the squeaky wheel gets the worm

one of the nifty features for pet battles blizzard introduced in patch 5.1 was a safari hat as a reward for completing taming the world. put it on, and your pets get a 10% xp boost, which is always nice, plus it has a dashing and distinctive look. not transmoggable, sadly, but one can't have everything.

unfortunately when the patch went live last week, they forgot to include the bit of coding that said "send a hat to everyone who already has the achievement". so people complained about being completely surrounded by no hat, and blizzard said "oops. our bad. we're sending them now." and some people got them and rejoiced. but some did not. some hatless people discovered that when they walked into an instance (old school, not lfd) the game suddenly remembered you were supposed to have a hat and *poof* you got one. but some tried this and got nothing.

the godmother has a good post that shows just how bad this omnishambles is. saturday lead content designer @mumper bragged about how sweet the hat was on twitter, only to have breanni reply "dude. still waiting for mine." if the name breanni sounds familiar, it's because she's the one that's done so much for the pet collecting community with warcraftpets.com that blizzard made a npc outta her. she's the one running the pet shop in dalaran, the one whose name is on all the in-game mails delivering pets to you. kind of a big deal. hoping this results on somebody gets called on the carpet monday morning and told "you made me look like an idiot. effing fix it now!" but we shall see.

meanwhile, i got tired of waiting for mine and submitted a ticket saturday morning. sunday, i got a response:

having customer support send these out one at a time seems rather inefficient, and while it's boa that does nothing for my characters on other servers. but, it does look rather dashing, and it should tide me over until everything gets fixed on tuesday. assuming it does.