is Wow going down?

[Dylonius Funk]

A friend of mine told me that because of massive lag issues in the recent patch which is affecting all players ( finally something Horde and Alliance get equally :D ) Blizzard is gonna be taking WoW down for a couple of months. I checked Wow.com and Wow Wiki and there was no mention of this so i can assume my friend is an idiot or he's misunderstanding something he read. Since I'm nice I'll go with the latter but i figured i would ask here since i know ther are some Wow players on the forum. I haven't had my account active in allmsot in a year but i thought i might get back into it this sumemr. So thats why i'm curiuous as to the state of the game as it were.

[Rhodes]

when has an major north american online game ever gone down for months to fix lag issues?

even at its worse EQ never went down for months.

hours for emergency patches sure... but its always back up within a day.

[AbeChinchilla]

This better not come to be. I finally got a game card and I don't want to be halted from continuing to play now that I'm getting back into it.

[wgabriel]

Your friend is wrong. :D

First, there hasn't been any recent patches to WoW (tho a big one is coming very soon, perhaps Tuesday).

Second, as far as I know there is no lag issue whatsoever. I certainly am not experiencing it, and if there was, you'd see the WoW forums FULL of posts complaining about it. Perhaps they are talking about the background patch downloader which started up again today to prep for the new patch...but it only runs when the game isn't running.

Third, if there ever was such a game breaking patch...they would simply back it out. No company is gonna shut down for months for something like that. Ever.

My suggestion would be to bonk your friend for passing on such nonsense!

[Lego]

Third, if there ever was such a game breaking patch...they would simply back it out. No company is gonna shut down for months for something like that. Ever.

As an Asheron's Call veteran, I've had that happen before. I remember a Christmas a couple years ago when a new patch really screwed up the server and they were down for two days and had to do a "rollback". Least we got pack dolls out of it..

But yeah, I'm used to the whole "oh crap" type of feeling.

[rbboese]

Second, as far as I know there is no lag issue whatsoever. I certainly am not experiencing it,

No lag at my place either.


and if there was, you'd see the WoW forums FULL of posts complaining about it.

But they do complain about everything else though :P .

[vegeta11]

First of all I play on Zul'jin and have zero lag. Two, they are not taking the servers down for a month or so, and three they have even been doing the new 2.1.0 patch in pieces over the last week so that there isn't a massive dl for the huge patch coming up since it ads 4 25 man raids (Serpent Shrine, Tempest Keep, Mt. Hyjal & the Black Temple) to the game for all you hardcore raiders.

[DeadlyMessiah]

My boss gave me yesterday a brand new copy of WoW that he got in Florida from BB Corporate. My g/f wants to play it, but I'm not sure if we should pay $15 a freaking month for a game. Is it truly worth it?

[vegeta11]

U work at BB by the game cards for 2 months at a time with discount. :> Yes the game is a lot of fun (and work at times) to play as a group or by urself.

[AbeChinchilla]

My boss gave me yesterday a brand new copy of WoW that he got in Florida from BB Corporate. My g/f wants to play it, but I'm not sure if we should pay $15 a freaking month for a game. Is it truly worth it?

Well. The game comes with a free month.

Play for the free month and see what you think, duh!

I wans't too sure myself, but now I'm buying time cards.

AND YEAH, you got that Best Buy discount. You'll be paying less than $15 a month with time cards.

Time cards are great. If you decide not to play WoW for a while, you just avoid buying and using another game card and don't get one until you do want to play again.

My free month ended in early March. Since there was a lot of personal stuff going on, I didn't get around to having time to play WoW again until last week, which is when I also bought my time card. :)

[Kellory]

My boss gave me yesterday a brand new copy of WoW that he got in Florida from BB Corporate. My g/f wants to play it, but I'm not sure if we should pay $15 a freaking month for a game. Is it truly worth it?

Well, you have to try it to see. I find WoW to be rather bland and boring, but I'm used to a more challenging type of MMORPG. But to each his/her own. WoW has many good points, especially for a new starting player who may not have 20+ hours a week to devote to a game.

As for being worth it, well, most MMORPGers I know who get hooked on it stop buying other games. Figure out how much you spend per month on video games. If you are paying more than 15 a month for video games, and you get hooked on WoW or any other subscription MMORPG, then I'd say it's worth it.

[fates]

The lag you guys are experiencing might come from the Blizzard Downloader that starts when you boot the game up. I always minimize WoW and stop it before I play.

[AbeChinchilla]

The lag you guys are experiencing might come from the Blizzard Downloader that starts when you boot the game up. I always minimize WoW and stop it before I play.

Why do that? Open up the Options (before you click "Play Game" upon WoW start-up) and pick your settings for the downloader. I set mine to have it in the background, as I hate logging into the game, only for it to say something about downloading a new patch, and then closing the game, thus having to re-login and all later.

[CrazyAsano]

First of all I play on Zul'jin and have zero lag. Two, they are not taking the servers down for a month or so, and three they have even been doing the new 2.1.0 patch in pieces over the last week so that there isn't a massive dl for the huge patch coming up since it ads 4 25 man raids (Serpent Shrine, Tempest Keep, Mt. Hyjal & the Black Temple) to the game for all you hardcore raiders.
If Wow is going to keep adding lame 5000 person raids that require you to join a guild and act like an employee of said guild to get raid credit to be allowed phat lewt, they should also be adding 1-2 person instances that cater to people who like to play solo or in small groups. As it is, even regular non-group Wow doesn't cater to them. You can do stuff alone, but it's slow and annoying and you need food and bandages to keep your downtime manageable. They need to make it kind of hard to solo because everything non-elite is already very easy as soon as you add a second or third person. In a one-person instance, though, the difficulty could be tailored for soloers. Basically the same way a group of five rips through elites in an instance without eating after every single monster, one person could rip through a bunch of enemies. I for one would have a lot more fun being challenged by myself to defeat a bunch of enemies than milling around in a giant herd of players rolling over everything in sight and then fighting some sort of boss made such an artificially inflated challenge to deal with the number of players that you end up being part of a scientific damage-dealing process in which every move is scripted and that can be ruined by one idiot. [/rant]

[Soulblazer]

I am hoping that Warhammer Online stays away from the massive groups for the PvE part of the game. It definitely brings down the fun level of WoW when you have to schedule your time with a bunch of other people to do the raid encounters. The fact that you get saved to a raid instance group also makes it annoying. In any case, at least the PvP should be better than WoW :).