Waiting

Exactly why I have patience, I'm not sure. This isn't a why in the sense of patience shouldn't be had, by a why in the sense of why have I been blessed with a sizable sum of that particular attribute. Even that isn't entirely fair, because my patience can be selective, and is shorter in some areas than others.

In any case, to some degree I suspect my patience comes from my longstanding relationship with Blizzard, the makers of WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo. Anyone who has ever waiting for an upcoming Blizzard game can not but know that being a fan of Blizzard requires being a fan of waiting.

Example 1: StarCraft. The Mac version was released well after the PC version, causing me to have to wait an addition six months before I could get the game.

Example 2: Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. A particular feature, Rune Words, was only partially implemented at launch, and it took years before it was finally finished fully.

Example 3: WarCraft III. This game was delayed by about a year or more (such that the Blizzard website claimed they were aiming for X release date, a month after it had passed).

Example 4: StarCraft: Ghost. This particular example will better reveal to you how the process actually works. A lot of the details for the previous examples were really foggy for me, but the waiting was very similar to the following details. StarCraft: Ghost was announced through waiting. Literally, the entrance to Blizzard's website, for twenty four hours, was this image that slowly grew more clear as time went on, along with a countdown to midnight PST. At that point, the release date was slated to be the Christmas of my Freshman year of college. Come November, that date was pushed back to February. Come February it was pushed back to April. That March, I preordered the game (and still have the preorder). However, come April the game was again delayed, this time until June. Come May, the game was delayed until November. As the summer ended, Blizzard's partner in the game left, and the game was delayed indefinately. Now, it will be while I am in Japan (fat lot of good that preorder will do me now) this Fall that the game will finally be released, a full three years after the initial projected date.

Understand that the examples prior to 4 worked in very similar ways. This is how Blizzard is training a generation of gamers to be patient.

In any case, yesterday I learned that every Tuesday there is maintainance on the servers for World of WarCraft. I also learned that, much like release dates, the time when the maintainance will be finished is usually much later than projected. In a similar way to the waits for the Mac versions of their software (that ended after Blizzard released WarCraft III as a Mac/PC hybrid CD) all of the servers I play on had special, extended maintainance.

So, I had to wait, a lot.

The good thing is, my past experience with Blizzard trained me to do something constructive in the meantime. I wasn't a part of the millions of frothing gamers refreshmonkeying Blizzard's website showing the current status of the servers. Out of curiousity, I tried to connect to the site a few times, but it might as well have been a denial of service attack, there were so many people holding their breaths (and occaisionally lapsing into unconciousness for holding too long).

It really isn't surprising then that as of this very sentence being typed, my servers are still down.

So, I must continue to be patient. And so I leave you with this brief quip (added to my random quotes).

Me: I need to exercise patience.
Friend: Indeed.
Me: Darn you patience! You need to lose wait.