Congratualtion to the morons at Blizzard that thought up and implimented a ‘fun’ prelude that rendered the game unplayable for many and so frustrating it’s not worth playing for others.

PvP’ers are probably loving it, but most of those doing so are doing it maliciously. They give these clowns the ability to explode and infect everyone in a radious. Unless you could cure disease, or get cured in a few seconds, you turned, then died. Great for them, they run back in, click on a ’suspicious package’ to re-infect themselves again, then start over.

There is NOTHING fun about logging in an dying, especially when it’s in a safe zone.

There is NOTHING fun about repair bills on Epic gear. The taunt of ‘well don’t wear it’ from the idiot brigade raised temper too.

There is NOTHING fun about waiting around to hand in a quest because some git deliberately infected everyone at the Inn etc, or having the banker or quest giver turn into a zombie and kill you.

And for the idiots that say, “Well don’t play” … I’m sure Blizzard would have a different view of that if a million really hacked off players took that advice - ($185,000,000 a year in lost revenue. Epic Fail!)

Then there’s the same fools that say, “Well, go to…”

Morons, every city, every village, every starter area is (was) the same - because it’s people like that going out of their way to make it so.

Yes, I am sure a percentage of players - in the minority I must add - are loving this to bits. For the rest of us - EPIC FAIL, Blizzard!

All in all, the ‘fun’ wore out very, very quickly, then because annoying, now it’s making me wonder if I even want to continue playing a game where the developers are so stupid, indifferent and out of touch with the feeling and pulse of the majority of players. It was players that caused the mess, but it was entirely predictable what would happen.

Utterly disgusted with Blizzard at the minute!

Addenda, next day:

It was removed the following day after an apparently massive deluge of complaints. I know a small minority of (adolesecents) called the rest of us whingers and whiners, but to be honest they where generally the hoody type cowardly bullies exasperating the problem. It was almost too quiet the next day. It was fun, at first, but there was an amazing lack of common sense on Blizzards behalf. Let’s hope they learn from this!

Getting annoying this. I suspect the bugged items are pets and similar that were in inventories or banks when they applied 3.02 patch as it doesn’t affect items acquired after the patch. Still, annoying and I wish they would fix it, must be making a lot of unncessary work for GM’s

Name: *******
Server: Aerie Peak
Time: Current, since last patch

Issue: In auction house I keep getting this message - “You cannot auction an item with used charges”

Affected items:

Brown Snake
Cat Carrier: (White Kitten)
Cat Carrier: (Cornish Rex)
Golden Dragonhawk Hatchling

Can you please replace these with not bugged items.

Thank you.

Was sorted an hour later, so it’s not a huge issue, but’s irritating all the same.

Day one was horrendous, barely usable, but they turned that round in a day, albeit till a tad unsettled from time to time. But there are so many great things in the 3.02 patch…

Inscriptions, obviously.

Barbers.

Greatly enhanced graphics and animation effects

An extended talent tree that’s insanelypowerful

And bug crawling out all the woodwork.

More annoyingly, the GM’s don’t appear to be answering people, the best you seem to get is a generic response from central support - not server specific.

Here’s the one that’s really annoying me - and seveal others, if seems:

This is ANNOYING. This is the 3rd time I’ve had to report this, with no action taken, especially as this is a known bug!

Name: *********
Server: Aerie Peak
Time: Current, since last patch
Issue: In auction house I keep getting this message - “You cannot auction an item with used charges”

Affected includes: Four of Portals, a BoE Jingling Bell, a Mechanical Yeti (passed to alt) and a Disgusting Oozling - now bound to me so I can’t sell it at all !

Not just me, I googled this and it’s not due to add-ons or anything, it is a known bug they just haven’t got round to fixing. It also affects - randomly - any and all vanity pets, the Darkmoon cards and deck and, bizarrely, the white, wieldable fish!

You can use then, post them to someone else, trade them with another player - but you can’t sell in Auction house because it thinks it is a spent item!

Nuts!

One other bug - Warriors are loving - is you can respecc, dual wield to two two-handed weapons, then respec to a better build and keep the weapons in hand for completely imbalanced damage.

Another bug - an exploit I’d never try for risk of an account ban - allows you to trade soulbound items to other players. *Twitch*

The constant hot patches and server reboots, while necessary, are very annoying too, especially if you are in an instance. Just as annoying is the fact you can’t log back in after thereboot - often for hours at a time. On the plus site I’m getting a lot more typing done :). Back to the Inscriptions guide, I guess…

This has to one of the buggiest patches ever. A lot of the complaints I saw were people just not knowing what to do, particularly with mounts, or talent trees, but others were stranger. Many players meeting themselves, even two or three copies of themselves, warriors finding their epic plate is now chainmail, gnomes speaking in Drenai, lots of people stuck, etc. I was booted so many times… Then there were resets and rollbacks - rather annoying after working out the talent tree etc. Then it fell over completely

As is stand for me (EU)…

Aerie Peak is down*
Wildhammer is down*
Blade Edge  was down but seems OK, for the moment
Hellscream was down but seems OK, for the moment

Yet characters we have on French, Spanish and German servers are all fine. Even stable enough to run BT raids.

* I log in, get the character list, Enter World - and get rejected:
“World Server is Down”

Before it all went pear shaped I was randomly getting booted, but was able to return, or return on other characters, now, nothing. The status on the listing for these is low population, assumedly meaning no-one else can get back on either.

If you look on the forums [ http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com ] they are flooded with people all over the world angry and frustrated, with the threads locked down as they fill up. A lot of people are probably very unhappy about now - easy to estimate the people having problems being “in the millions”

Can’t even access the EU Realm status
[ www.wow-europe.com/realmstatus/index.html ]

(503: The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.)

Can access realms here [ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/ ] - and they are toppling over like a deck of cards.

Basically, it is a safe bet they majorly messed up with this ‘patch’ and should have left well alone until it was ready!

Been flaky for hours, now nothing unless I want to play in Spanish.

Los siento no creo este bien!

Sorry, but I don’t this this is very good, nope! Worse than my Spanish even :S

Been trying for 5 hours, on and on. The games is really messed. And to think I was calling Warhammer Online the other day. The guys at EA / Mythic must be laughing their socks of at Blizzard about now. At least their’s is a new game, one expects a certain amount of teething issues.

The log-in for Warcraft seems to be resetting now and shows many server offline.

I just want to work on Inscriptions for my guide. Meh!

As just to complete the night, it’s started hailstoning. I hate the cold. *mutter*

Yayyy, my copy of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Collector’s Edition arrived yesterday

Warhammer Online Collectors Edition titlebox

The box oozes quality. Opening it revealed two heavy tomes, one a commissioned graphic novel, the other a high quality 224 page art book on the game. Along with these where the obligatory token mouse mat (cheap) and a metal miniature for the tabletop RPG fans.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Collector

Warhammer Online Collectors Edition: Artbook

Warhammer Online Collectors Edition: Graphic novell

I was extremely impressed.

Then I shut down WoW and started to installed it.

See, that there should have been a warning light. When the opening message on a release version features an Orc telling you the Beta server is now closed…

Half an hour later I was checking to see if the install had hung. An hour later the bar began to move. A whooping 2 hours and 7 minutes later (on a fast machine) the install finally ended.

Then went to get a 900Mb patch!

Don’t even talk to me about the registration process and the hassles I had getting it to acknowledge the serial number.

There’s also something seriously bugged about the patcher / loader for the game too.

This toss-tails over to become:

So, finally, three and a half HOURS later I can play the game. At last…

What the… please re-install???

This application has failed to start because d3dx9_34.dll was not found. Re-installing may fix this problem

So, I’ve paid all this money and set the 30 day timer on the game counting down - and I can’t even play it it’s so buggy. Naturally I went online to WoW and asked about - paints an ugly picture.

I am 100% positive that the clowns in charge of this got wind of the release date for Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion (out 13.11.08) and panicked.

“Yes, yes, we KNOW it’s not ready, but we HAVE to get it out the door NOW. Once Wrath ships we are screwed. We need to hook player now…”

Family site so I’ll not say what I’m thinking, but I am utterly, utterly disgusted. I’ll comment on the actual game when - if - I get it going, but if you want my advice - don’t even think of installing this game for a month or three, because it is just not ready to ship, in my opinion.

I really wanted this to be GREAT as I’ve been a fan of Warhammer for many years and, going back to the early 80’s, even knew Game Workshop’s Ian Livingstone well enough to chat to in a bar.

To be continued…

(Minutes later)

The file itself is a give-away “d3dx9_34.dll” - DirectX

Thought about that last night but I was too miffed to sort it. Despite having an up to date DirectX install, I had to install the copy that come with the game to get it working.

Now to see what the game itself is like.

Creating a character: OK, that’s nice. Like the music too

Choosing a realm: The sort on server type doesn’t work (meh ) and I’m not sure I like scrolling through all the server listings to find English.  Sloppy.

Sort, what sort? That's not piggin' sorted!

That you can choose the language (like WoW) should be a given mind.

World Population: Ah, the joy of logging onto a MMO and not getting hammered with spam from gold sellers. Of course, as far as I could tell, there were only two people on the server and I was one of them. Early days yet, I guess. Personally I suspect a lot of early adopters got a few hours into the ridiculously long install, thought, “Sod that” and cancelled.

Playing: It’s OK, but seems crude. You see the awe inspiring intro’s and expect something droolworthy. The reality seems to be some buggy graphic glitches and low quality shading and filtering. The whole thing has an unfinished feel to it. Played it for half an hour, got bored, went back to Warcraft, disillusioned. I will play the game more, obviously, but first impressions count and Mythic are out of their mind to release this unfinished product.

When I tried to play the second day - after waiting for more patches - then waiting for an irritatingly long load time - I thought it had lost my character, then I decided it has just hung. Finally (when it eventually  loaded) I realised the truth: The team that designed and signed off the character user interface need to be tarred and feathered and chased out of the games industry with a ruddy big big warhammer. *SPLOTTT*

Bugs and omissions: As I said, I’d only play for 30 minutes or so before the bugs started coming out of the woodwork:

• A graphics glitch when going up stairs that should never have left early beta.
• Creative Labs EAX doesn’t even work, not for me at any rate
• Even obvious things like testing the menu at the difference resolution options is flawed. That is disgusting. No way should something so basic have made it to a release version.

Can't enable EAX in user settings

Another bug: Can't scroll to the bottom of the user settings

Final view: If you are a die-hard Warhammer fan, give it a few months to get fixed and then look gain. If you are used to the smooth quality of games like Warcraft and GuildWars, forget it. You will hate it. I have been looking forward to this coming out for a few years, ticking the days off on my calendar as the release date got ever closer. I played tabletop Warhammer when it came out over twenty years ago… This isn’t Warhammer, this is just another attempt at D&D with Orcs, Elves and Humans.

Blizzard set the bar with World of Warcraft - I think Mythic aimed for the catflap… From the hassles I had even installing it, to the let down of the graphics, to the glaring bugs, everything screams that it was rushed out the door in a panic. At this point I’m not even sure I want to renew my subscription after 30 days. And if I don’t the odds are this game is an epic failure, I can see a lot of people stomping back to the store and asking for a refund and most early adopters won’t even think about renewing their subscriptions. The attrition rate for this will be huge.

My tuppence worth: Most players will see this for what it is -unfinished. Fans and customers got shafted:

• 9/10 for the Collectors Edition (lost a point for the pathetic mouse pad)
• 2/10 for effort
• 0/10 for knowingly releasing an unfinished beta. Epic fail!

At the moment, for me, it’s more a case of Warhammer Offline

I pre-ordered this well in advance from Game.co.uk but when I went to collect it not only did they not have a copy, they had no record of the Collector’s edition  on the system - of the game, not my order - and tried to fob me off with a regular copy and a guide book to the game.  Game have just lost any and all loyalty I may have felt for them, especially seeing as I’ve been in a few times checking on it.

Wasted a few minutes trying HMV, Smiths and Gamestation on the way to the bank before turning for home and the trusty Internet. I had tried to get a copy online before but seeing as it wasn’t released, couldn’t. Rather bizarrely, I find, the one place you’d expect to get it doesn’t nor does it have any plans for it when I asked: Games Workshop, the company that owns the Warhammer franchise. Go figure!

Anyhow, a quick search showed copies now available from £59.99 with Play.com to the usual parasites on eBay buying them to sell at a huge markup. On day one - when you can still buy it in the stores - it was going from £125 to £195 a copy already. Fortunately for me Play still had copies and I’m hoping for mine tomorrow.

Wish I’d bought the CE versions of Warcraft at the time (didn’t want to get hooked) - these sell for over a £1,000 now *twitch* Just hope I can get a collector’s copy of the Lich King when it comes out.

On an unrelated note, Mrwwwl… At the end of the month you’ll be able to buy a Plushy Talking Murloc toy

Talking Plushy Murloc

l