Frostbolt, a World of Warcraft Blog

Dear Blizzard,

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for over a year: a month and a bit more on the Closed Beta, and more than a year on retail, and let me tell you that I really love the game. Even tho I’ve never been a “hardcore” fan (knowing the lore and things like that) about Blizzard games, I’ve always enjoyed playing them. I would really like to write about the recent service that Blizzard has implemented, known as the Paid Char Transfers. While I always looked forward for this service to be available (more specifically transferring chars from one account to another), for the last couple of weeks I can say that the whole thing is getting frustrating.

You see, I play on US-Mal’Ganis PvP Server, I may not be a “knower” about my server, but I’ve heard that Mal’Ganis was one of the first servers launched when World of Warcraft went retail. The thing is: around six (or more) complete guilds transferred to Mal’Ganis, on the Alliance side, and one more on horde side (at least). This has increased the lag spikes on the server, making kinda frustrating when you are instancing (on a boss, working on making your way thru it, etc.), the population in our server went from Medium to High, and we also are starting getting disconnected from time to time of the server.

While those that transffered had their reasons to do it, there’s no sense as of why allowing such an overload to the server. It’s also totally unfair that the only “solution” for us, that started our “wow lives” in the server, would have to “move” out (and pay $25) for something we didn’t really have the fault. It would have been great if the transfers were capped, somehow, and that the current situation in our server (which isn’t that worst… yet) could be fixed.

Thanks,

A fellow customer.

I’m not sure if I should send that to Blizzard, mainly because I really doubt it would help at all. I’ve been writing before about the lag spikes, and yesterday we were going to do Ahn’Qiraj and we couldn’t. Why? When we were heading, the server was restarted because there was an issue with yesterday’s maintenance. After the server finished restarting, we just couldn’t finish filling up the raid. Then, with what we had, we tried doing Blackwing Lair, when we were making our way to Broodlord, we had several lag spikes, and even after we killed Bloodlord and we started working on the mobs after him (for Firemaw), everyone in the raid got disconnected.

C’mon. I love the game, and I love raiding, but geez, it’s rather a waste of time when things like that happen.

We ended up cancelling all raids yesterday and finishing the night with Onyxia. /sigh Watch the latency when we all came back after wiping in Blackwing Lair due to the mass disconnection

[item]Dragonstalker’s Bracers[/item] — Razor
[item]Judgement Bindings[/item] — Razor
[item]Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal[/item] — Razor
[item]Nemesis Belt[/item] — Vael
[item]Netherwind Belt[/item] — Vael
[item]Rune of Metamorphosis[/item] — Vael
[item]Nemesis Boots[/item] — Broodlord
[item]Bloodfang Boots[/item] — Broodlord
[item]Venomous Totem[/item] — Broodlord

[item]Nemesis Skullcap[/item] — Onyxia
[item]Ancient Cornerstone Grimoire[/item] — Onyxia
[item]Judgement Crown[/item] — Onyxia
I won [item]Onyxia Hide Backpack[/item], woot woot!

Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.

Alterac Valley, somehow the horde summon managed to go all the way to where the alliance starts, within the cave. People were saying that there was someone in the alliance that did it intentionally! (a horde spy! omg!).

Before we get out of the PvP topic, tell me this doesn’t suck, lol

Arathi Basin, we were running to the mines and it was kinda funny to see the uber huge name of that horde, it was a shaman, would have been worst if he was a rogue, lololol.

Last week I could see the eye on Twim Emperors room, before he despawned. I’ve never ever been able to see it, because, by the time I reached the place, he was gone already >.>

Yesterday night my friend Phigan helped me get to the NPC in Silithus so I could learn to make [item]Spitfire Breastplate[/item], [item]Sandstalker Breastplate[/item] and [item]Bramblewood Helm[/item] ^_^

Update 4 (081506): When I activate the Itemstats plugin, a bunch of errors appear on the front page:

Warning: fopen(http://blasc.planet-multiplayer.de/itemlist.xml) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in /home/adrian/public_html/frostbolt/wp-content/plugins/wp_itemstats/xmlhelper.php on line 105

Warning: feof(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/adrian/public_html/frostbolt/wp-content/plugins/wp_itemstats/xmlhelper.php on line 106

Warning: fgets(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/adrian/public_html/frostbolt/wp-content/plugins/wp_itemstats/xmlhelper.php on line 108

Update 3: K2 got updated, so I’ll be in the process of updating my theme, if it’s possible. There are a few things that did change, lets see how it goes… Clean your cache if you are viewing anything weird.

Update 2: Hmm, I got the feeling that the Itemstat plugin is somehow taking my site down, not really sure, tho. Most of the items that I’m linking are already in the database, and I’ve tried linking only 5 and a bunch of PHP errors pop out… Because of this, I’m deactivating the plugin… a while ago I had this problem but it went off alone o.o

Update 1: I’m having issues with my webhost, sorry for the inconveniences.

[item]Stormrage Bracers[/item] — Razor
[item]Bindings of Transcendence[/item] — Razor
[item]Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal[/item] — Razor
[item]Dragonstalker’s Belt[/item] — Vael
[item]Waistband of Wrath[/item] — Vael
[item]Rune of Metamorphosis[/item] — Vael
[item]Boots of Transcendence[/item] — Broodlord
[item]Bloodfang Boots[/item] — Broodlord
[item]Heartstriker[/item] — Broodlord
[item]Taut Dragonhide Belt[/item] — Firemaw
[item]Scrolls of Blinding Light[/item] — Firemaw
[item]Interlaced Shadow Jerkin[/item] — Trash mob
[item]Band of Dark Dominion[/item] — Trash mob
[item]Essence Gatherer[/item] — Trash mob
[item]Stormrage Handguards[/item] — Ebonroc
[item]Malfurion’s Blessed Bulwark[/item] — Ebonroc
[item]Ring of Blackrock[/item] — Flamegor
[item]Circle of Applied Force[/item] — Flamegor
[item]Empowered Leggings[/item] — Chrom
[item]Elementium Threaded Cloak[/item] — Chrom
[item]Nemesis Spaulders[/item] — Chrom
[item]Nemesis Spaulders[/item] — Chrom
[item]Pure Elementium Band[/item] — Nefarian
[item]Prestor’s Talisman of Connivery[/item] — Nefarian
[item]Netherwind Robes[/item] — Nefarian
[item]Netherwind Robes[/item] — Nefarian

Probably for me, the only interesting thing that dropped was the [item]Pure Elementium Band[/item], if I’m not wrong the one that won it is LuftWaffle (grats!). I can’t believe we got double [item]Netherwind Robes[/item] -_-, and still no darn [item]Stormrage Chestguard[/item] T_T /sigh The run was kinda rough at the start, but it got smoother later.

We had a couple of lag spikes during the run. After Blizzard opened server transfers, at least six alliance guilds (Retribution, Pro Baddies —before called Unforgiven—, Cadre Quietus, NvM, MTD, SoldOut) moved to Mal’Ganis, and at least one horde guild (Aurora). Some of them are from US-Arthas PvP Server and some from US-Magtheridon PvP Server; population on Mal’Ganis went from Medium to High o_o That’s a ton of people :-O I forgot to mention that on the AQ40 run we had on tuesday it also happened (the lag spikes).

It’s funny how things work, you all know. I’m one of those people that think that there’s always a reason of why things happen. After I Ex Umbra died, I was looking for a hardcore raiding guild, a guild that would raid almost all week. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to raid all the week, but because of what happened to my brother, my routine after I get out of work makes log into the game slightly late (at around 6:00 PM Server, a bit less than that, actually). Then I think about the application I made on other guild, and how it didn’t work out (the recruitment process in that guild was rather, weird, it would take more than a month to find out, probably, and I wasn’t getting support from people I thought were my comrades), and how I got into Totem Recall. Even tho they don’t raid every day (guys, we need to make Zul’Gurub and Ahn’Quiraj Temple runs, lololol), since I joined I’ve been feeling rather… ehh, how do you say it in english, not worried about things. I keep thinking that their raiding schedule fits perfectly with what has been going on in real life.

And for some weird reason last night, during the Blackwing Lair run, I was thinking about something that a friend and me were talking about a couple of months ago; making a guild by ourselves. My point of view regarding that topic is that being the leader of a guild is not an easy job, it’s too much work, you have to take care for many things, you have to work out issues with people within the guild and with the image of the guild, and, to tell the truth, that’s not fun (at least for me), lol. Meh, too much politics. Then we think about people that thinks that they can lead (or at least believe they can do it), and when something happens, they just decide to bail, which is the worst thing that can happen, because most of the times, when the leader(s) leave a guild *BAM* it’s basically done. Good leaders are to be admired, tho.

You may wonder why I was thinking about that last night. I really don’t know. Still, it’s kinda disturbing that two of the guilds that transfered to our server died/almost died; I don’t know the reasons, and I don’t care that much to ask or anything like that, but still, I mean, c’mon, transferring is not an easy decision, and after they got most of their guild move to another server, the leaders or their core raiders just decide to quit/leave (or whatever happened).

Enough of ranting! I’m thirsty, slightly hungry (I didn’t have breakfast, I usually don’t have breakfast), and writing this at work, awful!