Logged on a cou­ple of times in my free week.

The Argent Tour­na­ment was inter­est­ing. My priest’s dual spec was fun. Play­ing along­side my wife was fun.

I actu­ally blocked out some time last night to take an offer up from a friend regard­ing run­ning the Tour­na­ment of Cham­pi­ons. I was look­ing for­ward to it.

Of course, it ended up being patch day, and the servers were shot, yield­ing an infi­nite response after every time I tried to log in:

Waited a half hour, tried again, then another half hour, then another. Gave up.

What really struck me about this was that there was no offi­cial note from Bliz­zard about why it hap­pened. No win­dow on the login screen acknowl­edg­ing the prob­lem, no details on what the prob­lem was or the progress on it. Noth­ing on the offi­cial web­site, either. I found an arti­cle on WoW Insider with details.

What a weird way to learn about the sta­tus of a game where you pay for every minute of ser­vice. Five years in and a patch still wholly kills their servers for a day.

Evi­dently it got fixed after I went to bed for the evening. When I tried to log on this morn­ing, my free week was over. The error mes­sage after your time is up help­fully reminds you to go pur­chase more time to play. Time, like yesterday?

Same issues. WoW is a great feast, with tons of left­overs. It’s just a poor snack.

My wife and I will prob­a­bly check out Cat­a­clysm. Given this handy reminder of uptime and login prob­lems, we’ll pass on the launch cel­e­bra­tion, though.