Warcraft Experience

Blizzard Europe celebrated their one year anniversary over the weekend. Check out what they had to share…

One year ago today, World of Warcraft launched in Europe. Since that date, we have passed many milestones, added several dungeons and lots of content. In honor of this occassion, Shane Dabiri, the lead producer for World of Warcraft, has written a letter to the European community. You can read his letter here.

To accommodate for the growth of the European World of Warcraft community, we will open five new realms tomorrow, Wednesday January 25th. These realms are “fresh” realms and will be opened without migration at this time.

The English realms that will be opened on Wednesday are Scarshield Legion (RP PvP) and Xavius (PvP).

Over on the European WoW official website, they have just released WoW e-cards! Send that someone special a WoW e-card!

We have just added a new feature to the site: World of Warcraft themed e-cards! Now you can send World of Warcraft holiday cards to your friends online. To do so, just go to our E-card page, fill out the form, and send it off to your friends! We will be adding more themes and styles as the year progresses, so check back often to see what we’ve added!

- Thanks to WoW Stratics

Here’ a quick rundown of the EU server Migration schedule for the next couple of weeks so you can plan ahead.

January 16th, 17th, 23rd (and possibly 24th)
This is a re-run of the migration that was open December 5th to 9th 2005, because of great difficulties with the account management page at the time.

Bloodscalp –> Trollbane
Burning Blade –> Trollbane
Daggerspine –> Mazrigos
Stormreaver –> Mazrigos

January 19rd to 20th
This is a re-run of the migration that was open December 12th to 16th 2005, because of great difficulties with the account management page at the time.

Deathwing –> Talnivarr
Stormscale –> Talnivarr
Bladefist –> Emeriss
Kor’gall –> Emeriss

Blizzard is in the process of sorting out the server issues over in Europe and are moving some of the servers to a new data centre. To allow the transfer to take place they’re taking a whole stack of servers offline for 24 hours. Players will of course be compensated for this down time. A rather long list of servers affected can be found here.

As a safety precaution, the Realms listed below will also be taken off-line whilst this data transfer takes place. We expect all of these Realms to be unavailable for approximately 24 hours from the start of the maintenance. These Realms are scheduled to be back on-line by the morning of Thursday, 12th January and we will notify you in advance in the event of an early or delayed completion.

As a result of this inconvenience, all players with an active character on the affected Realms will be receiving a two-day game time extension. Players with an active character on the Realms that have experienced performance issues will be receiving an additional two-day time extension to a total of four days time extension. These include the eight realms listed above and those realms marked as receiving four days extension in the list below.

In an effort to battle the ever growing population of the World of Warcraft, Blizzard has implemented a Character Creation Block on the Euro Servers.

“In our ongoing efforts to provide the best online gaming experience and to improve performance on the realms listed below we will block players who do not currently have characters on the realms from creating new ones. This is part of several planned improvements for these realms to address the recent performance issues. This block is planned to be a temporary measure until further improvements are complete and we will continue to update players over the coming weeks as the situation progresses.”

There is no mention that this will take effect on the US realms. For a list of all the Euro servers affected click here!

Yes, we all get a little borked off when it comes to major patch time and our mods quit working… This is just a small frustration compared to what some of the EU gamers have gone through since patching started yesterday. According to this thread over on the EU forums, there was a network disconnect while the patch script was running. I am sure they didn’t realize that was the network cord they unplugged at first .

One user commented that the server downtime will totaled around 37 hours, once they got them back up. I also know that Jennie had a few alts on one of the servers.

[Thanks WoW Insider]

Blizzard EU have posted a few updates this afternoon including Arathi Basin Rewards, Alterac Valley Rewards, Warsong Gulch Rewards and their Flight Map.

Make sure you check ou that Flight Map – it’s really neat.