Hurrah, we broke the server!

When other people rage about things not working, I can only laugh. What's wrong with me? Whatever it is, I wouldn't want to live without it, as it surely makes life a lot more fun.

Today my new guild was planning to do EC hardmode, but when people tried to enter the operation, they got stuck. All of them at once. In the end I was the only one safely left standing outside, since I had wanted to wait for someone else to zone in first. (An old habit that goes back to times where entering a raid before the raid leader could muck up which version of the instance you landed in - thank god for old habits!) Meanwhile, my guildies got stuck on the loading screen, had to Alt-F4 out of the game, and then found themselves unable to come back online on their stuck characters. Now, if this had happened to just one person... it would have been something that happens sometimes I guess, but everyone at once? Most peculiar.

Even better, when the raid leader tried to submit a ticket about it, he was faced with an error message there too, so he made a post on the customer service forums instead. In the meantime, people kept trying to log back in but kept running into the same trouble over and over again. Eventually they more or less gave up and went on alts instead.

I joined two guildies for a round of the Black Hole and was surprised to find a mad amount of world PvP going on there. On another day, that could have been the subject of a post of its own really! Today though, I didn't pay much attention to it.

After we finished all of our dailies, there was some talk about maybe doing another round on some alts. I logged onto one of mine who hadn't been to the Black Hole before to take care of the breadcrumb quest while the others were still making up their minds. So far, so good... but after I finished the conversation, my character didn't exit cinematic mode and I was left staring at a wall. Eventually I escaped out and reset the quest. Weird. I tried to just pick up the dailies from the terminal, but a couple of them were behaving oddly too - as in, I could officially pick them up, but they showed no quest objectives. Figuring that this wasn't going to work, I hit my fleet pass... and it did nothing. Looking at chat, I saw people complaining that loot wasn't dropping and their quests weren't completing either. What the...?

Checking back on the raid leader's forum thread, it turned out to have gathered a considerable following in the meantime. First it was just other people confirming that they had trouble with entering hardmode operations. Then it seemed to affect story modes too. Then class quests with cut scenes. And then everyone was just talking about how generally borked the server appeared to be. Eventually Bioware had to take it offline and the news even made the official Twitter!

I think this guy from the official forums had the right idea:

Once they took the server offline, they managed to fix the problem quickly enough, and it's now back up and running again. But maaan... those were some funny couple of hours, with nothing working as intended. Funnily enough that brings back fond WoW memories for me too. ("Is Kalimdor broken again?" "Yep.") Nothing unites people like everyone complaining that shit's not working.

But wait, what am I saying? I meant to say: raaage!