The upcoming expansion: Wrath of the Lich King

I woke up this morning to do my daily routine… Which is essentially checking for any IM or email messages on my computer overnight.  And surprisingly I saw that I had one message from Blizzard Entertainment.  At first I thought it might have been something relating to the shit experience I had trying to purchase BlizzCon tickets; however upon opening the email I saw that I had received a beta invite to tryout in their upcoming expansion.

Seeing as there have been so many scam emails floating around as of late, I decided to check the validity of this email to see if anything within the email sounded fishy.  There was nothing in the email stating they wanted my account password, and the links within the email didn’t redirect me to some unknown domain either.  They actually provided a key for you to enter in your account which I don’t believe the scamming emails were offering.  I decided to check one last thing, the email headers to see where this originated:

Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of WoWExpansionBeta@blizzard.com designates 216.148.0.66 as permitted sender)

It’s definitely legit.  That IP is linked to DNS: ob3.blizzard.com

I haven’t had a chance to try out the beta yet, as I have work this morning, but I definitely will be checking it out sometime this week.  I’ll post updates about it as I’m playing it.

I have been an avid gamer in the MMO community since perhaps the beginning. I remember my first one. Meridian 59. A fun little world that one was. I loved that game and was playing until they jacked up the price from $10 to about $30 a month. The game went live after beta on September 27, 1996. It can be argued that Meridian 59 can very well be the first graphical 3D MMO to be released. I had a lot of fun in that game. Mana was done by a series of nodes you could attune yourself too. One of the nodes required massive co-operation of people to activate. It had an expansion or two, but I lost interest with the price tripling.

“In a cunning grasp of the economics of the internet (and over the dev team’s strong objections), the pricing model of Meridian 59 is changed from $10 a month to $2.49 a day, but never more than $10 a week, and never more than $30 a month. This effectively tripled the price of the service, with the added benefit that it confused the people it didn’t insult. Hundreds of accounts are cancelled. Tragically, the move proved to be profitable in the short term because 2/3rds of the population did not cancel their accounts. However, the damage to the community was very, very deep, and Meridian never fully recovered.” (1)

Skeletons!

It was truely a sad day for many. I personally feel that led to the games eventual demise. Although, it has been picked up by other people and is playable at this time. Anyone who has played this game and is a bit nostalgic, there is good news to be found in it. You can still play.

“The game is currently running in both the United States and Germany. There are two normal servers in the United States run by Near Death Studios, Inc. There used to be a Sacred Haven (non-PvP) server run at Skotos, but that has since been closed down. Unlike most modern MMORPGs a subscription to a single account on one of the normal servers cost $10.95 per month.

With players only allowed to create two characters per account, and only one character per account being allowed online at a time. Meridian 59 players routinely operate multiple accounts simultaneously garnering the benefits of twice the inventory capacity, and twice the learning ability (as characters have been limited on the number of spells and skills they could learn since the Revelations expansion.)

The commercial game, which is patched free-of-charge for all subscribers, has a small loyal following of fans many of whom have enjoyed the game since its inception over ten years ago.” (1)

For thier official site visit: Meridian 59 Near Death Studios

M59 had two factions you could join. The Duke and the Princess, in which you found tokens and turned them in. These gave your faction extra powers for a period of time. After reviewing the updates after I left, there appears to be a third rebel faction as well which can be joined. All this nostalgic reviewing has me considering starting it up for a month to check it out again.

Sources:

1. Meridan 59 on Wikipedia

This is basically an update to what my experience has been trying to order out BlizzCon tickets.  Earlier today, Blizzard claimed:

The bulk of the BlizzCon tickets we had available were sold out within minutes of ticket sales going live again this afternoon. We have a small reserve of tickets left — to make these available to some of you who might not have had a chance to purchase yet, we will be releasing the remaining reserve tickets for sale tonight, August 12, at 8:00 PM PDT. We appreciate the enthusiasm everyone has shown, and wish we were able to accommodate even more attendees at this year’s BlizzCon.

So they gave people a second chance to buy the remainder tickets at 8PM.  Well 8PM rolls around and their servers are still marked with their “Down for Maintenance” message.  It isn’t until 11 minutes into the hour their servers are back online.  I managed to pull up the shopping cart, and saw that they had tickets available.  So I add 1 ticket to my cart, but seeing as their servers were getting slammed up the ass, it was taking forever for the cart to update.  Eventually it timed out, so I refreshed the page again, and clicked “Add ticket,” the cart reflected the changes instantly this time and I was able to checkout my purchase.  I’m not about to hit submit 100x and end up with a $1200 charge.

The next step is to login to my Blizzard account I setup earlier, agree to their Terms of Service, and proceed to fill in my personal information for the ticket.  I get up to the point where it asks me for my billing info, to make things faster earlier I attached two credit cards to the account to speed up the purchasing process.

So finally I get to the last step and I need to provide my billing information.  I choose my Discover card and it prompts me for the CVV code, I type in the 3 digits, and hit submit, and wait…  After 5 seconds of loading on my browser, the 3 digits in the CVV code disappear.  No error, no nothing…  No indication that something was wrong with my card.  So I try again to make sure, and end up with the same result…

Ok whatever, lets try the Visa card.  the changes take effect and I can see that it has my Visa information displayed below showing the last 4 digits.  The CVV field again is blank for you to confirm payment.  So I enter in the payment and AGAIN I get the same error…

This is the last step for purchasing tickets... However their merchant account morked

You can probably see where this is going.  In any result, their fucking servers once again can’t process my payment EVEN THOUGH I’M AT THE LAST STEP & THEY HAVE ALL MY BILLING INFORMATION!  So all this time spent for nothing.. This is the EXACTLY the same shit that happened to me earlier where their fucking merchant accounts weren’t accepting payment.

Other people also had this exact same issue.  Player Domojin from the Suramar realm had this to say:

My biggest problem in all of this was: I was prepared for the traffic and site congestion. I had multiple computers running on high speed connections with multiple browser windows open (both IE and FF, and even Opera at the end.) in case any one of them had a problem.

I was able to get through to the confirmation screen EVERY SINGLE TIME there were tickets available. But could not continue. The CVV code on my CC was getting kicked out. My bank confirmed it when I called them. My bank stated that “The charge did not go through because the information passed to us was not complete. The CVV code was not able to be authenticated.” My bank confirmed at least a DOZEN declines. It was not entered wrong.

It is solely due to this error that I do not have tickets. This is an error on Blizz’s side. I was there when Blizzard said I should be. I was patient when things went wrong. I stayed alert and was able to get in every time tickets were up (to my knowledge) and at 8pm last night when the last batch of tickets went up I tried multiple CC’s and and had the same problem.

After dealing with this for 2+ days now, I’m pretty sick to my stomach over it. (1)

Domojin and I were in the exact same situation, experienced the same difficulties, and in the end both feel the same.  Last years BlizzCon had tickets available for 3 days before they sold out.

Every month that goes by, their audience grows.  Blizzard certainly has the census information of its customers and knew how successful BlizzCon was last year, I don’t understand why their Marketing department didn’t pick up on this and better prepare for the rush.  I would say that the number of people playing WoW now compared to last near has grown at least 35% .  I don’t understand why Blizzard couldn’t fucking use a service that better handles ticket distribution like TicketMaster.  At least their servers can handle the traffic as well as inform users of errors, etc as you’re purchasing tickets

I can’t remember being THIS frusterated ever…  I know I’m not the only one here.  Many other people put alot of thier own time and money hand designing costumes for BlizzCon and I’m sure they’re 100x more pissed off then I am.  People all around the word booked flight tickets, and hotel reservations, and I’m sure quite a few of these people are going to lose money when they ask for their refunds.

All I can say Blizzard, is YOU fucked this up big time, and there are thousands of other people who would agree.

Sources:

1. WoW Forums – Blizzcon Group

Blizzard servers worked for some, but not for most.

Blizzard announced they were going to reopen their shopping cart servers around 12PM PST.  Well as expected, a huge rush of traffic caused the servers to become slow and sluggish, and in my case, error out.  I made it as far as to the point where the servers were asking me to put in my credit card CVV/CVC codes, which of course at that point it crashed out.  I have two seperate cards on attached to my account, and the shopping cart wouldn’t accept the code for EITHER.

I must’ve at least made 20+ attempts between both cards getting the server to take the code but no luck… I would assume that was probably the last step prior to purchase.  I HAD THE FUCKING TICKETS IN MY BASKET BUT I COULDN’T PURCHASE THEM BECUASE BLIZZARD’S SERVERS FUCKING SUCK! I’m so pissed right now..

This is the message you see if you try to purchase tickets... No really... It is.

Now their stock for BlizzCon tickets is marked “Sold Out”and will remain so until 8PM PST.

The bulk of the BlizzCon tickets we had available were sold out within minutes of ticket sales going live again this afternoon. We have a small reserve of tickets left — to make these available to some of you who might not have had a chance to purchase yet, we will be releasing the remaining reserve tickets for sale tonight, August 12, at 8:00 PM PDT. We appreciate the enthusiasm everyone has shown, and wish we were able to accommodate even more attendees at this year’s BlizzCon.

I’ll try again then, but I’m not holding my breath… Blizzard really fucked this up for everybody.  Next time use a third party service like Ticketmaster that can handle this shit without issues you dumb fucks.  Thanks for making me waste all my time for nothing…

Assholes.

Nintendo restricts Shigeru Miyamoto from speaking to the public

I really don’t know what to say about this… Except that this restriction that Nintendo has put in place for this man is such horseshit.  Nintendo has banned the creator of Mario & Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto from being able to speak publicly about his personal hobbies & likes/dislikes.  Any typical corporation will have you sign a NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) about not leaking internal secrets about the company you work for, but your personal hobbies?  This is insane!  Nintendo’s claim:

Any inside glimpse into the man’s lifestyle could potentially be worth billions to competitors. Many of Nintendo’s successful franchises in recent years have been inspired by what Miyomoto comes up with in his free time.  If he talks about his hobbies with reporters, people could latch on to them prior to their development with Nintendo and cash in on Miyamoto’s thoughts. (1, 2)

I’m really curious as to what his personal feelings are by this additional restriction they’ve put on him.  I can’t imagine this agreement went smoothly.  Or maybe Nintendo paid him a large sum of money?  In any case, I guess he’s obeying and not speaking.

Your thoughts?

Sources:

1. “Nintendo Banned Sigeru Miyamoto speaking about his hobbies”
2. Wii News – “Shigsy banned from Hobby Talk”