With the connection of Aszune and Shadowsong announced as being July 2nd, I decided to check out the web for a list of common issues post connection, so I could be prepared for the worst, should it happen. What I found was reassuringly few problems but the ones I did find were fairly major ones.

PROBLEM: ALL characters vanished during the connection process. Blizzard is did restore the toons and did make this their no1 priority but still there can be delays.
SOLUTION: Open ONE ticket to request ALL your characters be restored and list ALL character names, guild names and specify the server name.

PROBLEM: Players who have deleted characters and created new ones to replace them have seen the deleted character(s) reappear and the new one(s) disappear after the realm connection.
SOLUTION: Deleting the "deleted" character, switching to a different realm and then back to home realm will update the character list to restore the "missing" character. If that fails, log out of battle.net then back in and if you're still missing a character, open ONE ticket to request the missing characters be restored and list ALL character names, guild names and specify the server name.

PROBLEM: Guilds have disappeared.
SOLUTION: If you're not an officer, don't panic let your officers do that! If you're an officer, still don't panic raise ONE ticket explaining the problem and let your other officers know you've done it. No point slowing the Blizzard folk down with duplicate tickets..

PROBLEM: All mail went missing. Blizzard will try to restore the missing mail but they can't guarantee they will restore everything and they won't accept your word for what went missing!
SOLUTION: Make sure to empty out the mailbox for ALL your toons and avoid sending mail unless absolutely necessary.

PROBLEM: Auction Houses have lost all auctions. Blizzard restored the deleted auction items to the players who had posted them but it can take days and that's several days you won't able to sell those items and earn gold.
SOLUTION: Don't post auctions that will end after 2am Wednesday morning. To be 100% safe, don't post any auctions AFTER 2am Monday morning.

PROBLEM: Raid lockouts are lost. That means any old raid saves may be lost. Also if the connection gets postponed to Thursday, we may be at the start again on Thursday.
SOLUTION: We will get 2 lockouts, progress will be hindered BUT we get 2 shots at loot.

PROBLEM: If you have the Valor of the Ancients buff you'll lose the buff during connection. Unfortunately, the system still retains a memory of the VP already earned by character for the week.
SOLUTION: You'll need to cap on a different toon. However, this will only be a problem IF you cap between the weekly reset and for the server shutdown prior to the connection. As our connection is Wednesday morning, don't cap until after the connection. You could also get close to cap so you'll only need a quick HC or a few daily quest hand-ins to cap.

Hopefully, as we're far from the first realms to be connected, whatever was causing some of the issues above has been fixed. But it is still good to be prepared and if something major goes wrong don't panic, it will most likely not only be you and simply raise a ticket and give Blizzard as much info as you possibly can and be patient.

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Princess Aszune and Maiev Shadowsong the namesakes of our realms

Well OK not actually connected but that days is not far away as this week the announcement that I have been praying for each week finally came. Shadowsong EU is to get connected, To Aszune. Wait what realm? I'd never heard of it during my research into realm pops so this one had slipped through my radar completely, the cynic in me made me suspect that this realm connection was to a Horde biased realm and that wasn't going to help Shadowsong at all. So I got out the old detective kit and went searching for some positive news.

What I found was, thankfully, all good. Firstly I discovered that Aszune has a similar population balance to Shadowsong, both realms have approx 60,000 characters with an Alliance heavy faction bias. This means that it puts the realms into the same character population bracket as Magtheridon.

Of these characters about 20,000 on each realm are 90. So however you look at it there will be double the number of characters around to raid/PVP with which is bloody awesome. However, the physical trip to Aszune (OK it is virtual but I sent atoon there) revealed a realm that felt quiet just like Shadowsong. This isn't what Magtheridon feels like and there the population is 60k per faction. The merged Aszune/Shadowsong will have almost 100k Alliance. I suspect therefore that many of the realms characters are inactive. So while it may be good it won't feel very busy, but it will feel busier..

A look over at WoWProgress and Guild Ox shows that the raiding is very similar on both servers although Aszune is rated marginally higher than Shadowsong, this is good for my raid team even though we will drop in the 10 man (from server 9th to server 21st) and 25 man rankings (from server 5th to server 9th). 

PVP on Aszune is also ranked slightly higher than it is on Shadowsong, this is again good news for my RBG team but will mean that we have more competition. We will still be ranked no 1, but we're only a few points ahead of the top 3 RBGs teams there so we will need to keep focused and work hard for our ranking from now on.

The chatter on Shadowsong is very positive about this and a few Shadowsongsters have made friendly posts on the Aszune realm forum although at the last look the same hasn't happened on the Shadowsong realm forum but at least the two communities are talking to each other which can only be good. I know my guild will be having a recruitment drive on Aszune soon and hopefully this will be the beginning of something great.

And finally, if, like me, you're thinking who/what/where is the realm named after.....

WoWPedia wrote:
Aszune was a night elf princess. Long ago she mocked the Oracle's wisdom. As punishment, she was transformed into living stone. Only the retrieval of her gemstone heart could end the curse.

Thrall happened upon the statue in the caverns of Stonetalon Peak during the Third War. The statue's magic created an impassable barrier, and the voice of Aszune spoke in Thrall's mind. The imprisoned spirit told him that she would not allow passage to the Oracle's domicile until her heart was returned to her.

Thrall found the heart in the possession of a red dragon. The dragon was under attack and nearly killed by harpies that were after its treasure. Thrall retrieved the dragon's magical amulet and gave it to Aszune. With this act, he ended the curse, allowing her spirit rest, and also the barrier that denied him access to the Oracle was lowered.[1]

The essence of Aszune's heart had come, through unknown means, into the hands of the Kirin Tor of Dalaran (after the city was destroyed too, it seems). They locked it away in the dungeons beneath the city, where it was eventually found by Lady Vashj.[2]

The Pillars of Aszune is a series of arcs on the Broken Isles that lead to the open sea. When Maiev Shadowsong was fighting off the Naga forces, her runner got through the Pillars of Aszune to reach Malfurion Stormrage on Kalimdor.[3] The name of the pillars implies that Aszune lived before the Great Sundering and was rather famous.

Nothing is known about Aszune beyond the information revealed in the above missions of Warcraft III. Her title suggests she might be related to Queen Azshara, but no information on this has been established. She makes no appearance in any document pertaining to the War of the Ancients - if she was indeed related to Azshara then she was likely imprisoned some time before the war, as no relations of Azshara would have gone undocumented afterward. However, there are a few obscure highborne princes featured in World of Warcraft, such as Prince Tortheldrin and Prince Toreth (and possibly Lord Talendar in The Frozen Throne), and she could have been their equivolent for the Kelani Magi, who had some connection to the caverns and ruins beneath Stonetalon Peak. She was also cursed for her arrogance, a trait typical of the Highborne. Her name appears to be somewhat similar to Queen Azshara's."

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Been thinking a lot about this recently and how we can get the benefits of a big server without moving everything off of Shadowsong.

What we're after is a bigger pool of players to recruit from than Shadowsong is able to offer us. Somewhere like Silvermoon is perfect as it has a big Alliance heavy population. It is a perfect realm for what we want, but none of us really fancy the expense of moving 600 characters to a different realm, and I'm sure Blizzard would hate such an influx to what is already the EU's most populated Alliance biased PVE realm.

The question is do we have to?

With the way the game is moving I have always believed that Blizzards ultimate goal is to have 4 "servers" in each region, PVP, PVE, RP and RP-PVP. If I am correct our current server based communities will become irrelevant and our recruitment pool will be everyone within the PVE environment in the EU.

Therefore, I have thought about ways we can be "ahead of the curve" and solve our current recruitment issue and I thik I have a crazy idea that might just work. 

Create a sister guild, called Exhumed, on Silvermoon and join forces to raid with them. The only two issues I see are:

• our current website cannot  deal with non-Shadowsong "guildies" and that makes managing event signups difficult;
• Mythic raiding will not be possible cross realm;
• No cross realm chat;

Both the first problems are easily solved by having those Mythic raiders transfer to Shadowsong, which then only leaves the signup issue for normal (aka  flex), heroic (aka normal) and RBGs, which can be resolved by creating alts on Shadowsong purely for the purpose of signing up to events. The third problem is a big one that I cannot think of a way to solve, and may be the showstopper.

Not sure if this is a vision or delusion but I've put it to my fellow officers and get their opinions on the matter. No doubt I'll be declared a crazy fool!

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It has been a while since my last post so I just thought I'd make a quick post to confirm I'm still alive, still playing WoW and still planning on writing blog posts.

The reason for my slackness is that I'm having to put a lot of time into guild management as we hit the lull period of the expansion. I've lost 3 of my 15 man raid team to real life and raiding boredom which means I'm chasing my tail trying to keep the other 11 raiders signing up so we don't have to cancel raids and lose progression opportunities. 

I'm also busy trying to recruit, but our home server isn't highly populated and trying to find 3 heroic ready people to fill even DPS spots is proving to be difficult so I'm now casting my search wider in the hope of pulling in some x-realm people to what is a medium pop realm.

I would consider trying to convince the GM that we should realm transfer but the guild transfer only brings 1 benefit  over a non guild transfer mass exodus, the guild structure (e.g. level, acheevs, gold, bank contents, ranks, membership) all transfer with the GM and members get to use a time limited code that means they automatically join the guild on the new realm when they arrange their own personal transfer. 

Also as Shadowsong is a English PVE realm we'd need to stick to that realm type, and we'd want to be on an Alliance heavy realm right now that means Silvermoon (http://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/eu/lang.en) and Silvermoon is bad because there queues at busy times NOW during the lull let alone during xpac launch and patch launch times.

The next best PVE realm is Magtheridon, this is a good realm, I have my Hordies there and it is a relatively faction balanced realm, but that creates 2 problems, not a high raiding poulation to recruit from and I have only 3 spots free.

The next few realms Arathor, Emerald Dream and Turalyon are not that far ahead of Shadowsong in terms of raiding population which sort of negates the reason for moving. Next on the list is Shadowsong, oh wait.....

That would means we'd need to reconsider our requirements, and for me the only changeable variable is the realm type to cover RP and that means Argent Dawn. The raiding population there is double Shadowsong's and I'm really not convinced that is worth the effort either.

One other thing has always stopped me doing realm transferring Evlyxx, I want my alts all in 1 place and with 10 alts I have an emotional bond with (my monk means nothing to me) that would be £150, which I simply couldn't justify to the accountant (aka the wife).

So all things considered I'm hoping for a realm connection soon to help ease the problem, but in the meantime I'm working on a plan B which is to motivate the Shadowsong EU community into action so we can draw more players to our realm. Some of Shadowsong's more prominent residents (some may be considered WoW community celebrities) are aware of the cause which to be fair is currently being championed by Monsterbaby of the all druid guild Druids of the Beast. For now I can't be more specific (because I don't have all the info!) but as soon as I am able to share I shall.

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In only a few short weeks, we will begin the charge to Pandaria and to level 90, but before September 25 arrives, we even begin preparations for the big day.

We need to consider many things for our characters and our computing hardware. Many of these tasks are quick and simple housekeeping type of things that if we weren't so busy we would keep on top of all the time but always find some excuse to put them off. But now there is precious little time remaining, we can procrastinate no more, the time for action is upon us!

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A few weeks back I made a tough decision, I love the guys and girls at Saturday Knight Fever, they rock they really do. But sometimes you have to be selfish and after a lot of  soul searching and attempts to prevent it happening I decided that I had to leave them behind. The options were limited, I love WoW for 2 reasons, the friendships I have built and the challenge of raiding and losing 50% of the reason I play simply means I don't enjoy playing the game and that meant leaving WoW or leaving SKF. Having tried out SWTOR and not feeling  that it was along term WoW beater yet I decided to change guilds. 

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A real quick post to plug my current best friend type addon, GTFO.

Put in the authors own words, GTFO is:

GTFO provides an audible alert when you're standing in something you're not supposed to be standing in. In some cases, you'll be warned before you start taking damage. This mod improves your situational awareness and is recommended for dungeon divers and raiders of all skill levels as even the most seasoned veteran sometimes needs a reminder to GTFO.

Its something that allows you to have your tunnel vision, healing blinkers or whatever is distracting your attention from the fire beneath your feet, a simple "beep" type noise alerts you to potential danger. Its really simple works straight out of the box and really I don't know why anyone should be without it.

If you're certain that you avoid 100% of such damage, I challenge you to download it use it for a month and prove to yourself how awesome you are. If you've managed to not trigger this addon for a month please leave a comment below, uninstall the addon and apply to join Saturday Knight Fever on the Shadowsong EU realm. more »

Tonight the boys and girls from All about Beer, the guild of friends that I house my 'lock with managed to kill the Lich King. Sure, to many this is no real achievement, but for a small group of very casual folks its a big deal and it was done in gear that would qualify us as a strict 10 man group and many people don't get to do that.

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Having been boosted by Soul of the Fire through Molten Core and Onyxia I continued to leech from their kindness with runs through Zul'Gurub and Molten Core on their off-nights.

I was really enjoying the experience but felt like I was simply a passenger and started looking for a guild I could raid with. I was very happy in EZO where I was an officer, but despite large numbers very little interest in raiding so it seemed that the only option for raiding was to leave.

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On December 7th, we will begin the charge to kill Deathwing, but before we even think about the ultimate goal of this expansion we need to consider what smaller steps we need to take.

Firstly you should review the 10 steps I mentioned in my post Preparing For Deathwing last week as at least 9 are still relevant. Now you've done them, lets look at the task and set out the rest of our gameplan.

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In only a few short weeks, we will begin the charge to kill Deathwing, but before we even think about the ultimate goal of the next expansions we need to consider what steps we can take now to help us.

The tasks can be broken down into a few small chunks under 2 wider categories, namely things we can do before December 7th and things that can be done after December 7th. I'm going to call these Before and After just to keep it short and sweet.

Today I am going to look at the Before tasks and the After will be covered in a topic early in December.
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The great glyph rush (aka Glyphmas) is still on the massive changes to the glyph system are still being discovered by the mass of players and this weekend will only add more people wanting more glyphs than ever before as the weekend warriors come out to play. My time and gold investment pre 4.0.1 paid dividends, not as much as I hoped but I believe my need to work and my greed prevented me from capitalising more than I did but with the second wave incoming I am hoping to get it right this time.

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