest of us over make me rage so damn hard it’s not funny.
That being said, my main server wasn’t one of the ones down, but I’m sure it will be at some point, the QQers should shut the hell up, and we might all have to *gasp* attend to real life for a change. Who’da thunk?
We had a list of people who needed tickets and a small army of people trying to get into the queue. We were lucky to have two people get through so we could cover everyone’s needs, but all the rest were fractions of a second too slow.
It’s crazy really. Half a second difference in clicking Buy translated to 2000 or more positions in line. My advice for next year, assuming they do the same methods of purchase…
1) Use Chrome. It refreshes their page way faster than IE or Firefox.
2) Just click Buy… you can change the quantity at checkout. Don’t waste time setting it before you’re in the queue.
3) Get as many friends/guildies together as you can to help you get the tickets. Anyone can buy tickets for you and fill in your information for the tickets themselves, and you can just paypall them the money. Consider ticket buying to be a raid activity… sad that it’s come to that, but you do what you have to do.
You can also work out some frustration by reporting all scalper ticket sales to eBay. Selling event tickets for more than face value is against their rules, and people can lost their accounts for it.
Mweheheh. Point taken. Noted this to SO, and next time we will worry about the quantities later. I think this is probably what may have cost us the tickets. Ah well, live and learn. Streaming coverage ain’t as fun as the real thing, but if they put a pet in this year like Grunty the last it would be worth it.
Have fun!
I’m sad that the ticket system works out that way. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any plausible solution to the problem that wouldn’t needlessly hamstring legitimate purchasers. (An idea that came to mind was forcing the buyer to assign the tickets to a specific person, like plane tickets. Your ticket, your name, and you have to show your ID at the door. This would prevent resale to an extent, but it would also block out groups that would purchase tickets for giveaways or guild ‘field trips’, etc.)
“entitlement bitches” I’m stealing this for my personal vocabulary. It perfectly describes the problem have with parts of my generation and the ones that have followed.
Congrats on downing Sindragosa! While I don’t raid (except rarely as a fill-in), I have a few friends in different guilds (also 10 man groups) that have been beating on her for the past week. Even though I’m not there, I’m excited for them. Good luck to both your teams, on the Lich King and their mounts!