tl,dr: lots of drama, world server down, just hearth my character already.
You have been warned.
Wednesday, December the 5th, at about 8 pm server time (Alexstrasza), I go down to Suramar to do some world quests.
Shortly after my arrival I stop to mine a node of Leystone. The animations starts, the cast bar starts to time it, but it fails to complete. I look around and see many player characters stuck on place playing the run animation. I walk over to a croc and try to hit it. Attacks fail to connect, abilities fail to cast. I walk a little more and then I’m warped back to my positions from a few seconds back. “Failed transfer, instance not found”.
“Oh damn” I think to myself, having seen zone world serves going down a few too many times in the past few weeks after coming back to the game after 6 years. In desperation I try to do what had come to know was futile, I try to teleport away from the zone. But I had already crossed the point of no return. Failed cast… Failed cast… Disconnected.
Can’t log back in.
“World server is down”
At least this time I wasn’t just taking a flight path over an off zone, having my taxi disappear under me and plummet to my death, like the last time.
More over, every time this had happened before, it was resolved after server restart on Tuesday maintenance.
But this wasn’t a Tuesday morning, wasn’t a Sunday night, this was prime time Wednesday night. That’s almost a week away from server maintenance. Also raid night.
I’d love to unstuck my character, after all, I can log with other characters, the problem is just in the Surumar zone (or so it seems). But unstucking would require logging in with the character in question.
Unfortunately unstucking through the customer service website only returns me an error.
So here I have a few questions. And no need the fret, anyone of them answered is far more helpful than the automated support systems have been capable of.
- Is there any chance my character (yes, this one here) would be relocated, to anywhere the world server is not currently down? (like, within the next, say, 24 hours? It would be convenient not to miss too many emissary quests, specially while the darkmoon rep buff is still available)
- Why is this issue so common? Is it perhaps related to the new phasing methods?
- Can this issue not be diagnosed by maintenance team? “World server is down”, sounds like the kind of thing that should make a little red light blink somewhere. Imagine, front page news, “We acknowledge issue, working on fixing it”, of some small comfort at least. You know, customers, help them help you.
- Is there any hope this will be fixed before server maintenance? (Even in the off chance I get relocated, didn’t get the chance to do what I went to Suramar for)
- Should I expect this to continue to happen every week or so?