As of this writing, the realms are still down, and an increasingly desperate tone is seen in the language being used in the updates we get from Blizzard. At 5pm PDT, they gave us another message telling us they'd have an update in an hour, but the language was different from the 3 prior to it (those 3 were identical except for the time of the next update). In this latest one, they tell us that they ran into problems during the testing, and that they're "doing their best" to have the realms playable in 2-3 hours. For those counting, that means the east coasters won't be able to play at all today, since it will be 11pm before Blizz admits defeat again. I might be able to play yet today, as I'm in Central time. But we'll see.
The patch hadn't finished downloading, but that was probably due to the number of available connections to the bittorrent cloud that my firewall will allow. Since my firewall NATs (most do), inbound connections are difficult to handle. When an outside source sends traffic to my firewall's public IP on port, say... 6999, to which of the three internal machines does that get sent? If I don't set up static inbound NAT, the answer is: none of them. Unfortunately, to permit bittorrent to move at top speed, that's what you'd have to do. And for various security reasons, I don't wanna. So how to get 3 machines updated soon?
Simple, and it's a suggestion that Blizzard makes: let one machine download the patch, then use local filesharing to copy it to the other machines. Which I did. So all three machines are patched to 3.1.
So I next turn my gaze to the addon situation, since WoWMatrix is down for the count. I said I'd be pulling it to my own machine to try it out, and I meant that. So I send my Firefox to Curse.com, and click on "Client", and there's a link for the 3.0 beta for Macs. I emphasize that, becuase we Mac users are always getting the short end of the stick when it comes to software for this game. Yeah, yeah, QQ moar. Shut up.
The application downloaded in seconds, installed cleanly, and recognized most of my addons. I updated them, and all seemed well.
The realms just went live, so I'm going to test the end results. More later.
