uruloki’s lair

So you go to log onto WoW for a couple of minutes to look a few things, and you get hit by the maintainers:

As of now, we will be bringing down the realms daily for regular maintenance. The schedule is as follows:

All Central and Eastern realms will be down from 4:00AM to 5:00AM EST.

All Pacific and Mountain realms will be down from 4:00AM to 5:00AM PST.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

I’ll just complain here about the game being down during prime playing time. I mean, what’s up with planning the Pacific Realms being down during early morning Pacific Time? They should know that some of us on the East Coast are playing there as well. You just know people are complaining about this on the forums.

Tags: Gaming by uruloki
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From Blizz:

In just the first day alone, over 200,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts, and over 100,000 were already playing the game concurrently as of 5:00 p.m. PST on Tuesday. The account-creation and concurrent-user populations are both record numbers for a MMORPG on its first day of launch, making World of Warcraft the fastest-growing online game in history. World of Warcraft is expected to continue to shatter records and achieve a record-setting week-one population in the days ahead. With dozens of World of Warcraft servers already filled to capacity, Blizzard is deploying additional servers rapidly to match the growing player base.

“We had a lot of confidence in World of Warcraft, but the success on day one far exceeded our expectations,” said Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment. “We are extremely happy that players are enjoying our game, and we are doing everything we can to meet the demand and maintain a fun and smooth game experience for everyone playing.”

Retailers across North America, including Wal-Mart, EB, GameStop, and others are reporting that hundreds of their stores have sold out of World of Warcraft due to the demand. If consumers have not yet purchased their copy of World of Warcraft, they are advised to call ahead to make sure their store has copies still in stock.

That’s a lot of money just for the game. When the subscription money starts rolling in next month, Vivendi is going to be a very happy parent company.

Meanwhile, Gamespy has a review of the first days, and more stuff in their WoW blowout.

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World of Warcraft is up and running about as well as you can expect for a MMORPG. We’re in the middle of shutdown for a lag bug that is ongoing, which is to be expected that not everything can go right from the beginning. Roki and I think it is the database server, since the problem seems to be unrelated to individual server population and the lag monster only appears after a loot window (with an item that isn’t another one of something in inventory already) is emptied.

With the release of World of Warcraft in North America, Australia, and New Zealand yesterday, we have already seen an incredible level of demand for the game. We launched with 41 servers in the U.S. yesterday, and we are bringing up an additional 34 servers today to accommodate the influx of players. Over 200,000 accounts were created in just a single day! Based on this, we can clearly tell that players are very excited about getting into the game, and as a result, we expect to see high concurrency on the servers for the first days that the game is available. As the rush to get onto the servers evens out and additional hardware is made available, the necessity for waiting queues will decrease.

200,000 accounts on the first day is an outstanding number. We’ll see how many there are in a couple of months, after the 10-day passes and free months expire.

Tags: Gaming by uruloki
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It’s on the way now… At least according to the FedEx shipping tracking site. It looks to be on a truck somewhere between Louisville, KY and here. Of course, some lucky people (like our Guild Master), have already been playing. That stiff is up to level 10 already….

Tags: Gaming by uruloki
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While I am waiting for the addiction to be sated, there’s a cool little game to play. You get all kinds of practice in using a trebuchet to hit things, which will come in handy if an EMP blast renders other large weapon systems useless. I am kind of wondering how the people on the high scores list got some of the scores that they did…

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Only a couple of days until World of Warcraft goes live. Blizzard just released some of the goodies that can be found in the Collector’s Edition.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to read some of the Lua stuff in order to get a better handle on scripting. This is mostly so that I can pull the best pieces of Cosmos and CTMod to use in my own interface setup.

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…it’s a bad idea. Former Secratary of State Medeleine Albright back s foreigners for President.

“We are a country of immigrants. I think that it would be not a bad thing to try to figure out how to allow foreign-born people to become president,” Albright told the Little Rock Rotary Club while in town to attend the opening of Bill Clinton (news – web sites)’s presidential library.

Supporters of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (news – web sites) have started an effort to amend the Constitution to allow immigrants to run for president. Schwarzenegger was born in Austria. Albright was born in Czechoslovakia.

Ummmm, no. Not even the Governator should be allowed to run for President. Why the hell is everyone so fired up to change the Constitution so much lately.

Tags: Politics, Stupid people by uruloki
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And here I thought that we were supposed to look at the Europeans as enlightened examples of behavior and sophistication.

DECENT soccer fans fired a broadside at the sick senors of Spain last night over disgraceful racist taunts aimed at black England players.

Stars Ashley Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips and Jermaine Jenas endured vile monkey chants as England lost 1-0 to Spain in a “friendly� in Madrid on Wednesday.

…

Spanish coach Luis Aragones stirred up trouble BEFORE the game by calling Arsenal ace Thierry Henry “a black s***�.

The emphasis is in the original. Meanwhile, the new Europeans are begged to be European:

European Union justice and interior ministers agreed Friday that new immigrants to the 25-nation bloc should be required to learn local languages, and to adhere to general “European values” that will guide them toward better integration.

Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk, who chaired the meeting, said all countries agreed to make integrating newcomers a priority, considering the growing ethnic tensions as EU nations struggle to absorb a steady stream of poor, mostly Muslim immigrants.

Isn’t that kind of hypocritcal, saying that your culture is superior to theirs? That is, in effect, what they are saying by requiring immigrants to “learn their language.” Ahhh, screw it. Maybe this time when Europe melts down we’ll turn it into a parking lot and say good riddance.

Tags: Life, Sports, Stupid people by uruloki
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Just in case you weren’t tired of the last two year election cycle, here’s a bumper sticker for one of 2008’s candidates.

And if you live under a rock, here’s what I’m referring to…

Tags: Funny, Politics by uruloki
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Yesterday, while I was out playing soccer, Blizzard announced the end of open beta. The full article can be seen in the extended entry, I’ll talk about a couple of things. First off, it’s a good thing for me that they did this. I now have five solid days to work on advancing the thesis before I start the whole sick cycle of leveling again. EverCrack can bite me, this is the most addictive activity I have ever done. (And yes, I tried EQ) Second, I’m really glad that they wiped the characters, since it levels the playing field. Granted it increases the population pressures in the newb areas when the game shows up in everyone’s grubby little hands, but that’s what dynamic spawn times are for.

Now, to just get out to California to get the guys to sign my copy…

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