Wrestling with Warcraft

Wrestling with Warcraft

Blizzard makes my head hurt. On the one hand, they are feeding my obsession by announcing just yesterday (10 March) that I can pre-order the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor (WoD), even though it's not expected to be released until this fall. Why would anyone pre-order that early? Well, because of the "Boost to 90" opportunity. The idea is that when WoD is released each account would be able to boost one of their characters (even a newly made level 1) instantly to level 90. The boosted character would get a set of green i483 gear (a decent starter set), 150 gold, and a full set of 22 slot bags (worth about 2,000 gold). If the character is at least level 60, learned professions are boosted to max level 600 as well. What makes this intriguing is that the boost can be done NOW, instead of having to wait for WoD. I am very tempted to pre-order and boost my level 27 paladin, Jocey, to level 90 right away.

On the other hand, Blizzard is making me really angry. I've started having connection problems with WoW. For quite awhile now I've been experiencing random disconnects. If I were raiding I'd have been a lot more worried about that, but since I'm not doing anything that affects other players, the disconnects were only an annoyance, not a game breaker. I could immediately log back in, so no big deal.

Well, now I'm having a problem with the Warcraft Launcher hanging with a greyed out PLAY button. It started a week or so ago and has gotten progressively worse. Yesterday I spent more time with a hung screen than I spent in game. Last night I gave up after numerous attempts to login failed at the launcher. Note that the failure affects only Warcraft. All my other programs and Internet connections work just fine. Even so, I took the computer, modem, and router through all the trouble testing and they checked out fine.

I put in trouble tickets, of course. Blizzard "answers" them, sort of, and I sent copious data to them, but nothing they've suggested has worked. I'm on my fifth ticket now. The situation as it stands is that Blizzard is blaming my Internet carrier, Cox Cable, and Cox Cable is blaming Blizzard. What little coherent information I've been able to get is that there is a network hop somewhere in Los Angeles that is causing dropped service. Apparently, no one is responsible for it (or is willing to admit it). The Cox Cable guy I talked to (I was directed specifically to him because he is a network/server tech and personally deals with all Blizzard issues) said that about this time every year the same thing happens. Players complain on the forums, and Blizzard tells them to go complain to their Internet provider. When they do, Blizzard says, see, the Internet provider is getting complaints, so it must be their problem. Sure they are, because Blizzard passed the buck to them. But, note that the problem affects other Internet services, not just Cox.

In Blizzard's world this is just a little blip. One technician said exactly that. Millions of players can access the game just fine, so it's not their problem that I can't. Really, that's what she said.

This morning I was happy to see that the Launcher is working. I get a nice, live Launcher PLAY button. Of course, this is Tuesday and the game is down for maintenance. I fully expect that once the game is live again I'll be treated to a greyed out PLAY button again.

Why do I keep trying to play this game?