Update 7:00 PM PDT
All realms scheduled to return to service today at 3:00 PM PDT are now available and accepting players.


We are moving forward on our hardware retrofits in preparation for the upcoming release of the Burning Crusade expansion and would like to inform everyone of our current schedule. Due to the requirements for implementing this new hardware, some realms may find they will be down for an extended period of time. During this time paid character transfers will be disabled.

Due to the nature of these hardware upgrades, we’re unable to preserve the friends and ignore list for characters on these realms. We recommend that players take the necessary steps to back up this information, and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We appreciate your understanding and patience as we work to improve realm performance and stability through our continued hardware upgrade plans.

Tuesday, September 12th the following realms will be down from 12:01 AM PDT until Wednesday September 13th at 12:00 PM PDT:

Agamaggan
Alexstrasza
Alleria
Azshara
Balnazzar
Blackhand
Cho'gall
Dark Iron
Destromath
Dethecus
Detheroc
Emerald Dream
Garona
Greymane
Gorgonnash
Gul'dan
Hel@*%*eam
Illidan
Kael'thas
Kalecgos
Kirin Tor
Lightninghoof
Maelstrom
Malfurion
Moonrunner
Sargeras
Spinebreaker
Staghelm
Stormreaver
Twisted Nether
Ursin
Whisperwind
WildHammer

Q u o t e:
What kind of avatar is a candle? Seriously, are you the skinny wimp at Blizz everyone picks on for being in touch with his feminine side?

I'm honestly curious.

Love,

Aggro

I would like to hope I'm in touch with my feminine side being that I'm female and I can't recall a time I was picked on for being the skinny kid. The boys did used to pull my pigtails when I was a little girl though. They say that means they like you . :)

To address some other more serious questions and concerns, we try to put 12:01 AM to make the time as clear as possible since saying 12:00 AM is a bit more confusing for people. When we say 12:01 AM on Tuesday, we're basically saying it's Monday night/Tuesday morning.

We do what we can on our end to give as much notice as possible for people. Sometimes that notice is shorter than we would like. We will continue to do what we can to improve this however since it's not our intent to give short notice. Those that are on the shorter downtime should have very little to no risk at all of losing Friend and Ignore lists. We may be able to avoid this problem in the future but we would prefer to keep people aware that at current the safest bet for players is to back them up.

We essentially are doing a series of retrofits in which some take more downtime than others and we are doing it in stages to break up the significant amounts of downtime where possible. People will attest that the 36 hour downtime we gave the last time wasn't actually 36 hours but we would like to err on the side of caution since things can go wrong with these sorts of things.

As for compensation, we gave compensation for the last group that was down for the scheduled 36 hours based on their actual downtime and it is possible that we may be doing the same for those down this time. Unfortunately I can't confirm that will happen as of yet since it's not within my scope of authority to decide.

I hope that helps explain things a bit more.

Q u o t e:



Uh-oh...



.

No, I wasn't picked on for being the fat kid either if you were hoping to go there. ;)