So me and four other guys from my guild are slashing our way through the Scarlet Monastery in pursuit of a named boss, when that by-now-all-too-familiar message pops up:
SERVER: SHUTDOWN IN 15:00
Of course by now, poor pathetic children of WoW that we are, we actually consider ourselves lucky to have been given fair warning, when so many server shutdowns and crashes these days come with none.
The problem here is, we’re in an instance and approximately, as luck would have it, fifteen minutes away from reaching and killing the named. So now it becomes a kind of time trial, where we have to make it to the named’s lair and kill him before the server kicks us out. And it was actually kinda fun; you definitely play differently when under that kind of time pressure. As much as I normally dislike timed missions (particularly the ones in GTA), I can see how under the right design parameters it would be an interesting sub-type of WoW instance quest.
Of course in posting this I have probably hit a new all-time low amongst those QT3ers who are trying to see the sunny side of everything WoW-related and fervently believe that the guys at Blizzard are a bunch of really cool dudes who desperately want this game to work as awesomely as they thought they designed it to and it’s not their fault no really it isn’t etc.
The fact is, the server is down and when it comes back up I will be standing alone in a chamber next to a Level 40 Elite Named. I will die, and for that Blizzard can lick my salty nuts.*
Except they can’t really because they’re a bunch of really great guys who desperately etc etc…
If you log out at an inn before the server goes down, you will be there. If you are out in the world when the server goes down, you may or may not be where you were when you were disconnected; could be right there, could be five minutes back, hard to say. If you’re in an instance, you might be teleported to the entrance; or, you might log in right next to the mobs. Hard to say.
The server keeps more accurate track of your inventory than your position, though; I’ve never lost items due to a server crash so far. The point of the story; always log at an inn when possible.
I happened to be in the middle of farming SM when the announcement came up as well. I fished in the chapel pond until 30 seconds were left, stoned to the inn, logged out, and then ate a meal and watched Lost. Logged back in, I’m at the inn.
Well, good for you. I’m getting majorly ass-wiped by mobs a couple of levels below me on medium pop servers because the server boots me every few minutes.
