Awww no!

It's Friday evening for me here in Australia, so my chances of getting some weekend beta action are limited to tomorrow now, and even if they fix it then I'll only have a day left. :(

I think there is downloader (which is tied to IP) for downloading installer.
Installer itself is not bound to IP and worked just fine for my mate before he got the key.

If it is legitimate to download it is a question of your country laws.

Keeping fingers crossed that the next batch is soon as I am 421 in queue!

Soon, oh yes, soon!

:o:banana::o:banana::o:banana::o:banana::o

I wouldnt count on it, second batch took more than a week :( And ours dont even work yet...

When I try to log in to b.net atm I get 'service unavailable.' Maybe they took it down to patch a fix?

Well, here's hoping hehe.

I'm hoping so, even though I don't have a key yet :)

Seems not. Ah well, lol.

We don't even know if they're actually working on it or not.

At 4 AM? I would think it's a pretty safe bet that right now, they're not working on it :)

Oh well, I always forget that the americans are still sleeping :p

Can never keep track of American time hehe.

Well the question is, though Blizzard works around times in PST, do they wake up in PDT? :p

They have a EU.HQ in Paris as well, so saying America is asleep is no valid excuse ;)

Actually it is as only the US based team work on the Beta servers.

Checked over at curse and it seems they are having the same problems with their newly released CD keys. Hope Blizzard figures it out today, would love to do some weekend testing =)

There may be no legitimate way to get the beta client but I can confirm that if you find a copy of the installer it works on Windows Vista just fine.

Not to sure about all the IP stuff but I currently have the client installed and fully updated. Just waiting for keys to work. Only problem I had was the launcher was getting write permission errors. So I just bypassed the launcher.

And i'm sure blizzard has people working all sorts of hours on the beta stuff. This sort of work is not your typical 9-5 job. I have a friend who is working on a silly online Facebook app for a big company and he is working from 9 am till usually 9 pm Monday - Friday as well as a weekend here and there so I can only imagine blizzard doing the same as well.

I think it is a Windows "feature" to report all folders to be write protected and you can't change it (on the folder itself and subfolders, file permissions get updated fine) and for some reason launcher wants to check it.

<Wakes up for work, rubs sleep from eyes, and looks to see if anyone's keys work yet.>

Krevlorn: grumblegrumblegrumble

<Goes to work.>

It woulda been nice if Blizzard with upgrading to the new bnet layout did a spot check on the keys to make sure they work.

Well yea but getting more people into the beta asap is hardly their main priority, I think. This is just one of those unfortunate oversights that can happen with these things.

I'd be very VERY cautious about where you get a downloader from - if it isn't from blizzard's official servers, there's a good chance it may contain keyloggers which may not even be caught by virus protection.

Better to just wait for the keys to start working.

Not sure what is causing it really. I have tried all possibilities to fix it.

When I r-click the beta folder the read only option is filled blue meaning it's contents contain both protected and unprotected files. Unchecking and applying has no effect. I even went the old DOS method from the cmd window using "attrib -r" with no effect. Attrib says all files are not protected.

Doesn't really matter as I got it to update regardless.

Definatally a good concern to have. With the popularity of the beta there is a good chance for this to happen. I got mine from a trusted source though so I know I'm ok. A friend already in the beta :)

Just had a thought....

since all of the team that works on making wow are in the US, are all beta users able to post in the US beta forums or are us EU players stuck out in the cold as always, unable to converse directly with the design team?

If you look at the cata forum on wow-europe, there are no blue posts apart from the stickies. I would be very dissapointed if I was unable to take part in the process properly just because of where I live ;p

The files that are read only are just a couple of files that are achives. Right click, choose security. Click Add ... then type in Everyone into the object names dialog. Click okay, then select Allow next to Full Control (if you don't want to add everyone then try just adding Windows login name).

Go to forums.worldofwarcraft.com, there you will see the beta forums (even the non-english speaking part of EU has their own forums), and English EU participants can chat there with the US participants in the forum tagged as "English" :)

The US beta forums double as EU/US for people that can speak English.

i was hoping this was the case, i might finally get to chat with GC ;p

Tell him I WANT MY PONY!

or just my beta key to work...

I am currently in negotiations with a crack squad of ninja's to have GC kidnapped until our keys work. Unfortunately the ninja's don't speak english so negotiations are going slowly

Cairenn, I dont suppose you have had an update from the folks at Blizz? Even just a note to say they are sorry? ;p

She did say the debugging could take hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, or millennia.

I understand that it can be a very tricky process (i am a web designer myself, albeit not at blizz's coders level), just wondered if they were keeping Cairenn in the loop even if it is just a note to say "we haven't figured it out yet" ;p

I know we're all antsy, but Cairenn will tell us if she gets any more information. Hold your horses.

See also: my signature, from last time around.

If sure once Cairenn gets ANY info we will all know. She has always been great at getting things done around here and has always been prompt at getting info to us when she gets it.

Everyone needs to chill and stop asking if there is anything to report. Sheesh :)

In other words, debugging will be done soon™

I'm sure we'll know as soon as Cairenn hears something. :)

Don't sell yourself short if you are good, just remember that websites aren't that complicated. In all reality it's probably a very fast fix, they either have very poorly documented web code, or they just have things that Blizzard management has placed higher on the list.

As a random example...maybe the new battlenet site has billing issues. Something with money would certainly rank higher than the beta keys not working.

Ok, time to eat, I'm thinking too much.:D

Good thinking. That sounds very plausible.

Even if the fix is simple, you have to realize this is one of the most critical pieces of code for their business - it's the code that decides if you own a game or not. I'm sure even if there is a fix done internally, it has to go through a lot of regression testing, and then who knows what their process is to push code live.

Plus SC2 is coming out next week, if I were blizzard I'd be wary of changing anything to do with their auth code.

Yah, if they made a change that let our keys work and it rejected the SC2 game keys on lunch night... *shudders*

Especially with SC2 coming out next week I'd push the team to fix possible errors with the game management as soon as possible, for two different reasons:
1) The same bug may occur when trying to insert your SC2 CD key. That would be devastating.
2) You do not want to have potential Battle.net downtimes just after the SC2 release.

They already totally changed the battle.net website yesterday (and by the looks of it, the auth code as well), what else can they do? :D

Its the new site that is the issue

Yeah thats what I mean.

Dralmoo said they wouldn't attempt to touch the game auth codes when SC2 release was so close, but they already totally revamped the website yesterday, so why not? :)

They could break the broken site.

Oh god! :eek:

But if a broken website becomes broken.... does that mean that it's fixed?

And what if the auth code mishap pertains to the SCII codes also. One how would they know now if I would. I would rather fix it now than come SCII release and those codes dont work also.

Or just yank the .torrent file out and download the files with µTorrent. Or, even better, get a Mac. :)

Indeed. I'm all up for them fixing now! :p

Quoted from WoWAce.com

http://wow.curseforge.com/announceme...lysm-beta-key/

wow.curseforge.com is also affected by the same thing... So they're basically in the same boat as us.

The new site has a lot of SC2 related features, so it had to launch before SC2. Clearly they tested sc2 keys, but not this type of Cata beta key. I'm just saying fixing fansite beta keys is probably not a huge priority under the circumstances, so if their is any risk to it, it may have to wait.

I don't have any inside info, I could be totally wrong, I certainly hope I am!

That's a quote from Blizzard by the way. So now at least we know they are working on it :)

Hope you guys get your keys working soon ;)

I would like to thank everyone for refraining from posting links or instructions *ahem* on obtaining illegitimate downloads of the beta client. So glad that our warning was heeded. :)

The quote from Blizzard definitely makes it seem like our keys won't be fixed today.

But I suppose that's always how they word things so no one is like "BUT YOU SAID..."

Re launch the old battle.net site on a different URL to allow the keys to be redeemed.

How. Hard. Is. That?

Both existed for the last week quite happily anyway...

I seriously doubt the key issue is coding related, it's more likely DB related.
Why I say this is:

Back in the day it was possible, given enough product keys, to reverse engineer the(or a portion of) base key and create a key generator that would allow you to unlock software from Windows, to games, to apps.
Eventually companies started logging the keys they generated and released for distribution, to prevent key generators from working on non released keys.

My theory is that they need to add the list of newly generated keys to bnet in order for them to be recognized as valid. This is probably a fairly simple db update, but they are also probably tracking other things associated with keys like curse vs wowi and some other things. I guess in a sense it's a coding issue since someone has to write the query to import the list, but for whatever reason it has to be manually added to the db and that takes a human.
More importantly it takes a human with the time in between the daily meetings "Should Semprini be a banned word" and "Why do the second floor toilets take more flushes then the 1st floor ones? - Did we break Gravity?"

It is also possible that the Key problems are caused by a vaccine(Jenny McCarthy's Beta Key) or Obama broke the key system when he faked his birth certificate.

Point is it doesn't matter what we think is the cause. It is what it is, and it will be fixed when it's fixed. In the mean time go outside and let your body soak up some natural light(not the beer).

This doesn't make sense on so many levels.
What we know:
There haven't been any issues with keys a week ago.
In the last week, a new Battle.net site was published.
The new Battle.net site gives you an error that the key is no game key but an item key. This is not the standard error since when you enter a random 26 digits key it just says the key is not valid.
Blizzard stated the problem lies within Battle.net problems and not the keys themselves.
(Common sense tells you that Blizzard would properly enter the keys into the database before sending them. Otherwise we wouldn't have needed to wait so long for new keys because generating the alphanumeric codes doesn't take any significant amount of time.)

The most logical conclusion is that either the site is coded wrongly not to accept 25 digit keys as game keys or there is some other issue either in the new Battle.net code itself or the database connection.