It's a Bumpy Rebirth

Definitely a rough start. Peppered throughout the leveling and questing are instanced encounters. There are so many people leveling that the instance manager, "Duty Manager", has been crashing. They've taken the servers down twice for emergency maintenance to no avail.

They are posting things. There was a Tweet a few minutes ago:

Yet when you click on the link it gives you:

So yeah. It's feeling like an unofficial fifth beta at the moment. Would really like to at least get a chocobo mount yet that requires a number of instances... *sigh*

Still won't be subbing at this point. Considering cancelling the pre-order. Maybe it will be more ready in a month. Or maybe a bulk of people will be done with the lower levels so it's easier to get going.

Damn Engrish

Over the open-beta weekend I enjoyed Final Fantasy enough that I decided to at least "buy the box." Not sure that I'll subscribe at this point. Not really concerned with physical boxes so when I found Green Man Gaming had a -25% voucher available that's where my money went. Got an eMail with the pre-order code so I figured I'd get that registered. I went to the redemption site and selected English, only to get this:

I don't want to sound like a bigot but I suppose I deserve it. Playing an Asian MMO that has literally crashed and burned once already is asking for trouble. *snicker*

Going to post something on the forums to the effect of:

When the ennui sets in after three months I'm wondering what the Server Merger plans are for the NA/US servers. Would it be best to create a character on the original servers that are being carried forward from the prior fail or will the newer ones (like Behemoth) be the final resting place for whomever is left?

*lol* Why is trolling so fun?

Mainly for the Murloc

Got a few more games in with my 3v3 team last night but they haven't appeared on the ladder yet. So as of last week the team was at #262 of 559:

Not exactly a proud showing I know but frankly rather beyond out expectations. We only signed up to get the 50 games in for the Murloc. Each of us has a mildly competitive streak so we didn't want to just roll over. Surely there are a few pet-only teams we could dispatch. And it felt good to do so.

Unfortunately the rankings go up fast when winning so we quickly faced some of the more serious players. Once we neared a 1000 last night it got rough. Even in the struggle we still did okay. There was one team of a Warrior, Monk, and Hunter that beat us twice:

Yet the third time we faced them we won:

That felt pretty good. The recognition of potential as we learn to work as a team. Even though none of us even do Battlegrounds. So tonight I'm going to ask my teammates if they'd join me in a 3v3 back on Live. Nothing to serious, but just get in the ten games a week. Add a little spice to each lock out for now. Next season... maybe the title?

Secretly I'm sure all three of us wouldn't mind the Vanquisher title but … yeah. Little late now with zero preparation—which shows. We have yet to break 1000 and we have 40 games in. See what it's like after the 10 tonight. *snicker*

Muffle the Elemental

Trolling the forums I came across someone crying about the water elemental idle "glug glug" sound. A blue responded with steps on creating an empty override file:

Here's a way I just tested and it seems to work fine. I found it on an addon site but it doesn't require you to download anything. I have to warn you though to use it at your own risk of course. Here's what you do:

1. Open your World of Warcraft folder
2. Open the Data folder
3. Create a new folder inside called Sound
4. Open the Sound folder now
5. Create a new folder inside called Creature
6. Open the Creature folder
7. Create a new folder called Waterelemental
8. Open the Waterelemental folder
9. Create a new file called WaterElementalLoop.ogg and save it. It needs to be empty, 0 bytes
10. Play the game and test

Thought it was interesting that an official agent would pass on something from "an addon site" but I suppose this is pretty innocuous. If there's a way of mapping out contents of MPQ files this would work for a lot of things.

Unwanted Dubstep

For the past few days Warcraft has been giving me cycling latency spikes. As a tank this makes timed actions and active mitigation very difficult. Wiped my progression raid a few times and have been voluntarily (though annoyedly) sitting since.

Figured it was something on my provider's end that would clear up eventually but it persists. Decided to hit the forums and immediately saw others having the same issue, so I added my two cents:

At first it really pissed me off as suddenly the game would catch up to what I thought was happening five seconds earlier. Now I treat it as a mini-game to see if I can anticipate bullshit. *sigh* Need to figure this out soon.