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Welcome, O WoW rookie, to patch week madness. If you thought run-of-the-mill maintenance and minor patch days could be dicey, here's your chance to enjoy the epic-level chaos wrought by epic-level content patches.

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Not entirely unexpectedly, many servers are having trouble staying up and active this evening. In most cases the server itself isn't going down, but rather individual continents. Northrend and the instance servers in particular are taking a beating, and at least on my server, Eastern Kingdoms is dropping like a rock every now and then, too.

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“When Life Hands you Lemons…”

There is a huge gold-generating opportunity in the issues relating to connectivity caused by the 3.1 deployment. The lower population, server issues and connection problems are, of course, annoying if you’re trying to make gold or quest in ways your are used to doing it but they also give us additional opportunities to profit if you’re willing to adapt and think on your feet.

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The9 has been the target of persistent rumors over the last few months that they're on the verge of losing their license from Blizzard to operate World of Warcraft in China. First, we heard about their financial troubles, and then came rumors that Blizzard was going to ditch them. And now we've got WorldofWar.net reporting a rumor that Netease will be the company to take over the reins there. It makes sense -- Netease has been growing a lot during their history, and they successfully operate Fantasy Westward Journey, an MMO with a US value of $761 million, with 400,000 average concurrent users. They're already supposed to take over Blizzard's Warcraft III and Starcraft II in China, so Blizzard will actually be consolidating their properties.

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Despite all of the instance server problems last night, a number of bloggers throughout the community marched into Ulduar to give the place a whirl on live realms for the first time.

• We Wipe On Trash downed a few bosses. They also, amusingly, wiped on some trash. Luckily, that trash was hotfixed today.
• Honor's Code had a whole lot of fun figuring out Flame Leviathan. If you haven't tried that boss out yet yourself, it might be worth reading before you do. First hand experiences are even better than regular ol' strategy posts sometimes.
• Hoof n' Healz came to the realization that Naxxramas made him a worse player, and Ulduar trash surprised him a little bit. I fear that most of my raid will come to that same realization tonight when we give the place a whirl.
• Of Teeth and Claws is just a little bitter about the current state of the game, and hopes Ulduar will revive the endgame.


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There's also been a bit of a facelift overall, with new buttons for the various sections of a character's profile, and some achievement statistics shown on the main profile page. The "Last Updated" date is a nice touch, although recently I find the Armory usually contains fairly fresh info [edit: apparently this is not a new feature].

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• Ulduar:
• XT-002 Deconstructor's heart aggro radius lowered to 60 yards.
• Trash before XT-002 Deconstructor disabled temporarily, because there was a problem with them being linked.
• Shattering a Construct during the Ignis the Furnace Master encounter will now decrease the number of Strength of the Creator stack buffs he has by one.


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Most of my mods are working pretty well in patch 3.1, even if it's no longer as easy to update them. However, there is one bug that bit me that seems to be widespread enough to be worth a mention: various types of messages not showing up in the chat frame. This includes outgoing and (sometimes) incoming whispers, guild member alerts, and notifications of discovering new recipes (the last one I find particularly irritating, since it leaves you unaware of what you've just discovered if you use a Research recipe).

• CraftyGnome
• An old version of Deadly Boss Mods
• Tongues
  


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Dear readers, you've probably noticed that WoW Insider is downright eager to give you guys free things the last few weeks. To give everyone the best possible chance of winning, here's a reminder for our two current, ongoing contests for those that may have missed them.

Your window of opportunity is closing quickly if you want to enter our Arthas: Rise of the Lich King giveaway. It's 3:00 PM Eastern as of this posting, and that contest ends at 6:00 PM Eastern. That's three hours! Head over there and throw your name into the ring!

Our Fan Art contest is still ongoing, and you only have until Monday night to enter that. Remember. creativity is more important to our judges than anything else, so even if you think you're a bad artist, you probably have a chance to win if you can make us laugh!

Remember to go through the official rules for each contest (linked on their pages) before entering, and note which regions are able to enter. Good luck to everyone who participates!

I've been holding off on leveling up my cooking until 3.1 in the hopes that the tweaks Blizzard was making would give me an easier go of it, but I probably shouldn't have bothered waiting. While they have given us a few more recipes that stay green later, that's pretty much all we got. Anyone expecting more yellow recipes or even (gasp) orange to get the skill points rolling faster will be sorely disappointed. I cooked some of those Salmon you see above, and got a pretty good rate of about one point for every three cooks (which is normal for green on any profession), but 420-450 is still a slightly uphill battle.

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Update (11:20AM PDT): Exodus just killed General Vezax.

Update (10:55AM PDT): Flame Leviathan first kill has been adjusted, as Might of Turalyon killed him a few minutes earlier.

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We’re getting reports, and have at this point observed ourselves, three major types of WoW outages today.

Authentication Servers Down

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Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss the how to properly bind your abilities to the keyboard.

While on a Sartharion 25 raid this past weekend, I noticed one of the other Rogues in the group moving very peculiarly. It took me a second to put my finger on it, but I figured out what was happening. He would be running around normally, and would then stop in place for two seconds every time he used Fan of Knives. I sent him a friendly whisper, asking why he was pausing when using Fan of Knives. He replied back that he had to stop moving and click the FoK button on his action bars, of course. I asked why he didn't simply bind FoK to a key for easier access, and he replied with "My 1-9 keys are already full!"

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We're not out of the woods with this patch yet. I'm seeing this message on a North American realm, and lots of other people are seeing the same thing. At least one of our bloggers is still in the game, though, and Blizzard is saying the Authentication servers are still up and running, so this should be fixed soon.

We'll keep you updated, stay tuned.

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Well goodness gracious me! We had nearly eighteen hundred comments for this morning's EU loot card giveaway! Not bad eh? Well we /rolled and came up with three lucky winners who will be receiving an email from me shortly!

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As promised in our alert post late last night, we are informing at this time that the issues affecting the auction house and in-game mail system appear to be resolved with the deployment of patch 3.1.

For your trading safety, we ran several tests on several servers to confirm that everything is working as expected. Testing conducted included:

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Listen up, this is very important stuff here.

When male Draenei logged on last night, they were greeted with some serious facial hair. No one is sure exactly what's happened, and the only blue response is a reply asking for folks to post if they're having the issue.

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At this rate, Demachic's gonna give me a complex. I now know far too much about the current happenings of Britney Spears. My knowledge of Britney music has quickly become my dark, secret shame. The kind of shame you keep quiet, tied up and gagged under the bed, where polite company needn't see it as they come by to visit. Which is a roundabout way of saying Demachic is back with another Britney Belf music video -- Circus.

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In the second of our two exlusive interviews, we sat down with Dan Jolley, the writer behind TOKYOPOP's latest Warcraft manga, Warcraft: Death Knight, which is due out later this year. You can also read our interview with TOKYOPOP Series Editor Troy Lewter here.

WoW Insider: How did you get involved with the Warcraft manga?

Dan Jolley: I've been writing for TOKYOPOP for a number of years now, and when I heard they were going to do Warcraft manga, I called them up and basically did the long-distance, over-the-phone equivalent of jumping up and down and holding my breath until they agreed to let me write some of them. (Tantrums aside, I think I'm also a bigger Warcraft geek than anybody else there, so that was another factor in my favor.)

Did you have particular plots in mind for 'How to Win Friends' and 'Miles to Go' when you were first approached?

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We can leave your friends behind. Which is exactly what Firael and Rollack of <Knee Deep in Blood> on Antonidas did during Heigan in Naxx. When eight of their ten raiders wiped on the first dance, the tank and healer decided to see if they could down the boss alone. And sixty-two minutes later, Heigan hit the floor. I wonder if there's an achievement for that ... or if anyone else was still at the computer to collect the loot?

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It's been a long old twenty four hours but the US servers have had 3.1 running life for a little while now. I can just imagine the thousands of people swamping Ulduar, the Argent Tournament and every class trainer from Azuremyst to Thunderbluff will be stood on by thousands of toons trying to dual spec.

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Let's get real here for a second. When I signed off at midnight, the US realms were only just started to pop back up. Did you honestly think we here in Europe were going to get away scott free?

You did? Oh dear, let's not go there, eh?

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The Zug Initiative on Kael'thas turned two a little while ago, and to celebrate, their guildie Pacheco made these adorable cupcakes. The Horde symbols are red fondant, the Hearthstones are white chocolate (which sounds way too tasty), and of course the other ones say "Zug Zug." Very awesome. The guild had a little local gathering to celebrate, and we're sure these things were enjoyed. Congrats on two years!

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US Maintenance
Quote from: Zechtal (Source)We will be conducting emergency maintenance on all US/LA realms this morning at 4:00AM PDT to address some technical issues. We expect the realms to be down for two hours with the maintenance period ending at approximately 6:00AM PDT. EU Maintenance
Quote from Blizzard staffThis Wednesday there will be an extended maintenance to apply patch 3.1.0. Please note that all European realms will be offline from 03:00 until 15:00, Paris time (CEST).
Ulduar - First Kills
Ulduar is now open and we can start tracking World First kills! There is also temporary Ulduar US First Kills and Ulduar EU First Kills forums for guilds who wants to post about their kills before they hit the front page. The Flame Leviathan, Ignis, and Razorscale were killed very fast by a lot of guilds and it's hard to figure out who got the World First kills, I'm working on it.

Update - US and EU Rankings are now split. A new forum has been created and there are now 2 first kills forums:

• Ulduar US First Kills
• Ulduar EU First Kills


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Hey, European players, psst! I know it's the crack of dawn and to make things even worse it's patch day! Pretty miserable, huh? Well, I have something that might cheer you up! Upper Deck Entertainment here in the UK have given WoW Insider a set of shiny, brand spanking new loot cards from the Blood of Gladiators expansion set, which is available right now, just in case you didn't know.

And we're giving them away to you, loyal EU readers. All you need to do is leave a comment in this post before 5PM GMT (6PM CET) today, April 15, 2009. We will then randomly choose which of our three lucky readers will win one card each. Be sure to comment with an e-mail address you check often and have easy access to, because that's how we will be contacting our chosen winners with the codes.

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When I first had a chat with the Big Giant Heads who run WoW Insider and Massively, they were under the impression that I dwell in the future. Sadly not, even if I am on GMT. I had to explain that, no, we don't get patches before North America but rather we have to wait an extra day to enjoy all the new patch goodness.

So it's Wednesday morning in the UK and guess what? Yes we have extended maintenance on all European realms. Hmm, what could this mean? Ah yes, could it be, 3.1.

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We are receiving widespread tips from concerned readers informing of us of rampant bugs in the game after the patch roll out. Complaints range from the expected (Realm and zone crashes, instability and add-ons not working as expected) to the not so easily foreseen (missing mail, auction house crashes and quest/quest item peculiarity). We’ve spent a little time on various servers now and can confirm some, if not most, of the issues that were brought to our attention.

It is the unexpected issues that concern us most as fiscally responsible traders. Specifically, issues with the in-game mail system and the auction house makes us nervous about losing items or, perhaps even worse, gold. /gasp!

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