As many of you are probably aware, those crazies over at Blizzard update the snot out of the World of Warcraft, a popular online video game for super nerds. Yes, I play this game occasionally. However, today I am going to talk less about me being a nerd and more about cryptic and often misleading error messages, which are being seen more often lately.

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, there are two things happening. 1) There is breaking news stating that there will be extended maintenance on Thursday and that there will be a period of downtime (a period in which you will not be able to play the game) and 2) We are unable to connect. This message says, and I quote, “Unable to connect. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact technical support.” … But why?

I believe that the above-stated error message is simply too vague. Granted, anyone with half a brain can put two and two together and come to the realization that you are probably unable to connect because Blizzard is performing “extended maintenance”. However, this message never appears when they are performing maintenance. Usually, the person is able to log in and view the realm list (that’s sort of like choosing which “world” you want to play in). Long story short, a lot of people are probably wondering wtf is going on, why they can’t connect, is their internet broken, do they need to open firewall ports, etc.

What they didn’t tell you is that they’re temporarily taking their servers offline.

Just then, a very basic, easy-to-implement solution popped into my head. Why didn’t Blizzard just tell everyone that this would probably happen? And what better way to do that than by utilizing the news section of the game launcher? Something like, “Oh, hey guys. Just so you know we’re taking our servers offline and moving them so the game will run better. By the way, you’re probably going to get a connection error. Please don’t freak out and do anything rash like throw your firewall through a window.” If you look at this screenshot, you’ll notice a section titled News. It’s big, it’s orange and you can’t miss it. My guess is that anyone looking for news pertinent to the game would probably look at this screen first, considering it’s displayed every time you launch the game.

But no.. Instead of using this space for actual news, they use this space to try and sell things like mounts, posters, mouse pads and tankards (yes, the kind you drink out of).

Why has Blizzard done this? I don’t know. They do a lot of weird, unexplained things. They make really fun, visually-stunning games. I just don’t think they do a good job of letting everyone know what the hell is going on. :) But hey, that’s what happens when you’re making billions of dollars per year. You come up with vague error messages to confuse your customers.

Tags: Awesome, General, WoW