that you appreciate some clear information.
Sure it’s 2+ hours early, it’s a loss of a night of WoW (but then we Aussies have been paying for 7 days of WoW per week and only getting 6 since the servers 1st opened)… but at least it’s clear!
Every now and then I compliment Blizzard, or I dare say a closet Aussie at Blizzard, for putting up more than just the mysterious PDT.
Of course I also let rip reasonably often when there is rubbish warning about downtime, or rubbish updates about extended downtime.
- WSG 2/0 … What?!?
- 10.15 on a Saturday night… WTF! (See, there it is again…)
However this is one of those positive moments in downtime alerts where not only is there PDT times, but AEST and a clear indication of what this time zone is with GMT+10 (east coast of Australia), so Kiwis, more-Western Aussies and all the Asian players on Oceanic servers can easily calculate their downtime.
I knew as soon as I got home that I wouldn’t be playing because I didn’t have to get out a handy-dandy time zone converter… I just read the notice.
It’s like a crystal ball in the palm of my hand
Actually, to be completely honest, I didn’t even need to come home… I could tell from my desk whether it was worth racing home for a short night of play, a long night of play, or no play at all.
There are two tools at my disposal for viewing from my browser capable mobile telephony device.
One is shown above and reachable at
http://launcher.worldofwarcraft.com/alert
Not pretty, nor Oceanic time zone friendly, but at least I don’t have to be home to check it out.
The other is CGullz application/website (Ohh I c what he did there)
Which I see promises Launcher Alerts for other zones apart from en-US.
Once again… not Australia specific times, but what do I want for nothing?
Yes, yes, I want it all, like everyone in the world.
Still, as sure as downtime will steal my fun away, freebies will only get me so far.
Hope you have a happy downtime!
RTL keeps me playing, so don’t worry about the 10 days of trial remaining!
RTL = Reduce The Lag.. so it isn’t my WoW account that is about to expire, it’s my FREE 30 days NO STRINGS ATTACHED, UNLIMITED PLAYTIME trial of Reduce the Lag.
Neither is this an advertisement for RTL, although after shopping around, I am impressed that they, unlike most of the others selling similar latency reductions, have a truly unlimited trial… No “30 days for free, in 30 minute blocks, insert credit card here” business. Pure and simple, create an account, download the client, restart WoW, play at 1/2 latency.
Half a dozen of my mates have already signed up for 12 months because it’s just that good.
So, while this isn’t an advertisement, credit where credit’s due…
Gnomer and Out!
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2011/05/10/its-during-downtimes-like-this/
I didn’t actually see that announcement – but I’ll be glad if that becomes standard practice. I don’t do too badly at the mental conversion although it gets extra confusing around the times when everyone else decides the sun should go to bed earlier/later (we like to be consistent here in the West… so our curtains don’t fade and the cows know when to be milked).
I wrote in a whine post about maintenance once (http://wowinanhour.gameldar.com/search/label/maintenance) where I touched on this – it really isn’t that technically difficult to stick a wildcard in those messages that replaces the time with your local time – the conversions are already being done in-game for the clock.
I seem to remember they did start putting some of the AEST times in there in the past – let’s hope they keep it up. Interestingly the post of the service status forums does not contain the AEST times.
There were realm restarts last night and no pretty AEST times… so either that was a short lived change or I’m actually thinking that what you are seeing there is RTL being nice and converting the times for you. They are obviously intercepting the status messages and inserting the trial expiry text above it – so I’m guessing they are being nice and doing the time conversions too (which shows you how simple it can be).
Ahh it must be RTL then, as I had GMT+10 times once again.
http://gnomeaggedon.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/another-good-downtime-notice.png