And I’m going to spill the beans…..

But first, let me tell you about my day!

You see, today was the day of the week where I anticipated playing some. Having fun. Cassie was even in the mood to quest. Was gonna be a good day.

And then… 30 minutes into playing, disconnect.

30 minutes or so later, another disconnect.

Within the next 30 minutes, two more disconnects.

WTF?!?

I had downloaded and installed a new addon Ruune had recommended called QBar, that adds an extra bar to your screen that auto-populates with ‘to be used’ quest items. A godsend for someone like me that has every bar full and shoehorns something out of the way to get a quest item on the bar for fast activation.

But… reason was telling me that addons had nothing to do with it.

You see, I’d get disconnected from the game… and when I tried to log back in, it would hang up, it would fail to connect, it would log in but fail to connect to my world server….

None of these have anything to do with addons.

So I assumed an ISP issue with my provider, Comcast, or that Blizz was messed up.

I journeyed to the WoW Forum Technical Support page, where I quickly found out that Comcast and Verizon customers all over the US were having the same issue… and dong a tracert function on my computer resulted in the same results as others… interesting lag spikes before disappearing into ATTENS.NET, one of AT&T’s routers feeding Blizzard.

Blizz Customer Service seems to be on top of investigating this issue, which seems to be affecting many, many people.

The problem, of course, is going to be identifying if it’s hardware or software, and WHO owns the code or hardware that needs fixing.replacing.

Please god let it be Blizzard, since they have a personally vested interest in fixing it.

If it’s an AT&T owned router in Dallas, TX… well, what the hell does AT&T care if a bunch of gamers can’t get into a game? I imagine someone in Tech Support there would probably say something like; “Tough shit, they can go outside and see the sun for a change, then. Losers.”

We shouldn’t expect much sympathy from folks outside Blizzard, is what I’m saying. (That above is a comment I’ve actually heard around the office about another video game player who complained that his hard drive at home crashed, by the way. Just so you can appreciate the humor. What humor? Yeah, pretty much.)

Anyway, Blizzard Technical Support has a thread up, I was online there when it started, and within two hours it had grown to 43 pages. that;’s 43 pages of people submitting their tracert data for assisting Blizz in troubleshooting the issue.

First, that’s a lot of awesome folks stepping up and helping.

Second, think about it… that’s 43 pages of posters, in two hours, who were smart enough to go to the WoW Tech Support forums instead of that Blizzard dead end support page that starts every troubleshooting issue with “First, delete your WTF folder…”

43 pages of people that, once there, had found the correct thread of shared problems to respond to, instead of posting “Wah, I’m getting Disconnected every three minutes, and I’m different from the other 400 people who are also reporting this problem, I’m special.. please help!”

43 pages of people that, having found the correct thread… were able to enter their CMD window, run a tracert properly, output it to a txt file, and then post the results in the thread.

Now, I gotta think that the 43 pages of folks represented a TON of folks that couldn’t quite handle that process.

Call me cynical. I stand by my statement.

Anyway, that was hours ago. Since then, if I am online I get booted within 8 minutes. Every time. Cassie and I get simultaneously d/c’ed. It’s synchronized D/C, folks! The latest sporting craze.

I saw that WoW Insider finally put a post up about it… even though they got most of the facts wrong. Well, that’s to be expected.

Currently, at the time of this writing, that thread in the WoW Tech Support forums has grown to 113 pages.

The latest update to the thread, from 4:33 PM, says they are still investigating and have been in touch with peoples. What peoples has not been specified.

Still, imagine if you will, the moment when I was farming ore in Sholozar, on my Hunter, flying around, and I spotted a Titanium Node. And I hit it with my pick. 

And the loot window opens showing a Titanium Ore, Crystallized Air x2, Crystallized Fire x2, and a Ruby.

And my screen freezes.

Imagine a Bear, on his knees in the center of the room, head thrown back, screaming “KHAN!!!!!”

Can I get an “awwww…. poor Bear?”

Thank you. I feel better already.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot.

BRK’s huge, super big secret?

Scroll on down to see….

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.

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I’m going to be on the next BRK podcast!

That’s right, he had me on as a guest, and we chattted away the afternoon. I tried to keep it to Huntery stuff, since I was a guest on the best hunter podcast around. Still, a few Druidy things crept in. I have a hard time helping it.

It was a lot of fun.

BRK is an incredible speaker. Very sharp, very focused. It was great fun.

If you listen to the show and have a hard time figuring out which of us was the Bear…

Remember, Bears are slow. Very, very slow.

Except when there is food.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.