Blizzard released the first informations about the upcoming patch.

Call me unimpressed. There’s already a lame pic around but the point is that this patch really doesn’t sound worth the wait.

To summarize:
– Battlegrounds and Honor System dealyed, see ya
– New dungeon (Dire Maul 56-60)
– sidebars and quest tracker (ripped from the user mods)
– Chat bubbles on screen
– *Amazing* fixes to classes:

# Mage – New Spell: Mage Armor allows mana regeneration to function while casting and increases resistance to all magic schools
# Druid – Cat form damage per second increased
# Warrior – Rage will now generate when attacks are parried, dodged and blocked
# Priest – Power Word: Shield can now be cast on all raid members

– Meeting stones

—
Who wants to bet that the meeting stones will be forgotten by the players in less than a week.

More than two months for a patch filled with fluff.

Moral: when you see the devs and community reps go all silent it’s not because they are working too much. It’s because they have nothing to show.

This announce is really a cover-story to hide the fact that both the honor system and the battlegrounds are, again, delayed.

I guess my prediction

When Blizzard will finally release a content patch it will be rather big. Peoples will stop complaining about the lack of updates in two seconds (till the next month). Instead the servers will decide to explode and everyone will start to scream about them releasing it too soon.

…was a bit too optimistic.

Btw,
I WANT THE LEET SPEAK FUCKING OUT OF THE GAME.

(The message also hints the plans for a test server for the battlegrounds and honor system. It isn’t clear how they’ll deal with it but it’s possible that they’ll target or mirror one of the live servers)

From the Mannoroth forum Sato, a level 59 undead warlock, says:

Goodbye Mannoroth :(

To everyone I have played alongside, its been great. To everyone I have played against you have been worthy opponents. And to everyone I have been ganking in the Wetlands with my 34 Rogue Archangel, I had a blast with my final days.

I will be logging in one last time this Friday to change leadership of my guild and say goodbye to them. We have been together for over 2 years, and through several games. I hope our website comes back up again so I can keep in touch with you guys.

Special thanks to Necrocyde, Aradesh, Deathgaze, Kilour, and any of the other warlocks that I have had such a good time with in the Warlock channel.

A bit below:

Where are you going? :(

What do you think?

I have to focus on school. Its also time to end my addiction with video games and get back into the real world.

I dont need to fail another semester of College because of MMOs.

Aww…

I took some more data.
There’s a total of 3246 players on Blackrock and 3340 on Warsong. Both without queues. Maybe they relaxed the server cap a bit. (EDIT: I tested a few hours later when there was a small queue of 20 people on Warsong and the total population was 3350, so this is still the cap. People complained a lot about the lag.)

To see what I gathered follow the “read more” link on the right.

I’m starting to worry. In World of Warcraft my rest bar is growing faster than my experience bar. I cannot catch up. No really.

The result is that even if I play so rarely I keep crunching levels as peanuts. I find myself doing grey quests all the time because I keep outlevelling them but I’m still curious to finish them and discover new story lines (and quest lines).

COME ON, I barely finished Maraudon and I’m going to outlevel Zul’Farrak before even starting with it!

Where’s my “level down” button!?

Not much to discuss, World of Warcraft released today a client patch that is supposed to improve the performance of the client while large crowds are shown on screen. Along with this “performance patch” come five brand new servers (2 RP 2 PvP 1 PvE) for a grand total of 93.

The patch about the client is probably a preemptive test for the battlegrounds, from my tests it seems to work nicely but without the possibility to have comparative tests I cannot say how far they went and the client was already rather good after the optimizations they did during the beta.

Anyway, let’s hope that things will start to move more consistently.

From the european forums of World of Warcraft, about the possibility to play on the Euro server with an american account and vice versa:

“At this time, owners of the US copy of the game are unable to play on European servers.”

“You will have to buy an EU version to play on EU servers. Theres no way to transfer US accounts to a EU server.”

“Once we have an official policy on this, it will be posted on all of our websites, American and European. At this time, the process of transferring players from American servers to European servers, or vice versa, is under review. Mostly this is due to the imbalance of character levels between server blocks. It wouldn’t be fair to allow a level 60 character to be transferred to servers where a majority of the population is still level 20 or below, and it wouldn’t be fair to allow some players to transfer, but not others – thus we are reviewing the best single solution to give to all players who wish to transfer.”

This doesn’t make sense. The players are asking just about the possibility to access the servers and build new characters when, instead, the answer is about moving the characters (the players?) directly. Imho it smells of pay-per-use service. It also sounds like you won’t be able to play on both the euro and the american servers, you’ll have to make a choice and move your whole account.

We’ll see, it won’t happen before a few years considering Blizzard’s pace of development.

Sometimes (but rarely) reading this website can be useful.

Now, through the Technical Support forums, I found a few useful tools to keep care of your beloved World of Warcraft client. If you want to check its health or if you keep crashing every five minutes you should investigate to find out if the files are currupted and need a fix.

The Step #1 can be bypassed but it provides more information. If you aren’t a geek or not directly interested in the process you can bypass this and go directly to Step #2.

Step #1
You need to download this program and install it. Then click on Start > Run and type in CMD then click Ok. When the command prompt opens you have to navigate right into the directory where you installed the client and into the “/data” one, where there are all the big .mpq files.

Here you type -> fsum file.mpq
Replacing “file” with the name of the file you want to check. After a few seconds the program will show a long string that corresponds to the MD5 of that file. Below you can see the correct MD5. If you obtain a different value you probably have a corrupted archive.

83EF5759BA2B610FB1E484BFFA563C8D *base.MPQ
6573BBD7F29C68724CC00AEEFD1DAA0D *dbc.MPQ
3E0390C70EC88EF961562CBB4D33046B *fonts.MPQ
6054AF22A2314D0FCA8DD0A3CC087F89 *interface.MPQ
144638046316A506160485F562D5240A *misc.MPQ
81DFD7FF9AD6D1CA7BF9A065480FD6B7 *model.MPQ
4405E85224816854DD4171F8D98E82C8 *sound.MPQ
043CA457DD4EF4194E04678E5F448A8F *speech.MPQ
CA2064C4272A726CECDB75B426F437A5 *terrain.MPQ
BC92D7E0E3258DA459F3310782B9D1B1 *texture.MPQ
118FD5BF991C01E147564CD7DF31FA07 *wmo.MPQ

Important note (updated 21-Jun-2006): The “patch.mpq” file is also extremely important but the MD5 value varies depending on the order of the patches you applied. To be completely sure of your installation you can use the patches that I mirrored on this website and that you can download from here (you have to log-in to download the files).

First you install the game directly from the CD or DVD. Then, before applying any patch, you check the MD5 of all the files in the “data” directory as explained above (and the installer). This will make sure that you have a default installation without glitches. Then you apply the patches that I linked here above, one by one in progression. Following the istructions.

If you follow the same precise order you can check directly if even the patch.mpq is built properly. The correct MD5 will be (for each step):
107F0940436D60620CB4BE80FE368B3B *patch.MPQ for 1.3.0 (4284)
57C95DD7FA4598E066E4E93A99EBC93C *patch.MPQ for 1.3.1 (4297)
AE1855400C6CA896583084BFDAE72CC4 *patch.MPQ for 1.4.0 (4341)
F00B3BEE162FC08CB19F0F95BABBECB5 *patch.MPQ for 1.4.1 (4364)
73590215A367FC323CB46694DF9B2B63 *patch.MPQ for 1.4.2 (4375)
26EC389F878B2B1CC66097B549397A6B *patch.MPQ for 1.5.0 (4442)
8B037930D04F5BD893D25E84DDA21B03 *patch.MPQ for 1.6.0 (4500)
6A270335F697F60BD67727C358E97E87 *patch.MPQ for 1.7.0 (4671)
DB77DC80B24DABAEB473B71BBF23388E *patch.MPQ for 1.8.0 (4735)
432F7CABC15E6E5A36DB14C22C8A5346 *patch.MPQ for 1.8.3 (4807)
39EA2AC284616B06F5B0CA4CDEB7127A *patch.MPQ for 1.9.0 (4937)
(from this point the file to check isn’t anymore “patch.MPQ” but “patch-2.MPQ”)
604455FCDA91DFA332E505E3B7346051 *patch-2.MPQ for 1.9.3 (5059)
5117ACEAB1D26E822468741B6CD832C7 *patch-2.MPQ for 1.9.4 (5086)
(back to only “patch.MPQ”)
E50107CB0FD1E83C48C94647294D7D33 *patch.MPQ for 1.10.0 (5195)
(back to “patch-2.MPQ”)
520AD02DC7A432B25907B72D095B341B *patch-2.MPQ for 1.10.1 (5230)
2E2DB66128B245EA7D3D1B52E8E6690F *patch-2.MPQ for 1.10.2 (5302)

Remember that if you do not follow the exact same patch order the MD5 may be different.

Correct order: Release CD -> 1.3.0 (4284) -> 1.3.1 (4297) -> 1.4.0 (4341) -> 1.4.1 (4364) -> 1.4.2 (4375) -> 1.5.0 (4442) -> 1.5.1 (4449) -> 1.6.0 (4500) -> 1.6.1 (4544) -> 1.7.0 (4671) -> 1.7.1 (4695) -> 1.8.0 (4735) -> 1.8.1 (4769) -> 1.8.3 (4807) -> 1.8.4 (4878) -> 1.9.0 (4937) -> 1.9.1 (4983) -> 1.9.2 (4996) -> 1.9.3 (5059) -> 1.9.4 (5086) -> 1.10.0 (5195) -> 1.10.1 (5230) -> 1.10.2 (5302)

Step #2
This step is the most important one and probably the only you want to follow even if you believe the client is alright. An health check is always useful. This time the program you need can be found directly from Blizzard, here (the program is replaced with a new version shortly after each patch and will warn you if you are using it on a wrong version anyway).

Remember to close the client of the game, then launch the .exe that is contained in the archive. The program will check throughout all the files of the game to see if everything is at the right place, in a similar way to the manual process I explained above. The nifty feature is that it will also auto repair the files if something isn’t correct, downloading the small part that went corrupt directly from Blizzard and WITHOUT BITTORRENT!

Again I recommend everyone playing the game to download this small program and check if the client is in an optimal shape. If you keep crashing after this it means that the problem is somewhere else (unstable hardware, obsolete drivers and so on…).

That said, I go back at exterminating centaurs in order to gain a faction level and enable a quest…

(this message will be linked on the World of Warcraft repository page that is easily accessible from the sidebar)

News #1: I’m currently seeing an ad banner about “Matrix Online” on thottbot. Maybe I’m just old and my memory fallacious but I didn’t notice advertising on the site the last time I used it.

News #2: Blizzard introduced two new cool monsters in the game, even if they aren’t listed on the patch notes: DumbAss and IMwithSTUPID.