Select Realms Active with the Rest to Follow

General

Following a spotty at best attempt at keeping the clamoring masses updated, a number of realms just became active in World of Warcraft.  The culprit of today’s extended service period seems to be a bug regarding in-game mail.  According to US World of Warcraft forums Community Manager Zarhym in “In-game Mails“:

We wanted to inform our players regarding today’s extended maintenance. We experienced an error that resulted in players being unable to retrieve in-game mail from the last 15 days. Once the error was discovered, we brought down the realms immediately and began working to address this problem, and have been doing so for the duration of the day. Our decision was to enable players to continue playing World of Warcraft before the opening of Wrath of the Lich King. Work would continue on addressing issues with the in-game mail while the realms were up. This is the plan that is currently in motion.

The process from this point forward will be twofold:

1. All items that were in a mail will be sent to characters in one or more messages depending on the amount of items the character had in the mail system.
2. Gold from auction house sales or sent through mail will be sent in a separate mail.

We are working to resolve this issue, and we will keep our players informed throughout this process. In the meantime, please do not create an in-game ticket or contact phone support for this issue – multiple mails will be sent returning your items and gold automatically. We greatly appreciate your patience during this time.

While I understand and appreciate the effort made by the staff of Blizzard in trying to rectify this problem — especially before the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion — I really do feel that Blizzard had dropped the ball again in keeping people informed of their efforts and why the extended maintenance had occurred.  This lack of information was compounded by the fact that the official forums are typically down during the weekly scheduled maintenance.  As a result, a further disconnect resulted in which the last word heard by Blizzard was that the servers were expected to be up two hours after their final in-game notice.

That message was posted nearly seven hours ago.

In an attempt to help alleviate this problem, Blizzard decided to make select forums read-only so that information could be shared with the World of Warcraft community.  In “Select Forums Read-Only,” Zarhym further stated:

To improve accessibility, select forums on the official World of Warcraft forums will be temporarily switched over to read-only mode. While we would like to make every effort to ensure the forums allow the community to interact with each other, the current situation does not allow players to communicate with each other, or allow Blizzard to relay information to the community. Thus, some forums will be available as read-only to allow us to share information with the public. We hope that we can keep this to a minimum and revert the forums to full functionality as soon as possible.

A little slow perhaps, but a feature like this in the future would help relay reliable information to the company’s consumers rather than having to rely on what limited information in shared on the game’s “Breaking News” box.  In fact, I’d love to see this become a staple policy each Tuesday when maintenance is performed.

Here’s hoping that your servers¹ are up soon!

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