f13.net

Today seems to have caught Blizzard napping a bit with it's huge response slamming the network servers to the point of usability. I'm pretty amazed they get this kind of response just for a patch as there didn't seem to be even close to the meltdown last year then the same basic patch went live. I still can't load my chars on my main server. And  a few others where I tried are just as beat up.

Just take a pass.  Once I got into the world, there were no NPCs or mobs.  The new UI stuff is great, just the game is unplayable at the moment.

Well my server's up and running fine if a little laggy i mean it's only been 6 hours, world didn't end.

Yeah, I rather expected it.  When I heard the November 13 release date for Lich King I figured the patch would come roughly a month before it, and I figured that both the patch and release day would have some noticeable issues because it seemed clear from the state of the beta and the news coming from it that the release is being rushed, not put out when they feel it's ready.  The numerous bugs and issues many people are experiencing seem far more than the typical for a blizzard patch/expansion release.

I'm pretty sure they basically wanted to get the expansion out before the holidays, like they did with the original game, and it's going to result in similar issues where the game has major problems for some time while they fix all the bugs.  In contrast, when they released Burning Crusade they seemed to have done it when they felt it was actually ready, missing the holidays but putting out a product that had minimal patch day trouble (I remember being shocked that I got home and was able to immediately play with no problems).

Speaking of bugs. No where have I seen patch notes that mention how to use the new mount slots. Anyone from beta willing to share the secret? I couldnt find a key binding. The only thing that's happened so far has been, I clicked on my mount which silently vanished and doesnt seem to show up as a assignable key.

On the character page, click on the pets tab.  From there, there's a mount tab at the top.  Drag any of the icons to a hotbar. Viola. 

If you access the mounts via a macro, they are also available by removing anything other than the name of the mount.  "Reins of the Violet Netherwing Drake" for example becomes "Violet Netherwing Drake" and "Summon Dreadsteed" becomes "Dreadsteed".

Ya thanks. As a pet owner I already had my pet out and the panel had autoswitched to the pet panel. it took me a few looks to notice that second tab there. I wonder if this will make it easier for mod writers to make a 1 click mount mod. Never found one that worked well before.

? One click mount mod? I use autobar and it's one click to mount or dismount, same as clicking the actual item was.  So you must be looking for something more than that, what is  it?


With regards to "did anyone see this coming?" Yes.  Any time there's a big, extensive patch there's issues.  The BC-changes patch didn't go as smoothly as Koy seems to recall. (It was a few months before the x-pac, remember.)   The one where they changed all the AHs was really fucked-up and the one where pre-bc instance raid sizes were changed was also fucked.

  Any time there's a major systems update there's going to be issues getting into the game and with the game.  Considering this one not only changed a bunch of systems but added-in whole new ones I wasn't expecting to play at all last night.  I wanted to, but I didn't expect to.

Personally I'm hopeful that this rash of problems now means that by the time I'm able to play again (got my fingers crossed for at least *some* playing ability come LK) most of the major issues will have been fixed.

I know it's schadenfreude but it makes me slightly less pissed off that I can't play now :p

Did anyone see this coming?
It's patch day. You never, ever expect to be able to play on patch day for any mmog. If you can, it's a bonus.

I was able to get in, reset my talents, and get my mounts all set up (yay more bank space now!).  Anything more than that is gravy on patch day with big system changes like these.

It's about what I figured. Same as any other patch. Wait forever to get in. Figure out which mods broke (I use about 0% of the default interface). Find a half dozen that are broken that I don't need. Wonder why X-Perl is so poplar and never seems to be ready. Wonder why auctioneer and cartographer are supposedly ready but don't actually work. Same old same old really.

The only real hassle wasn't Blizzard, it was bartender 3 becoming bartender 4 with afaik less functionality and a need to reset everything.

On the other hand, now I can start collecting pets seriously. (Now that they are back to being tokens, are they tradeable? I have a crimson whelpling on a character I never play.)

Really?  Crap.  It may be time to wipe all my mods and start over.

Yeah, they haven't finished the alignment stuff which means getting things where they belong is very tedious as it tries to jump to the nearest grid, which doesn't take fubar into account. And they also have permanently eliminated the numerical timers on abilities.

My soulbound pets were all still soulbound this morning, but I didn't look too hard at the purchased ones.  Just the things like the snowman, reindeer, miniwing, etc.

the TIMER is gone! FUX.  Now I need to find a replacement....

I can't login with my main now.  Earlier this morning, I hearthstoned back to Shattrath from near the mailbox outside the Stormwind Bank.  I logged back in with an alt and saw that my main was apparently still standing beside the mailbox in Stormwind, complete with summoned demon and whelpling standing next to her.  I logged back in to my main in Shattrath and while harvesting some ogres, I kept hearing the NPCs that wander around the Stormwind AH.  I went back and tried to enter Stormwind through the Shat portal, but I was disconnected.  Not able to log back in and the double is still standing beside the Stormwind mailbox.

I love patch day. :why_so_serious:

This whole pile of shit with mods has me pissed. I created this whole 20 meg pack at work, and ended up still upgrading about half of them when I got home.

There's apparently a new ag_unitframes out, no word on whether it hides the default blizzard focus frame or not - I was using Pitbull in the interim, which I'm not a huge fan of.

Bartender4 is just disappointing. I like that it pretty much seamlessly integrates with ButtonFacade, but I just want Bartender4 to work like BT3 did, and it doesn't.

Also, BT4 makes my empty pet bar visible on my Warrior a lot, and I have no idea why it does that.

I went through the trouble of downloading mods at work as well, and about half of them still didn't work after using the 'new' version.  I go back to check on some, and even though I could have sworn they'd all been updated at various points yesterday, they were showing as being at least a week old.  So I don't know what the hell's up with that.  I do know that I'm much more reliant on my mage mod than I thought, I'm going to have to wait for them to get it fixed, or get an entirely new setup going for him. 

As to pets, Blizzcon and CE pets are accountbound, so you can use the item to learn the pet, and then mail it to another character on the same account.  It won't be consumed.  Anything else, including TCG pets, are consumed on use. 

As to servers in general, yeah it sucked that there were problems, but considering everything that they changed with this patch, and that there were shitloads of people trying to get on, it's not that much of a shocker at all.  I mean, I saw a queue on my server for the first time in forever last night.  It's not an average 'fix a few bugs add a quest or two' type of patch, this thing's big, so doomcasting Blizzard or saying that it's Worst. Failure. Ever. is just silly. 

At first I couldn't get my character list to come up, but I got on a couple hours later just fine, the only issues seemed to be that Stormwind was PACKED with people and there was some lag issues. Went out to Un'Goro on my hunter and trained a Devilsaur, which I doubt I will keep because of the annoying stomping sounds he makes. I dig that I can have all three original CE pets for each character now. The barbershop is awesome. And I forgot about those new little bonuses from professions until I happened to notice one in my general tab.

I personally like Bartender4. Its alot more streamlined, took me all of 10min to setup (compared to the hour or so the last Bartender rebuild took me) and even without the alignment functionality I got my bars exactly where I wanted them and the keybinding feature is pretty slick. Recount2 is ass, however. Very limited options, cant change the look, afaik, and is just missing some basic stuff. I found it extremely ironic that its actual look is going for a "windows vista" feel, given the general lack of functionality and compatibility.

As far as this feeling rushed and whatever, speaking from my (PVE) experience in the beta as of right now all classes can level to 80, have fun doing it, smash some faces and get into the entry level raids without much hassle. You encounter bugs along the way but I haven't run into anything at all that made me step back and not want to play. There are probably twice as many quests as you will actually need to reach level cap so when I found a quest that was even remotely buggy or maybe even didn't have the best quest log description I just abandoned it and moved on, no worries.The most glaring issue in the beta has been the server stability which seems to be more a population issue than anything.

I mean one that is smart enough to load your flying mount if it works in the zone, otherwise it uses your riding mount. When I saw the mount section I first assumed that the big mount button worked that way.

With regards to "did anyone see this coming?" Yes.  Any time there's a big, extensive patch there's issues.  The BC-changes patch didn't go as smoothly as Koy seems to recall. (It was a few months before the x-pac, remember.)   The one where they changed all the AHs was really fucked-up and the one where pre-bc instance raid sizes were changed was also fucked.

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I didn't mean the issues other than the population explosion that seems to have killed some of the servers. I don't think I've ever really noticed as huge a boost in population coinciding with a patch.

This is why the only mod I use is Gatherer.  Everything else is default interface to avoid the disappointment that comes along with changes and obsolescence.

My addon problems all basically go back to the whole WoWAce is gone, hi guys use curse's client, we assure you it is "free, easy to use, and works just like WUA"

None of which are apparently true.

The mod community has gone to a model of many small incremental builds, and without a viable SVN client, it sucks finding updates. Though I was able to download most of the important mods from curse, I am annoyed that most of my FuBar plugins are borked.

Ended up getting Bartender4, since bongos2 has gone the way of the dodo. Since I don't need any of that auto-paging shit, it works fine for what I need it to do, though the configuration of it is really crappy compared to bongos. OneBag not having a really working version makes me sad.....Bagnon is just not as good as the sheer simplicity that OneBag brought.

Have not even bothered to grab SCT yet....figure I will let that have a couple weeks to iron out bugs before I get it.

Overall, my server has been up most of the time and surprisingly stable. I guess we are reaping the benefits of being one of the last clusters to get upgraded hardware back in the Pre-BC days.

I think curse would work if you were running a couple of mods and it was a normal upgrade. If you're running lots of mods, particular interlinked ones, and when you're dealing with a big patch like this one, it's just not up to it and actually makes things worse by leading you to believe you have the latest versions when you don't.

You don't need a mod for this, just make a macro.

That's the one I use on my warlock.  If the zone is flyable it summons my drake, if the zone is land-only it summons the dreadsteed, and it dismounts me if I'm mounted.

Amen.   I use convienence mods, nothing that over-automates or fucks with my UI in general.  I used Thottbot's thing back in the original beta and then was crippled when patches came out.  I decided it was just a bad idea to be so dependent on something other than the game itself working right. 

So right now i'm just out just a few quickies like Autobar for eating/ drinking/ pots/ mounts without keeping my bags orginized, aceprofit for selling all those damn grey items at once and Auctioneer so I can be lazy about selling.  I can still play the game, though, which is more than I can say for the guys who were so bongos dependent they're just not logging in.

Gpt a link to a copy of aceprofit that's 3.0 compatable? I'm logging in but I find it a bit painful to bother pricing stuff on the ah without auctioneer.

I thought I heard that the author of Bongos made a new bar mod called Dominos. Might want to check it out.

The old Trinity bars are back as Macaroon. Still wonderful as ever but a little  quirky to set up

Try out BaudBag. Can get it no WoWInterface and Curse. Its pretty slim and does a decent job of handling remote bank and one-bag type needs.

Not yet.  I downloaded something off WoW-I called "junksell" or somesuch last night.  I don't like it as much as aceprofit but it could be because it's new to me. (And that I can't get the "ADD" button to add white-class junk items like fish oil and scales.) I think aceprofit was developed by the WoWAce guys themselves and might be gone forever now.

I picked up the new Cartography, which is pure ass. Either the design is wrong, or there is a giant bug that's causing clicking on my map to fail. Either way, I deleted it. I've basically cleared out all my mods with this patch to "trim the fat" so to speak.

I picked up mapster to add coordinates and unfog the map and tomtom for waypoints and its working great. It's not quite as good as the full cartographer suite, but my understanding is the author doesn't have much time to work on things and it won't be fixed for a while. The mapster/tomtom even picked up my questhelper waypoints without any prompting.

Almost all my mods are informational (Omen, Recount, AtlasLoot, all my FuBar plugins are mostly informational, etc.) so except for on my shaman, who needs a bar mod for totem management, I can handle playing without disaster when a patch like this hits.

I keep thinking that I should try raid healing with something other than the default UI on my druid but I have some sort of mental block being able to deal with Grid and its ilk.

Grid really isn't that bad to set up and will work out of the box. Once you have it, you won't be able to survive without it. It's that good.

I just got Mapster + GatherMate (and GatherMate_Data to get the info in).

Fucking awesome the little I played with it.

Cartographer is going in the bin now.

This worked perfectly until I tried it with my rogue. For some reason it wont work with him, dispite everything else being as perfect as I can manage it.


The only thing I can see is the macro processor may only allow for 3 spaces in a name. I may have to take this one to the ui/macros forum.

Did blizzard send you extra copies of your mounts and you kept the items in your bags/bank?

That borked the macro for a guy I know.

Yeah, and I deleted them since I wasn't hit by the pet bug.

Ya me too. And on a different character too I think.

This is the "Smart Mount" macro that i use, still works perfectly with the current system

/cast [nobutton:2, flyable, nomounted] Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake; [nomounted] Horn of the Frostwolf Howler
/dismount [noflying] [button:2]

If you want to use multiple random mounts, provided you have enough text space, you can do the following variation.

/castrandom [nobutton:2, flyable, nomounted] Swift Flight Form, Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake; [nomounted] Amani War Bear, Swift Brewfest Ram
/dismount [noflying] [button:2]

Does the following
- Left click in flying zone - flying mount
- Left click in no flying zone - ground mount
- Right click in flying zone - ground mount
- Right click while mounted - dismount (i believe it is currently set up to prevent you from dismounting while flying also, so as to prevent accidental plummets to your death.)

The macro seems to get screwed up if you have (or have had) the mount -item- in your inventory anytime recently, if the item doesn't have a different name than the mount 'spell' in the pet panel.  For example, my paladin that just hit 70 got a Golden Gryphon, I memorized it, edited my macro, and...borked.  In order to fix it I logged completely out of the game and back in, that seemed to solve the problem.  YMMV.

On the other hand, I had no such problem where the mount item has a different name than the new mount 'spell'.  Like with Reins of the Violet Netherwing Drake it didn't do that since the item has 'Reins of the' and the spell doesn't.

Dunno how it is in-game or if it makes a difference, but you have 2 spaces after the word nomounted], and that may screw things up.

Nope. Macro started working  this morning. odd. Maybe it was this char that got mounts mailed to him. Hard to remember with so many alts.

Yup, I was wrong. This one really is pretty fubar. Last night was the fourth or fifth night in a row I logged out because the game was unplayable due to lag spikes (30 seconds to a minute virtually each pull) or the servers had crashed. I'm on Earthen Ring. Is it just us or are all the servers in this bad a shape?

Whisperwind just gets high latency for about 30 minutes each night at peak.  It goes from 100+ to 2000+ for me and my guild (the ones I ask.)  I'm not so sure this is because of population because that seems like a huge spike for a short time.  I assume they are doing something server side during those times in preparation for the expansion.  Outside of that, everything is fine.  I never get booted.

The mail system and crafting system still seems to have a second delay more than normal though.  It is annoying but liveable.

*Edit:  we do have queue at peak so we are certainly "full."

Runetotem has had zero issues other than the rolling restart they did the other night.  Stormrage has been up and down quite a bit though.

Shadow Council has had instance servers down most nights at some point since a day or so after the patch.  It was apparently better last night, but most people were too busy going for brains as zombies to do any instance running. 

I'm suspecting that the big problem they've added to the mix is the whole achievement system is beating the shit out of their database. Every tiny thing you do is now being logged to the database. That has got to be a serious upping of the load right there. In an architecture that had a notably poor database design on release, which they supposedly fixed by throwing hardware at, adding this much extra load seems like a recipe for disaster.

Im not sure that is the case.  I mean, probably around 70 to 80% of the achievements in the game are directly tied to things they were already tracking to begin with, like quests completed, reputation values, battleground victories, map areas explored and similar things.

I imagine a lot of the issues is just the massive hit to instance servers as everyone and their dog is running old world instances like mad to get those achievements unlocked.  Every instance related problem i have seen on Tichondrious seems to stem from the system being overloaded and needing somewhere around 4 or 5 minutes to create an instance for my group so they can go in and kill stuff.  Once it actually makes us an instance, zoning in seems fine.