Initial Thoughts On and Issues With the New Patch

So, the biggie patch 2.2.0 came out today. Initially after getting the patch installed, I actually couldn't log into WoW, because it froze up on me. It wound up being a sound issue, presumably because of all the new sound stuff in this patch (such as voice chat). And "Linux and sound", particularly sound in non-native games, is a very finicky thing. Fortunately I was able to go into winecfg and apply a temporary fix, but here's hoping I can go back to ALSA instead of OSS soon because until then I can't play mp3s while playing WoW without jumping through hoops.

Now that the jargon is out of the way... (sorry non-Linux-geeks!) here are some other general thoughts.

- The UI was a bit messed up and it took me some tweaking to get it back to how I liked it... but it wasn't a big deal overall.

- The sound is really quiet for me now... I have to turn my speakers up considerably higher than I used to in order to get it to a normal level. I also had to adjust the sound volume in-game quite a bit. I don't know if this is a Linux/Wine thing or if maybe some other people are having this problem too. A lot of people are indeed having sound issues now if the WoW "technical support" forums are any indication.

- "Sale pending" mails from things I sell on the Auction House... I don't know much about this yet, so I'll pass on judgment for the time being. =P

- Raptors get dash!! Time to pull Wash out of the stable and have some fun (and if you get the reference to his name, cookie for you!)

- A bunch of random stuff from my bank wound up in my bags. o.O Yeah, I have no idea how it happened. It was completely random stuff too, I couldn't see any rhyme or reason for what it chose to put into my inventory. Fortunately that one was easy to fix, I just went to the bank again.

- Everybody can talk in World Defense now... I think. All I know is that nobody has ever talked in that channel before and today a bunch of people were in there talking up a storm and alternating between reactions of "wow we can talk in here now!" and "...okay, leaving this channel would be a good idea now." So I'm assuming it's a patch thing, or maybe the people on my server just figured it out today. =P I don't know how much I like this idea yet, I really like having World Defense on so I can see what's going on but if it turns into a big global spam channel I won't be happy. We'll see how it goes I guess.

- The biggest issue for me I think is the whole "time to upgrade all my addons now that they're out-of-date and giving me error messages" thing. But this isn't a patch problem so much as it's my problem for being an add-on junkie... not as much as some people, but a junkie none the less. I think at some point I'd like to make a blog entry about what add-ons I use and why I use them, and then decide if I can live without some of them. I already had to disable Gatherer because it was acting up the other day and to be honest I don't miss it that much... yet.

Overall, I think I am mostly sad that the new voice chat feature will very likely not work on my computer (refer back to the "Linux and sound being finicky" bit.) Why does this sadden me? Well, because the big joke going on currently on my server is that voice chat will prove that all night elf females are actually played by guys. So I think it would be hilarious to show through voice chat that there is in fact at least one night elf female on Silver Hand actually being played by a real live girl. Heehee. Hopefully I can in fact get voice chat to work so I can be all devious and stuff. =P

Sorry for another long entry! I know I talk too much.