World of Warcraft Suffers More Downtime

_xeno_ writes "World of Warcraft has received many awards for being one of the best games released in 2004. Unfortunately, the game is still suffering from downtime. Over this weekend, twenty different servers went offline several times - enough for Penny Arcade to revoke their 2004 Game of the Year status from the game. As Tycho puts it, "...we loved the game and had faith that any hitches in the experience would be ground down before release. This has not been borne out."" Relatedly, Voodoo Extreme is reporting that the Korean release of World of Warcraft should be happening today.

Comments

Patience is a virtue

[SiliconJesus]

A lot of people are playing this as their first MMORPG, and don't remember the launches of others. Star Wars has been out two years and is still unstable.

Stability takes time. WoW is still one of the best MMORPG's out there today.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

YEA.... When you can actually PLAY the damned thing!!1!

Re:Patience is a virtue

[k_187]

yes, but from what I understand, things were more stable during the open and closed betas. Which is strange at best, inexcusable at worst, especially since now all those people are paying $15 a month. Of course, most of these problems are occurring on the top 12 or so servers. I picked a low population server, and we haven't seen as many problems. Its getting worse though, as people with broken servers, come to us. Hopefully something will change after today's maintenance.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than "crap" is hardly a recomendation.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Seumas]

I've been very pleased with WoW. Yes, there have been a couple of downtimes, but nothing extreme. There was a 16 hour extended maintainance one day, but they awarded users 24 hours of compensation time and also alerted players to the scheduled outage in advance (and only the 20 servers were down - the other 68 were still up).

Anyone who thinks this has been a released "plagued with problems" clearly never played Shadowbane or Anarchy Online at release. Those games were down for hours and days at a time and when you were playing, the lag and framerate were absolutely not playable. We're talking 3fps the entire time - if you were lucky. And with Shadowbane, they went from the "let's have one massive universe" idea to "let's have seven or eight of them" to compensate for the troubles and spread the load.

Compared to every other release that I'm aware of, WoW was incredibly flawless and the only people bitching are those who play 24x7 and can't tolerate two seconds away from the game.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Seumas]

I have no idea what beta was like, but I doubt they had anything near the current number of accounts playing the game. And as for the cost - Blizzard has been good about compensating players for down time.

I mostly play on Blackrock which just might be the most heavily populated server in the entire game. It was down for the extended 16 hour maintainance. There have been some game-wide login-server problems. And there have been a few outages in the last two months. But really, nothing to get all excited about. I trust that they'll adjust and things will be better over time. As long as they're compensating me for my lost game time, I have no gripes.

The only thing I can think to complain about is that the forums on their website are TIED INTO THE GAME LOGIN SERVERS. So, if the servers are down - you can't post on the forums. As most people from any online game will know, the forums are the busiest when the servers are down. Blizzard has crippled communications during the most critical times for players to communicate with each other and keep up to date on what's going on. It's absurd!

Re:Patience is a virtue

[GoofyBoy]

Stability takes work and money. Blizzard has both.

With City of Heroes, things have been pretty solid, including its launch.

In 2005, with the amount of money being spent through subscriptions and technology, there should be no reason why servers should be down.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Squatchman]

Compared to every other release that I'm aware of, WoW was incredibly flawless and the only people bitching are those who play 24x7 and can't tolerate two seconds away from the game.

Competitor products(CoH) didn't necessarily have these kinds of problems, and certainly not for two months after release with no end in sight. These companies are offering subscription(pay) service. A large part of their obligation is to make the service available all the time and to post scheduled downtimes for the playerbase to plan around.

Just because you haven't been plagued by problems doesn't mean that the problems don't exist.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[*weasel]

Vivendi is making the same mistake EA made: too many players per server. They've loosened the server caps and dropped their unpopular queues - and now their most popular servers are buckling.

With the 'shard' design, where users per server is capped and they throw more servers at problems - there's very little justification for such overload.

Too many people are forgetting that Dark Age of Camelot has had very very very very few stability problems. In comparison to the rest of the genre - they're downtime's infinitesimal.

Every time a major publisher completely screws up their launch, or fails to deliver a stable product, I give one more proverbial gold star to Mythic. They've proven that it can be done; that there is no reason that we can not demand that level of service.

I've moved on since DAoC, and WoW is my current poison -- and a tasty one at that -- but this genre needs to demand better.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Auraveda]

Here's an idea: don't play on a high population server. Unless all of your friends are on a super high-pop server, don't make a character there. I play on Malygos, a low-pop server, and I've never been queued up to log in, lag is minimal, and the only downtime I've noticed happened a few weeks ago for one evening, when ALL of the servers were down. Yet despite being a "low-pop" server I rarely have problems finding a group for a quest.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[NexusTw1n]

While true most MMORPG have problems, that shouldn't mean every future MMORPG should follow in their footsteps.

Blizzard have had years of free publicity as people have praised them for the slow alpha and beta testing, waiting till "it's ready" rather than when the beancounters tell them to launch.

Clearly it isn't ready. So people have the right to be annoyed at paying to sit in a queue. Especially if true that you can't post on the BB while waiting because you need to be logged into a server to post. They should have anticipated server capacity, people should be able to jump servers without loss of their character, it isn't just about planning a great game, it is about planning contingency should something unexpected cause things to go wrong.

They have sold 600,000 units. Assuming everyone is still playing - a safe assumption seeing as the novelty value will still be strong - then that means they are making over a quarter of a million dollars a day in subs.

With that kind of income, buying extra servers, hiring temps to manually transfer existing accounts to new servers (which should have been something the software should have been able to do automatically), and offering rebates shouldn't be too much to ask.

I haven't played yet, I'm waiting for the EU launch at the end of next month. Hopefully things will be better by then, this is the one time the regular US first, EU later policy on entertainment may see benefits!

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I'd rather have the forum login down if the game isn't working. The forums have enough garbage in them without being filled to the brim with "OMG SERVERS ARE DOWN BLIZZ SUX I WANT MY MONEY BACK BETA IS OVER WTF" threads every time someone trips over a power cord.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Sux2BU]

It is not strange. Beta was like a DSL webserver, launch was like that webserver being slashdotted. The system wasn't capable of handling as many users as they were getting, so that's why the servers started lagging and crashing. Blizzard is still trying to figure out how to scale the system up for as many users as they have, and that's not as easy as buying new hardware - they probably have top of the line machines already. What they have to do is change the server code to run on more computers or be more efficent. That takes time, which is why the service has been so poor lately.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[tc]

WoW suffers from too many players per server, at least partly as a result of some backfiring of attempts to loadbalance.

Firstly, they didn't release the entire list of server names that would be available on launch day ahead of time, only a subset. Then they are surprised that those servers are overloaded. People agreed with their friends which server they were going to play on, and obviously you can only agree to a server you know exists.

Secondly, classifying the servers by timezone was a mistake. The most overloaded servers are the central zone ones. Why? Because people have friends on both coasts, and decide to plump for the central servers as a compromise. The reality is that geographical location of the server isn't really that important (I've played WoW from the UK, no problem), so the timezone classification didn't really help and in fact probably exacerbated the clumping problem.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Sux2BU]

DAoC didn't break the record for concurrently connected users either. I agree the downtime and problems suck, but it's because they grew so fast.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[KillerDeathRobot]

It's not even that the stuff they set up couldn't handle the number of users; it's more that idiots have piled up on a relatively small number of servers, making those ones terrible to try to play on. The article says 20 servers were down, but that's out of over 80. A significant number, to be sure, but there are lots of servers with hardly any problems simply because they're not full to overflowing.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[_xeno_]

I have no idea what beta was like, but I doubt they had anything near the current number of accounts playing the game.

I believe they capped it at 100,000 accounts, although it's unclear how many actually played. However, they only had something like 40 servers, whereas they now have 88 servers. So if we assume that all 100,000 people actually played during the beta and 300,000 people currently are playing (based on the MMOG chart figures), the server load now is higher than it was during the beta.

And I agree that I expect that Blizzard will eventually fix the problems, but we shouldn't just pretend they don't exist. They do exist. World of Warcraft hasn't been experiencing anywhere near a "perfect launch" as some people seem to believe. The problems need to be acknowledged, instead of just brushed off as things related to the launch. The game was launched almost two months ago and, while the servers are more stable than they were at launch, things seem to have recently been getting worse, not better.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Sux2BU]

The problem is because they've sold 600,000 units. The servers are having problems handling that many players, which is why they're crashing. Throwing hardware at it alone won't fix it, since the server code would need to be changed to be able to spread over multiple servers. They have been trying to fix the server code, which is why we had the extended downtime on Thursday. The problem is that the change was buggy, which is why it was down again this weekend. Unfortunately this is going to take some time for them to figure out, no matter how much money they're getting a day. The only other way to fix it is to reduce the load on the servers. This could be done by moving people to other servers or forcing people to wait to login. Either solution would leave many people upset ("What do you mean that I was moved to this server while the rest of my guild is still on the old server?" or "I want to play, not wait 30 minutes to login. What they hell am I paying for?").

Re:Patience is a virtue

[NexusTw1n]

throwing hardware at it alone won't fix it, since the server code would need to be changed to be able to spread over multiple servers.

Fair point, but don't you think the code should have been scalable in the first place? During the lifetime of a MMORPG there is no way of knowing how many or how few servers you will need. The code should be flexible enough to easily handle increases and decreases in cluster size.

Noone would use Active Directory, or Google, if the underlying system fell over everytime iron was added or removed.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Stability takes time.

Baloney.

I expect to receive this game for my birthday in a month. It will be my first time on a MMORPG, but I've been toying with it since I finally gave up MU**ing three years ago. I'm really looking forward to an enjoyable experience based on the many reviews, but I also have the limited patience of an adult who now expects a service when I'm charged for it.

I don't have any experience with the actual outages, but I can say this: if your PS2 failed to boot 4 times out of 5, would you take it back? If Blizzard expects me to be patient while they work out their issues, are they going to be similarly patient when they request payment from me?

If they can't deliver, 99.99% of the time, on their promises, frankly they're in the wrong business. I don't have the time or the interest to fart around with waiting for them to get their act together, and I will either keep my wallet in my pocket or move to another game.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless all of your friends are on a super high-pop server, don't make a character there.

For those of us with friends, guess which servers our friends are on?

Those of us who have been playing since launch have large groups and/or guilds who are stuck on high-population servers, unless we want to get the entire group to agree to start over.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[llefler]

The stress tests were capped at 100,000. They told us, when their beta registration server melted, that they accepted 500,000 open beta applicants. Of course, with their silly hacked BT client, some of those open betas probably only had 2-3 days to play.

I didn't expect a perfect launch, but I do expect them to work hard at making problems go away. They released a patch right before christmas to fix some bugs, and introduced some new ones. And nothing has been fixed since. I personally am debating whether or not I should suspend my subscription until they have some of their problems worked out.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[obsid1an]

I am getting ready to migrate to a new server. It really is getting bad. This last weekend my server went down around 7pm CST and saturday and sunday. Monday, there was 30-50 minute queues to get on. The only thing stopping me from making a new character on a new server is the hope that Blizzard will allow character transfers soon. There has been mention of it by GMs but nothing currently announced.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[llefler]

Loyal customers who pre-ordered and created their characters on launch day are on those servers. Blizzard didn't have enough servers to begin with, and didn't add more for two days. By that time, characters were created and guilds were started.

Now here is the really moronic part... character names are available on each and every server, but guild names are unique for the entire WoW game. If you create your guild on server A, you cannot create it on server B (or even join it). I've seen frustrated players ask to move their guild to a less populated server, the request falls on deaf ears. What does it tell you when people are ready to abandon level 30 and 40 characters to move to a different server? Those same players then get blamed for staying on overloaded servers.

BTW, I'm not on an overcrowded server, and I only have one character in a guild, with a bunch of people I don't know.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Teh Suq]

Better to make a game that is so fun that people are upset when they can't play it than to have people not care if they can't play. Personally my experience has been great. I have rarely had a queue to login, nor have the servers been offline when I wanted to play. I guess I have been lucky but I'm certainly not the only one happy with the game.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[ThePiMan2003]

That is NO excuse. If they have so many users they should have plenty of money to fix it. OR they should not have sold so many boxes if they didn't have the servers to back it up. Its not like some gnome keeps making the WoW boxes to sell.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[DAldredge]

It will not help. The server I am on, Uldum, was a low pop server when I started over a month ago and has been getting worse of the last 5 days. Server side lag has gotten to be really bad lately I mean it sometimes takes 15-30 seconds to loot something or to get the NPCs to respond.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[DAldredge]

Just wait - Uldum the low pop server I am playing on has been acting really funny the past 4-5 days as more and more people join it.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[KillerDeathRobot]

I agree with you to an extent, and really I think Blizzard's best hope at this point would be to start allowing (or requiring perhaps) server transfers.

Nevertheless, a lot of big guilds did purposely decide to join the same servers.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[SoVeryWrong]

What started this whole overcrowding issue was Vivendi. They staggered the launch to coincide with timezones. So when the east coast servers came up, everyone in the country who had the game piled onto them, the Central and Pacific servers were damn near empty for the first few weeks. I assume that since then there has been a relatively even growth across the servers, but that jump right at the beginning doomed a few of them.

Saying that, I play on Draenor (Pacific) even though I live on the East Coast, and I've never had any problems with downtime. Ironforge still lags a bit, but otherwise it's been pretty good. I know that's no consolation to those who can't get in, and it sucks that they're screwed just for wanting to play the game they bought without waiting for their timezone to launch.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[lowmagnet]

I recall the launches of UO and Lineage 2 (US launch, in that case) and both were plagued by downtime and reboots ever three hours or so. L2's mobs were constantly disappearing. Or you'd be fighting something your level +2 and it would de-select itself so you have to re-acquire it as a target. Every system has its bugs.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Naffer]

Are you sure about this? The registration servers came up at 10:30pm the night before release, and I jumped online directly onto the Mountain Server "Kel'Thuzad." On launch day, there were only 5 mountain servers online, and in fact population problems didn't start until the day after launch when people started getting their coppies. New servers weren't brough up for days, as database and worldserver lag spiked on many many servers.
My server was down for 16hours of maintainance recently, but that didn't stop it from going down for approximatly 4 hours both subsequent days at prime time.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[falcon5768]

No sorry doo not pass go do not collect 200 dollars.

Your right, stability does take time, but they used theirs up a couple of massive server outages ago. And compairing WOW to SWG is unfair because my crash happpy XP box would fair better than SWG.

Compaired to most games out there WoW sucks for uptime. At least in most cases the other games didnt just crash. Wows servers have done just that more than once.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[DrEldarion]

The monstrous amount of people playing the game is putting a massive load on the servers, so I'm not sure if it's very "strange" that they're having more problems now than in beta.

Sure, it sucks that it's happening, but it really is expected.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Now even their boards are down...

You've encountered an...ERROR!

We're sorry but there has been an error with your request. Please try again later.

* Go back to the previous page
* Return to main

There was a thread from yesterday on the general forums by WoW's community manager with a less than verbose message regarding their recent problems and plans for resolution. Their board login system is linked to their system login system, which means when their is a systemwide issue it makes it difficult for customers to post on their message boards. Whether this is by design or accident is left to question, but it does seem suspicious since this has been brought up a number of times to Blizzard and they have not seperated the two login systems thus far. Many people (including myself) are torn between liking the game a whole whole lot and being subjected to progressively worse game stopping issues over the last month or so.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problem as well but it is probably because i am from New Zealand so when i play most of the world doesn't. It also means that i have little competition for mining, so i am very happy.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[RocketScientist]

I've been playing for about a month now. I play on what's probably a medum high-pop server, but I've not seen a queue, even logging on at 7PM CT. If you don't pick one of the insanely high pop servers, you're probably not going to see problems.

The biggest problems I've had:
1. The auction house is very slow. The city the auction house is in is very slow. Some of the surrounding countryside around the city with the auction house is very slow. I had instant-cast spells take 8 seconds. If you roll a dwarf or gnome, get to level 5 and head to Stormwind to get away from the auction house. You can do all of the human quests for level 5-15 and it'll go a lot more smoothly. You can always return and mop up the lower level quests (if you want the positive faction reputation points) when they get the auction house fixed, which they're working on.

2. The login servers, the servers that handle auth and character selection for startup, they suck. They're plagued with outages. Daily outages. Fortunately, they're usually resolved within a half hour or so. And, if you're already in-game, you don't even notice the login server outages. You need the login server to be up for about 30 seconds per day, so the odds are in your favor.

The good news?

If you pick a server with a medium to medium-high pop, you'll have very very few problems (you'll have more luck finding people to group with on servers with more people, but too many people on the server and you'll have queueing to get in). There is a site (www.wowcensus.com or something) that will feed you population statistics. Keep in mind those are voluntary reports, and may or may not be accurate. A better idea is to visit the forums at worlofwarcraft.com and see what realms get the most complaints :).

Also, the higher your level, the more time you'll spend in less-populated areas. My lvl 36 warlock spends a lot of time out in the boonies running down quests, and I have no performance issues at all until I return to a big city to sell stuff. My level 11 priest is in one of the lowbie areas, and it's not bad, but it will occasionally act funny (3 second lag on body looting, for example). My theory is a lot of people are playing one character up to level 15 or so, deciding they don't like that class/race/faction, and are picking up new characters. Nothing wrong with that, I did it myself. But, that keeps a higher-than-normal pop in the newbie and lowbie areas.

Finally, the game is a LOT of fun. Seriously. Very well thought out quests, neat items, I haven't had to farm monsters to get levels (almost all of my levelling has been from quests). Find a good guild on a good world and you'll have support structures to help you (higher level guildies pass down loot they can't use to lower level members, and you'll be expected to be generous when you get there).

That said, have I had problems? Yeah, I was trying to play on a Saturday evening and it took about 30 minutes to log in. Given that I've played nearly every day for a little over a month, I'd say that's a pretty decent rate of failure. I had one time I was on and got a broadcast message that the server was going to be rebooted in 20 minutes. I finished up what I was doing in about 10 minutes, logged out, played with the dog for a half hour, and logged back in. Honestly, I'd rather have them reboot the server periodically than ignore problems. So my failure/outage rate with the game has probably been about 3 to 5%. If your PS2 had a, say, 1 in 25 chance that a game you put into it would require you to clean the lens of the DVD player, would you still play? Most likely. It's not a matter of 4 out of 5, it's more on the scale of 1 in 25 or so.

Oh, and my warlock has a pointy hat. How cool is that? Blizzard gets bonus cool points for pointy hats. Now I just want a high-level crafting skill that lets me create self-propelled luggage with the attitude of a badly raised pit bull.

Blizzard could do better. But they're doing pretty good overall. Good enough that when someone on the boards says "I've had enough of the outages and queues, I'm cancelling my account" most of the replies are "Bummer for you. Hey can I have your stuff?"

Re:Patience is a virtue

[j0nb0y]

They released a subset of server names? I was paying pretty close attention, and AFAIK, they didn't release any server names before launch.

I believe you're wrong about central servers being the most populated too. The last time I looked, all the most populated servers were east coast servers. Why? Because in every Blizzard game, everyone always plays on east coast servers. Why? Don't ask me. I live on the east coast, so I suffer for it.

Here's what happened to my WoW Guild: Opening day over lunch I hit the mall, hurry home, register an account, log in, and check out the server list. I pick the only East Coast PVP server with a low population, post it to the guild website, tell it to my coworkers who play, email people etc. When I get home from work at approximately 5:30, there's a huge queue to get on the server. And the queue only gets longer as the night progresses. The server is Mannoroth, which according to wowcensus.com is the sixth most populated server. Fortunately we haven't had too much unscheduled downtime. Lots of lag though in major cities. And a massive raid on Undercity took down the entire server saturday night. Wasn't down for too long though.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Thanks for the info: I really am looking forward to this game--but the comments have just started to make me wonder if I shoulda asked for GURPS 4th Ed instead of $50 for WoW and $30 for a two month sub, at least until Blizz get the issues worked out.

www.wowcensus.com is good resource--but I wonder why Blizz doesn't publish themselves? I found their realm status page at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/serverstatus/, but it seems like that's a "current load" not a registered load--so it doesn't do me a lot of good at acct creation time when I need to pick a realm on which to play.

Can I ask on which realm you've had so much luck?

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Golias]

Nevertheless, a lot of big guilds did purposely decide to join the same servers.

Because only about one server in 20 is flagged as a "roleplay" server.

People with MMORPG experience know that your chances of finding yourself in the company of grown-ups improve dramatically if you stick to the servers where roleplay is emphasized, so most guilds of people who like RPG (including mine) crammed themselves onto servers like Silverhand.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Destoo]

Quoting from another board:

Ulamr:

This was a great debate/topic/opinions until dumbass trolls/Blizzard spoke-holes "RealBigNUKE" and "dragonsongcame" out. You guys couldnt make it anymore obvious.

Here are some good points in this topic, summarized.

*50 cents a day is still money, and if you dont think so, please send it to me, or make a donation to this website.
* EULA doesnt mean LAW. (Blizzard protects and give itself all rights of GOD, while consumer gets no rights.)
*Why we accept that WoW must have bugs, and we must be inconvinienced?
*Just because EQ and UO etc etc had.has problems why is it an excuse for every other MMO that came out. WoW has nothing revolutionary in game or graphics. With graphics being somewhat sub-par. And its been 2 1/2 years + and they still don't know how to make it right. That is just incompetence. 10 years from now, we will have another MMO, and we will still have the same lame excuses?
*People play MMO so they can play with a LOTS of other people, moving to a server which are "empty" defeats the whole point of why people bought this whole game in the first place.
*No one complains when their game makes great review or gets GOTY, but as soon it doesnt, they question the "motives" or talkes about "Credibility" of the source. For your info, Penny Arcade is one of the few places that hasn't whore itself out to big companies as most video game magazines due.
* WoW sales are mostly to great hype and reputation Blizz had.
* Software companies must be hold accountable for the products they make. Blizzard is no different.
*It costs a lot of money to run an on-line games. (You know if in 1999 it was 2-4 dollars out of 10 for band, 5 years later, the cost is cheaper actually, but great point)
*Penny Arcade gave very good reason on why WoW doesn't deserve GOTY. And it does mean something. Penny Arcade has more credibility then most game magazines.
*Blizz doing lots of LIP service.
*Lag is real, que's are real, problems which were talked about in BETA. There are no surprises, so what is going on is bad programming.

People pointed out that Blizzard was forced to put out the game before it was done. Care to prove it?

You want to give a message to Blizzard, don't continue to subscribe to the service. Unless you like to grab your ankles without any lube...then you deserve all the whining and moaning.

###
endquote.
source: http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it has nothing to do with population. There are some servers with more problems than others. Last night when I tried to login to Ner'Zhul it took over an hour and the population was LOW.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[prator]

You can always return and mop up the lower level quests (if you want the positive faction reputation points)

I saw some chatter in the forums about not getting much faction reputation if a quest is too low level to you. If the forum search worked, I would post a link to it.

-prator

Re:Patience is a virtue

[L7_]

Color me a blizzard fan boy or whatever, but they those complaints are so hypocritical.

"People play MMO so they can play with a LOTS of other people, moving to a server which are "empty" defeats the whole point of why people bought this whole game in the first place."

And then ...

"Lag is real, que's are real, problems which were talked about in BETA. There are no surprises, so what is going on is bad programming."

Lots of people on a server are going to produce lag/queue issues. People want lots of people on a server.

People want lag/queue issues.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[DerWulf]

You think that the discs produce themselves? Blizard knew very well how many units went to stores, where preordered and how many accounts where registered.
WoW uses a shard design. It should be trivial to calculate the maximum possible number of players per server. We'll just call that number X. Now you know that 600.000 units where sold. 600.000 / X = number of servers. Clearly, the number of actual servers is well below that. How is throwing hardware (more shards) not going to solve the problem?
And besides, each subscription is a contract and that means that blizard is legally bound to provide the agreed upon service. Queues and excessive downtime doesn't cut it.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[hrodnovar]

But Patience does have it's limits. The other STUPID problem is that if a server gets too full, you can't move your character to another. (or if you can, I sure haven't found a way to do so) YOU HAVE TO START ALL OVER! Yesterday, there was a queue of over 306 waiting to get into proudmore, so if I wanted to play, I had to create a new char on another server and loose all my exp's They really need a player migration utility so we can MOVE to the newer servers when the old ones get so fricking full.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[jbich]

I work with someone that beta tested and we were talking about the lack of server to server transferability.

Apparently, there is no way, even behind the scenes at Blizzard, to transfer anything, meaing items, coin, characters, guilds .. etc, from one server to another.

My co-worker also said that they replied to his request to transfer his character by saying they are working on the functionality to be able to do this... so perhaps we will see this in the near future... /pray

Re:Patience is a virtue

[jbich]

Hardly a good comparison...

COH had nothing in the game! It was bare bones. Kill something.. wasn't that fun? Now go kill more. Quests? Content? Naw we don't need that!

If you take a simple web page that has very little dynamic content, and match the speed up against one that pulls tons of info from a DB, well DUH? Which one do you think will perform better?

WoW is FULL of content. There are so many easter eggs that I spend 1/2 the time playing it saying "Oh.. never noticed that before! That's cool!"

Re:Patience is a virtue

[jbich]

Ok dude.
That's simple ignorance.

It takes more than money and a wish to fix problems. It takes time and work, as it has been said in about 300 posts before mine.

Guess what guy? Development takes time! And guess what else? The more developers you have, the harder it is to work on one central project!

Stop crying and think before you bitch about something.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[GoofyBoy]

Its the load, alot of content is just text.

Don't think that just sending quest text adds to network load.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[jbich]

Lol.
Are you serious?
"Content" is "stuff" in the game, not just quest text.

The Action House is "content".
The cute little panda pets are "Content".
When a certain NPC does a unique action it's "content".
etc. etc.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[bernywork]

Lots of people on a server are going to produce lag/queue issues.

No, bad internal queueing and bad back end application design are going to product lag / queuing issues. Simple example, you write a web app the wrong way and it's going to stuff up when you put 10,000 people onto it full time. Same goes for this.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[AKnightCowboy]

That seems kind of a wacky universe. Why can't they cluster all these servers together and create one uniform universe?

Re:Patience is a virtue

[furrywithwings]

AO has gotten better. But it still barely pushes 20fps on modern hardware. not to mention that it basically evolved into EQ camping in space. Wow still has it beat on fun value alone.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[packeteer]

Ok here is what is happening on my server (kel'thuzad). The game has been getting so laggy it will freeze up during a battle and come back a few seconds later only to show you that your dead. Many important quests have been ruined for me and had to be re-done. If there is any major raid on a town the server bogs down.

During the peak hours of the day the lag is frequent and very difficult to deal with. Blizzard came up with a solution for this on saturday or sunday i dont remember exactly. To my surprise when i tried to log on i found myself waiting in a que. Blizzard significantly lowered to slots available on the server. Their idea is more quality for the select few instead of lag for everyone. I had an 25 minute wait untill i was able to play. 25 minutes isn't so bad when i can just log onto slashdot and kill some time but its dissapointing. This was only the beggining of my que woes.

I triet to get on later to find myself in a que that said was 45 minutes long but i timed it and it took 1 hour and 15 minutes to get on. This has become rediculous. There have been times when i want to get on and play for a few minutes before i have to go somewhere but i cant because i have to wait in line.

What are people suposed to do that are only able to play short periods of time at once? Overall i am very upset with Blizzard BUT the game is NOT un-playable. Despite all the frustration its a good game and works fine during the night and once i am finally in a server. My question is this; why dont they make it frickin' work? If WoW has sold over 600,00 copies then why isn;t it working? It is $15 a month with a $50 starting price. (600,000 * $15) + (600,000 * $50) = enough to buy their own god damn building full of servers.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Mundocani]

That is true -- I've gone back to try to pick up faction reputation points by completing lower level quests and you get very little xp for the quest and your reputation in that faction only "very slightly increased". I can understand the low xp, but not getting much reputation boost sucks.

For those who don't know, reputation determines things like how much you pay for goods in stores run by a particular faction. I think it may also determine whether the guards for that faction will protect you if you're attacked (if the faction is neutral to you initially), though I haven't achieved 'friendly' status with Booty Bay or other neutral factions so I'm not sure about that part.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[Daravon]

While not the author of the grandparent post, I've also had fairly decent luck with the servers.

I used to play Magtheridon which is a east coast PvP server. Only reason I left is because I got tired of having to watch my back while doing quests because of people being 10 levels higher then me going out killing. Once the honor system is implemented, that might decline as it punishes that kind of behavior.

Currently I play on Dalaran, which is another east coast server. That one is a normal server (PvE) and I haven't run into any problems. Only played hoarde side so I can't speak for alliance players, but 99% of the people are nice and are willing to help people new to the game.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[KillerDeathRobot]

People with MMORPG experience know that your chances of finding yourself in the company of grown-ups improve dramatically if you stick to the servers where roleplay is emphasized, so most guilds of people who like RPG (including mine) crammed themselves onto servers like Silverhand.

Actually, most people with MMO experience know that non-RPers often flock to RP servers in the hopes that a) there will be more opportunity to grief and/or b) that there will be fewer power-gamers to compete with.

Hard to be at the top

[Squatchman]

I couldn't imagine setting up a datacenter for a game like this. How much load should you plan your 100% to be? Could they even afford it? It's the new Warcraft game, so all the Blizzard fanboys were in. It's a new MMORPG, so most of the fans of that genre(usually warcraft fans as well) were on board. The word of mouth advertising alone had to be crazy.

This is nothing new for most of the games like this though. Poor launches, crashing, lack of character balance, etc. Rarely do you see a launch as smooth as City of Heroes or Planetside.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Alarash]

They had plenty of time during the various stress testq they ran to evaluate the rupture point of their servers/bandwith. They even stated that if there was so much lag during the open beta, it was because they planned it to see the said limits.

Now, we are after release, and the servers still can't handle the load. It does seem an expensive business indeed, so they could have limited the number of available boxes, earn a few bucks with the subscriptions and then open more servers with more routers to handle the traffic. It seems to be the case already, only they sold too many boxes.

Or they could have tested their games with products from Spirent, Ixia or Agilent. Spirent's product can replay a PCAP capture. Record a few hundread of them, play them at the same time several time, and you get a pretty good idea of how your game will react. That's called application testing and every single datacenter has to go through this (although maybe only on lower layers, but since some equipments can handle layer 4 to 7 perfectly, I think it's still valid).

Not like I care, the game is still not released in Europe :)

Re:Hard to be at the top

[arkanes]

There's been a lot of MMORPGs. Every single one of the major ones has been plauged with problems like this. Maybe it's just not an easy problem? If it were just Sony or something I could understand saying that they don't know what they're doing. I seriously doubt that every single successful MMO is run soley by clueless people who don't know how to do stress analysis.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Palshife]

I have no idea what the launch was like for Final Fantasy XI (being in Japan and all) but I agree. Being the best is rough. We have SCHEDULED downtimes and very few other outages. Altogether a very enjoyable experience.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[GoofyBoy]

> I seriously doubt that every single successful MMO is run soley by clueless people who don't know how to do stress analysis.

Where is Lum the Mad? He had great articles about how clueless people running the show were. From bad Customer Service to nerfing, they are clueless.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Alarash]

I'm not quite sure, Arka. I'm not sure they hire actual Network Architects/Strategists on a permanent basis. I'd be curious to know, but my best guess is that they hire a IT company with the specs they need. Like "Alright, we want to be able to handle 1 000 000 customers, on 100 servers, kthx". Then the company runs some tests to check the VLANs tags, routers capacities, throughput and what you will, but I'm not sure they do any very heavy, realistic load test. The technology to do that exists, but is expensive (usually customers are Cisco, Alcatel, Marconi, 3COM, that kind of giants). I'm not sure Blizzard or even Vivendi can afford, or is willing to afford, that kind of testing equipment.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[MacBrave]

He still has a blog, but stopped using the 'Lum the Mad' handle a few years ago: Broken Toys

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Anonymous Coward]

He got hired by Mythic. Something tells me it was a good idea to retire LtM in that situation.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[KillerDeathRobot]

Actually, most of the servers are handling the load just fine. The problem is that a very large portion of the players are trying to play on a relatively small portion of the servers. There isn't much Blizzard can really do about this, though I'm sure they're trying their darndest. Opening new servers doesn't help, because there are already plenty of perfectly usable servers with low to medium populations.

Blizzard did stress test, and might have even used those products you mentioned. Nevertheless, servers can only handle so much, and when everyone piles on the same few, Blizzard's stuck.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Last I heard, Scott Jennings was working for Mythic, doing Customer Service software for DAoC.

His blog is here: http://www.brokentoys.org/

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Yngwarr]

This excuse it a total farce.

Look, City of Heroes had a great launch. Dark Age had a great launch. And now Everquest 2 has had a great launch.

Games are rightly knocked for having bad launches. People need to stop making excuses for them.

Okay, if we were talking about some small company, maybe a bad launch would be okay, but Blizzard? Come on, this isn't a start-up by a bunch of newbies.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Anonymous Coward]

fwiw, SERVER-SIDE LAG is greatly improved over beta.

in open beta, it wasn't uncommon to get stuck waiting 2-3 minutes for the loot window to pop-up, and then another 2-3 minutes for the loot to reach your backpack. during this time you were unable to attack.. but you could still BE attacked (and killed!) by monsters.

in retail, server-side lag has been primarily confined to areas where large amounts of players gather -- the auction houses and the banks. raids of 100+ players also tend to slow things down a bit.

When reading users complaints, you need to be sure that they're actually addressing a server-side issue -- in many cases, it's the player's own box/ pipe that's simply not fast enough/big enough to handle the data being flung at it.

Re:Hard to be at the top

[AliasTheRoot]

Mythic hired him to do PR for DAoC

Re:Hard to be at the top

[cheese_wallet]

eq2 was rocky, but to the rest I say AMEN!

Re:Hard to be at the top

[Anonymous Coward]

thats great, now go farm for 30 hours so you can buy boots and actually get into a party.

Reports Reporting

[DogBarf]

Reports Reporting, huh?
Is that like pre-reserving?

Re:Reports Reporting

[TheDude2084]

I think you get those on the 11th day of Christmas.

Tychos Comments

[ben0207]

Fair enough. Although Id imagine theyll give the award back when the servers are unborked.

What downtime?

[Bruha]

Luckily I seem to be on a cluster that's not being intergrated with a new cluster.

Unless you know anything about how adding new servers to the clusters and how flippin hard it is to do right then really just sit back and go do something else for a bit.

Everyone runs around with their heads cut off like it's the end of the world becuase the 8 hours they set aside to play the game are totally interrupted and they're delayed from getting to level 60. Get up watch some news and get involved for a bit. Then go back and appreciate you can at least play a game like wow in this country.

Re:What downtime?

[EddieBurkett]

I agree with you that everyone should find something else to do, but at the same time, when you are paying $15/mo. to play the game, if you set aside even one hour, let alone eight, to play the game, then you should be able to play. I'm sure Blizzard will continue to credit people for their downtime, but still, this isn't reflecting well upon them.

Re:What downtime?

[lpp]

I think you nailed the problem for many folks though.. they've already set aside the time to play the game, having already gotten up and watched some news and been involved for a bit. Now they want to blow off some steam, go level up for a bit, or just chat with some folks they only know through WoW. And now, having set aside this time, having cleared the slate and, moreover, having payed the money, they can't access the game.

Re:What downtime?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'll bite. Don't like it - don't play it. What's your problem again?

Re:What downtime?

[Seumas]

Shut, you Alliance pig!

Re:What downtime?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, ohhhh... you got him!

Re:What downtime?

[FLaSh SWT]

lpp, you've explained it perfectly.

Re:What downtime?

[Swanktastic]

I agree with you that everyone should find something else to do, but at the same time, when you are paying $15/mo. to play the game, if you set aside even one hour, let alone eight, to play the game, then you should be able to play.

What if $15 a month isn't enough to gaurantee that level of service? What if the level of hardware/support required to have five 9's uptime would require a $25 a month fee? Would you pay it? Would other customers pay it?

Keeping a MMORPG up isn't the same as keeping a website up. When you have 100 servers and 1 goes down, someone is going to complain. The 99 others won't say anything. It gives the illusion that there are more problems than their actually are. I play WoW on a High/Red server and haven't had any problems.

I'm not giving them a carte blanche for bad service, but I'm not sure what you do in an industry where 50% of the customers are complaining that the price is unreasonable and the other 50% are complaining that the service is unreasonable? What do you do when 50% of your customers complain that the product is not perfect at release and the other 50% demand it to be released ASAP so they can start playing NOW?

I wish folks would complain about the issues that Blizzard could reasonably improve rather than the ones that may be theoretical impossibilities given the current state of technology:

1) GM's not seeming to understand that their job is customer service, rather than some sort of enforcer.
2) Terrible forum management
3) Customer communication - IE what is causing problems, what is being done to resolve them, and when problems will be fixed.

This whole situation is a little bit analagous to the problems airlines have with customer service. Mechanical problems sometimes can't be anticipated. The trick to customer satisfaction actually has very little to do with statistical performance, but rather with expecation management.

Re:What downtime?

[GameNutz]

That's not even the point! I don't care if it's "hard to do right". The fact is that when you sign up to play you have a contract with a company providing a service, not just a product. Imagine if this logic was applied to other areas of entertainment services:

- Out for a movie with your spouse and whoops! Projector is down for 5 hours. Come back tomorrow and see the movie with your current ticket, that's if you can find another babysitter for the kids.

- Ah, SuperBowl! Got all the food, drinks, and 20 people coming over for the game. Whoops! Cable will be down for 12 hours. Sorry about that! (Please don't start rioting!)

Etc. etc. etc.....

The real issue here is that game companies don't understand how to build these kinds of infrastructures. PERIOD! These are game companies, not service providers. Talk to their engineers and ask them to explain 5 9's methodology and multiple pathing. It's not their fault as they should be focusing on game development and work with companies that know how to build thses kinds of services/infrastructures.

I refuse to accept the oh it's difficult excuse when you are paying for a service. If it was a free service , that would be one thing. But you are paying for a service and should expect nothing less than the company living up to it's end of the contract.

Re:What downtime?

[Seumas]

What idiot moderator scored this as flamebait? If you're spending your time reading a WoW related article, you should probably already know that there are two competing factions in WoW - the Horde and the Alliance. The Horde have Trolls as one of their races. Thus, someone yelling "TROLL!" would appropriately be called an "Alliance Pig!".

Re:What downtime?

[GameNutz]

If it's too much of a problem, then get out of the MMORPG business. No one forced them to make WoW.

Re:What downtime?

[LordNimon]

What if $15 a month isn't enough to gaurantee that level of service?

Xbox Live is much larger than WoW, supports dozens of games instead of just one, meshes with EA's network, and still costs less than $4/month (assuming you buy a year subscription at $40). Blizzard really has no excuse.

Re:What downtime?

[j0nb0y]

Xbox Live also has no MMO offerings. The problem of a non-mmo offering and an mmo-offering really isn't comparable.

Re:What downtime?

[KillerDeathRobot]

But those things happen sometimes. Sometimes projecters die. Sometimes cable goes down. This is the reality of the world. Furthermore, this type of thing happens with just about every new MMO, and should be expected.

And if you refuse to accept it because you're paying for it, the likelyhood that Blizzard will make up for that with free play time notwithstanding, then don't pay for it. That's how it works.

Re:What downtime?

[Golias]

What if $15 a month isn't enough to gaurantee that level of service? What if the level of hardware/support required to have five 9's uptime would require a $25 a month fee? Would you pay it? Would other customers pay it?

Five nines, maybe not, but other games (CoH, DaoC, etc.) have managed to be far more reliable with only rare (and pre-scheduled) downtime during non-peak hours, sometimes for even less that $15/month.

I wish folks would complain about the issues that Blizzard could reasonably improve rather than the ones that may be theoretical impossibilities

People complain because we know that they could be doing much better. Furthermore, they must start doing better, or many of us will be moving on.

Re:What downtime?

[GameNutz]

I agree that it happens sometimes. But you don't *expect* it to. There is the difference. Hardcore gamers, who are generally more tech savvy than non gamers, go into the experience knowing that there will be problems. Now try explaining to a general consumer that they can expect their service to never be available to them all the time and unexpectantly.
Again, I understand that problems arise but the prievious poster was excusing these issues. You are providing a service. If you expect there to be downtimes and crashed, make it part of the EULA and let consumers know up front.

Re:What downtime?

[llefler]

But those things happen sometimes. Sometimes projecters die. Sometimes cable goes down. This is the reality of the world. Furthermore, this type of thing happens with just about every new MMO, and should be expected.

All of this is based on customer expectations. Having telephone service 364 days a year means nothing if it's down when you need to call 911. We expect utilities to have at least 5 9s. Cable service has become a utility, particularly with their push to offer VOIP. Naturally, expectations for a MMORPG are considerably lower, but they already schedule 4 hours a week of down time. (and on at least one occasion it stretched to 16) Nobody screamed when Blizzard's datacenter was down after a hurricane.

Server status forum

Are we not allowed to expect progress? Or should we continue to pay $15 a month and hope it will be fixed someday?

Oh, and yes, I would expect a theater to have spare projectors, particularly with the multiplexs they are building now. It's an essential to their business.

Re:What downtime?

[Zed2K]

I agree with 2 of your 3 points. The one I don't and never will agree with is customer communication. Whenever a server or something happens they always post that something is going on and it will be back up when its fixed. As a user, that is all you need to know. You don't need to know what was wrong, you don't need to know what they are doing to fix it, you don't even need to know when it will be back up. All you need to know is that THEY know about it and are working on it. And that is exactly what they've told their customers every single time.

Re:What downtime?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree with you on this point. As a customer who pays a monthly fee, it's your right to know what is wrong, what they are doing about it, and when it will be back up.

While I don't play WoW (many of my friends do, but I doubt I'll ever convert), I do play FFXI. Any downtime is scheduled, usually days in advance letting people know what is going to be affected by the update.

In the rare cases where there is emergency maintaince, customers can still see what is going on at the website or within the Playonline application.

Finally emergency maintaince to a zone or two does not bring the whole server down, people are warned ingame that the area is going under maintaince and about 1/2 hour or so later it gets shutdown and fixed. If you try to zone into the area it won't let you. People who need to log into that area are stuck while the maintance is occuring, but this maintance is VERY rare.

Re:What downtime?

[kiddygrinder]

I couldn't disagree with you more, All i want is a brief description of the problem and estimated downtime, so i can have an idea of what's going on for my own curiosity and an idea of when i should try again. The sort of information you are asking for can be pretty much deduced by logging on to a server. Is it down? yes, so they're most likely aware of it and working on a fix. Additionally, they posted no warning or reasoning why the queues were re-implimented yesterday, which kind of goes against your statement that they at least keep us even mildly well informed. The Customer Service Rep in charge of the forums had to get on the phone several times on her day off over a period of hours to even find out what was going on, before she could inform the public! Honestly, this kind of crap is inexcusable!

Re:What downtime?

[Zed2K]

Last night they posted a message about the queues as a sticky:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn =w ow-general&t=874660&p=1&tmp=1#post874660

Re:What downtime?

[Zed2K]

Oh and also they posted it on their home page and everyone has been given 48 hours of free time. Just like every other time they have had server problems.

Re:What downtime?

[bonzoesc]

"Nobody screamed when Blizzard's datacenter was down after a hurricane."

The same way nobody cheered when Microsoft abandoned software to make heavy masonry for public building projects, yeah. There have been no active hurricanes since the WoW release fyi.

Re:What downtime?

[llefler]

I don't get your point. Are you saying you would be unreasonable about cutting them some slack after a natural disaster? People have complained throughout the stress tests, open beta, and launch about problems with the game, but everyone understood when their datacenter got flooded.

My point is that the people who are complaining are reasonable. They have a reasonable expectation that those game servers will be available when they want to play. There was no clause in the EULA that said "game servers are available when we have nothing better to do". Too many people are dismissing the problems with "these things happen during a launch." They shouldn't happen, at least not to this degree.

Re:What downtime?

[jbich]

Ok I don't get all this /crying!!

To Quote Artie from Howard Stern: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA My WoW is DOWN! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Grow up.
All major services that heavily dependant on technology go down, and YES IT IS TO BE EXPECTED.
*Internet Services like Cable and DSL
*TV Cable
*Online services like WoW, SWG, etc.
* The list goes ON and ON

All of these are difficult to implement and difficult to maintain. You pay for all of em in one way or another and if you really think just because you're paying for a service you are exempt from the trials and tribulations of the technologies the services depend on you are either really idealistic, really nieve, or really really stupid.

Get with reality, and deal with the fact that the internet and things that run on it are NOT perfect.

Grow up.

Re:What downtime?

[andy_fish]

Phantasy Star Online

Re:What downtime?

[Surye]

Remember, PSO is not really massively multiplayer. Just an illusion of one with a fancy lobby.

Re:What downtime?

[bonzoesc]

All I'm saying is that there haven't been any hurricanes to hit their datacenter, and won't be for several months.

Re:What downtime?

[packeteer]

And what if the time you have set aside is longer than your wait in the que? What if you can only play a few minutes at a time, a few times a day. your screwed.

Re:What downtime?

[j0nb0y]

Is that out for X-box? I thought it was only for gamecube and dreamcast.

Also, if it is out for x-box, I guarantee there's an added fee in addition to the live fee paid to microsoft, so it's not really a good example.

Re:What downtime?

[KillerDeathRobot]

A hurricane did hit their data center, before release.

Downtime inevitable

[oprahwinfree]

MMOGs will have downtime. Even Sony, no matter what some may think of them as a company, has years of experience running and maintaining servers for online game play and suffered massive downtime last month with EQ2.

I think it is to be expected. Blizzard isn't a telco. There aren't laws enforcing a certain level of uptime and punishment dealt out if those levels aren't met. Game companies shouldn't be reasonably expected to have as strict a standard as a utility, so they don't take on the enormous cost of having really reliable systems in place.

Re:Downtime inevitable

[Harlockjds]

I don't consider one weekend and a Tuesday (after a fubared patch that glitched people) massive downtime. Esp. since they added 3 days to everyone's billing cycle to compensate for it.

Re:Downtime inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit. You buy a service, you want it performed. You buy a product, you want it to function as advertised. The problem is people are too complacent nowadays. Here's the lesson I learned from an old buddy from the UK. You are allowed to talk to anyone if you really want to. Don't stop with first-level tech support when you can't get anything done. Don't go piss and moan on slashdot. Make your voice heard at the company. Shit, we used to get through to VP's and such for a troublesome piece of PC hardware, if their company didn't handle our situations well. Someone important works at Blizzard, and you can get through to them. Even if it's because you call his secretary every single day, you can get through to him. He'll either take your call, or get the picture pretty darn quick. Ultimately the lesson is, expect more. Don't settle for half assed just because everyone else does. By the way, you'll notice a trend of this in extraordinarily wealthy people. :)

Recently stopped playing

[zhevek]

I gave up on WoW a few days ago. The constant lag and random downtimes were disheartening. Great game, too bad about the crappy server architecture. Or whatever is causing the problem.

Sadly Penny Arcade is right

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great game in so many aspects.

But, Blizzard just can't get the servers to stablize. In fact the situation is getting WORSE not better. I could understand during the first couple weeks, but we're getting close to two months now.

If you have a PvP battle with more that 30 on each side. You'll probably bring down a whole continent, or alteast completely lag out everyone in the region (can't loot, can't cast spells, can't get quests).

Even with no battles, if there's moderate amount of people in region everyone lags out.

We reported this lag bug so many times in beta. We /suggested many times for blizzard to upgrade their hardware for the traffic. Yet their policy seems to be to wait for battlefields as if that will magically cure their problem.

For the amount of money blizzard is making in subscription revenue, I'd suggest hiring fewer corrupt GMs (a gm disbanded a guild his guild was fighting with) and upgrade their server hardware. C'mon guys let's replace those PDP-11s.

- James

Re:Sadly Penny Arcade is right

[jafuser]

Blizzard just can't get the servers to stablize. In fact the situation is getting WORSE not better.

It has been getting worse up until yesterday when they finally capped all the problematic servers to 'Medium' load.

Sure, waiting in a login queue for 45 minutes to get in sucks, but wasting 4 hours when the game is lagged to hell or crashing every hour with a 30 minute rollback sucks a whole lot more.

I've never seen the game run so smoothly as it did last night. The only downside is if you crash out you have to wait in the queue again; but I think reducing the load has also eliminated crashes for most people.

I know this is only a temporary fix, but it seems like the best move to make until they can get the whole thing back on it's feet again. At least the 'estimated time' on the queue is fairly accurate, so you can find other things to do to fill that time while waiting.

no, no

[koi88]

You're misunderestimating the author.

time with the family instead

[dmauro]

What was the number of units sold? About 600,00 (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/10 /2030244&tid=209&tid=98). That's a lot of people to deal with. And this isn't affecting all servers either. I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server. Yes it's good to give Blizzard hell and light a fire under them so that they get more servers going, get the current ones stable, and allow people to move from high to low pop servers, but rescind your GotY award? That seems a brash and immature thing to do at this point. They put up with the rough release, and saw through the server problems to find a great game? Why take it back now when you've known this was going to take some time to get fully worked out. Especially when you have more and more people joining. I also think Blizzard should be applauded for not shipping new copies of the game until the servers are stabilized. If they are going to have to stabilize the servers before selling more copies, don't you think it's their number one priority too? Give them some time, start a alt on a better server, pick a Horde race, and enjoy the game.

Re:time with the family instead

[Fr05t]

"I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server."

I'm on Dal and I've been seeing a slow but steady increase of lag in the major cities.

"I also think Blizzard should be applauded for not shipping new copies of the game until the servers are stabilized."

No they shouldn't. Not only have they not been shipping new copies they have been forcing retailers to sit on the copies they have. Also it's not their concern for their current customers - it's PR damage control.

Re:time with the family instead

[illumin8]

I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server.

Thanks... I have never had any problems and my level 30 rogue is on the Dalaran server... Until now... Thanks, dmauro, for telling all of the lagging PvP mofos out there where the good servers are... ;-P I guess I'll just have to go back to Diablo I and II for my RPG fun. You've ruined WoW for me...

Hahaha... JK.

PA? WTF?

[cjpez]

God damn, I'm so sick of seeing Penny Arcade links in Slashdot stories. Yes, I am a huge fan of Penny Arcade. I've got pretty much all their strips since two years ago saved on my hard drive, I even used to subscribe for their monthly get-interesting-stuff thing. But come on, they write a fucking webcomic . Cool as they are, and as incredible as their webcomic is, this does not make their comments about anything some kind of news-worthy announcement. People who already care about what Gabe and Tycho have to say will have already read it. People who don't aren't likely to be swayed just because they pulled a game from their fictional awards "show." Gah, and now I'm posting meta-comments on Slashdot. LAME.

Re:PA? WTF?

[oprahwinfree]

Linking to PA makes perfect sense to me.

It's like if they linked to Larry Flint's blog on a story about a porn star. Gabe and Tycho are fucking game pundits. Games are their thing, and they are a good source to go to when you have a story dealing with games, especially when it's a story they themselves have covered.

Re:PA? WTF?

[_xeno_]

I was originally going to try and make a write-up of this story on my own, but then I saw that Tycho had posted a much better version that said basically exactly what I wanted to say. I figured that people would be more likely to respect what Gabe and Tycho have to say on the matter than some random Slashdotter. :)

I really intended this as a counter-point to what appears to be the prevailing opinion that EverQuest 2's release was plagued with flaws and World of Warcraft's wasn't. Blizzard has been having problems since launch. The problems may be perfectly understandable, but they shouldn't just be ignored or written off as "launch instability" - they exist and Blizzard needs to do something to convince people that they understand there are problems and that they're working to fix them. Having a server go down for "emergency maintanence" three times in two days suggests that there's something seriously wrong with the way the servers are running.

I'm beginning to think they're running the servers on Windows 2003 Server - they seem to simply reboot the servers fairly frequently. >:)

Server down time not the only issue

[Fr05t]

--I can't post on the forums - login server down
--I emailed tech support about a problem and posted on the forums (when I could get on them) over a month ago - no reply from blizzard

Not surprising Blizzard has "stopped production" and told retailers to hold the games. It's damage control. They have already pissed off 500k people and want to make sure they have noobs to replace all the players who will jump ship as soon as the next game comes out.

Re:Server down time not the only issue

[Teh Suq]

Not surprising Blizzard has "stopped production" and told retailers to hold the games.

They have not told retailers to hold the game. It is on the shelves at many stores still. I could go buy 10 copies at a store 1 mile from here right now. You are correct about the "stopped production" in that they are not currently shipping any more copies until they are ready for them.

Re:Server down time not the only issue

[Fr05t]

I know people who work at EB and Futureshop here. They say the same thing - boxes full of games in the back which aren't allowed to go on the shelf. If customers call they tell them they will have some in "in about a month or two".

On a side note

[Alarash]

Just in case some people didn't real the whole news on PA's website, it's good to know they were hired to do a few drawings for the official strategy guide - so they were 'officially involved' with Blizzard through Prima.

Also we all know that fanboys can turn to true haters when disapointed. But I don't undestand all the fuss about a webcomic removing an award - when it's not even the purpose of a webcomic in the first place.

Re:On a side note

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not so much the source that you need to question. It is the company and the service rendered. Most of us subscribers will be happy to see this in the limelight and we'll take what we can get thanks.

The more places this is exposed the better. Only hip pocket revenue loss will enthuse Blizzard into revamping a: Their server control and b: Their public relations.

The major problem is communication

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm very glad this posted, I am a subscriber to WoW and I have to say that all things being equal I'm embarassed to be so.

Why?

I feel like an idiot for giving this company money for frequently crashing, laggy servers. I feel like an idiot for paying for a service where we are told absolutely nothing.

These are the current problems with the game

- HUGE queues

Even at non peak times you can expect to wait 10m- 2 hours on a server. People argue that "you should have started on a low pop server". Well idiots all servers were low pop at the start. They don't offer a server transfer and of course they don't offer an australian server.

- Server Issues and Lag

Servers are not stable, full stop. Last week blizzard took our servers down for an extended 16 hour maintenance period. After this "FIX" the servers constantly crashed every few hours and on sunday night were down for another 3 hours. Now they are down for another 4 hours tonight for "maintenance". Every time they fix something, its more broken. Hmm..

- Lack of Australian Server

if we want to play with others we are forced to play on the WORST server on the network. We pay premium price just like the rest of the people only for some reason we have to wear pings of 300-600ms. This is an issue that blizzard absolutely do not comment on either.

Communication

As far as Blizzard are concerned, I don't deserve to know whats going on. Let me expand on this. Any time a server goes down, we are told basically nothing (one line of text suggesting they are down 30 minutes after the fact means absolutely nothing). We are not worthy of having updates. All we are told is "we appreciate your patience".

If I have a technical issue and I post it in the forum. Most of the time it is ignored.

If I post a genuine thread in the general forum, it is almost always ignored.

Infact, the only time I can get a response is when I'm breaking the rules.

Wake up blizzard, if you don't say anything then we can't exactly see that you're making changes because you're sure as hell not fixing the problems. Throw out the smoke and mirrors! Inspire some confidence.

Re:The major problem is communication

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I just love it when the login screen has a line saying the servers are down, with a "Click Here For More Info" button... which takes you to the Forums which have no information about the outage whatsoever.

Most of the time, the most recent post from the admins in the forums is from a day or two prior to the problem. Why link to that with a statement that it provides info when it doesn't?

Here too

[Taulin]

Out of all the MMORPG launches I played in (UO, AO, DAoC, SWG), WoW is by far the best, and could have almost been called perfect.

However, looking at the big picture, there does seem to more problems now, than at launch, which is strange. Increased user base? Most likely the cause. I think Penny Arcade is just whining now since they are so spoiled with such a great game. Man, people are contacting ops over not being able to log into the forums they are looking so hard for things to complain about? I have been in many 50+ people raids with no network lag, and the graphics stayed pretty smooth also. Incredible times.

My server was not one of the 14 hour down servers for some reason. Not sure why only half them had that long downtime last week. Wondering if they are going to spork the others this week.

Re:Here too

[helfon1]

I have to disagree with you on that one. Dark Age of Camelot launched without a hitch that I can remember. The only downtime was a once a week scheduled patch that included new features.

I played on one of the biggest servers and it would take 300 people being in the same immediate area.

Every mmo has it's problems there is no doubt but Blizzard apparently didn't do enough stress testing or didn't control server population balance if there are some servers that are getting hosed and others that are competely fine.

Re:Here too

[tricops]

Well, I think people are pretty much just complaining to complain as well. I don't doubt some servers have had issues, and my server has been up and down some, but overall it's been pretty good. So many of the other MMORPGs have had stability issues. During the brief time I played FFXI after its NA launch, it seemed to be down every other day for maintenance - that after however long they had to prepare from it running in Japan only. As far as your 50+ people raid with no lag, that's pretty good. We had a massive 160+ person raid the other night on Windrunner which was an experience quite the opposite of that. Just sitting there by Southshore we were lagged, and once we actually moved and attacked the horde it was lagged like 15-30+ seconds behind and looked more like pinball than anything.

Re:Here too

[Daravon]

The large raids were going ok on the server I used to play on (left PvP servers because of the asshats on the server I played on...heard it's not as bad on other PvP servers). When the hoarde were being attacked (which was almost constantly on my server :D) we'd notice lag when we were trying to run around the raid. I just think it was my computer because of my harddrive throwing a shit fit. Once we moved far enough away that the game wouldn't try to cache up textures for the Alliance storming us, smooth sailing again.

Corrections....

[Taulin]

Not trying to rag on you, but I have to add and correct to some of your statements...

Huge - Waiting times? I have never experienced this on my Med and High pop servers. Maybe a few servers have this problem, but I have never seen it.

Only half of the servers were brought down for the 14 hour patch, and it was on Thursday, which is supposed to be the least load day.

Lack of server - Did Bliz actually release it for Australia? Or did you just import it? AFIK, only the US has been released to, which means other countries are not officially supported. I could be wrong about Aus, though.

Communication - Not only does the log in page have a paragraph or two if it concerns all players, but the forums also have comments from Bliz support with status and plans. There is a button on the log in screen that takes you directly there too.

Re:Corrections....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I know you're not trying to rag on me but you don't seem to be quite as aware as I am of the situation.

Huge- Many servers are experiencing huge queues. I happen to be on one of the worst, however I hear that it is spreading to many servers now. Look forward to queues because they are coming.

Whether half the servers or all were brought down for the 16 hours is not really the point. The point is, after all this (and zero comms on what they did aside from a few class changes) the servers that were worked on performed worse.

Lack of server - Australia had a major release too. Enough said. We have been released to and don't have a server. Our "unofficial" server is consequently the worst server as it struggles to deal with the high load of australians/US people on it.

Communication: The log in page RARELY references downtime. The forums have a standard 1 line comment, read them if you want. Many of these downtimes can last hours upon hours. Generally we are given a 1 line explanation an hour after it has crashed.

Realm Status Forum

Check the general forums, blizzard do not comment on anything.

Check the tech support forums, if your game is crashing heavily they will ask you very little but to update your drivers and reinstall.

I accept that you clearly are on a much better server and thus are mostly oblivious to the terrible problems of server instability though.

Re:Corrections....

[tholomyes]

Also...

If I have a technical issue and I post it in the forum. Most of the time it is ignored.

If I post a genuine thread in the general forum, it is almost always ignored...

Blizzard has stated that, if you have a problem, posting it in the forums is not the best way to let them know. Email them. Call them. Or, even, page a GM in-game. I don't know, is that "breaking the rules"?

Yes, there have been some issues, but they haven't seemed that godawful to me. It's still one of the best games ever created, and even if I only get on for 4 hours in a single month, I've gotten my fifteen bucks worth. C'mon, that's the price of two movies at the theater. One, if you have a girlfriend.

The only things I'm tired of are Blizzard's "planned outages" which they notify you of 30 minutes before, the random login server fuckups, and all of the people whining about lag.

Lag is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, on this very website. You can see it when you look at your webportal or when you turn on your XBox Live. You can feel it when you VPN in to work... when you go to The Cathedral of Light... when you eFile.

Re:Corrections....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ragging on others???? I love people who generalize about others because their experience was different than others.

The FACT of the matter is that a substantial number of servers were brought down for 13 hours last week. Since that time, these same servers have been horribly unstable. Starting yesterday, these same set of servers started requiring users to wait in "queues" for up to TWO HOURS before they can play. These servers are even medium and lightly loaded servers.

In my estimation, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 users have not been able to play consistently for the past 5 days, and not at all for nearly two days.

The WORST infraction was that the communication was absolutely NIL. At least when EQ2 went down for 3 days a few weeks back, they had nearly hourly reports with actual information.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing people defend Blizzard blindly and calling everyone else whiners because A) their experience hasn't been that bad or B) they have some insatiable urge to defend a companies reputation at the expense of all else.

EQ2's launch was nearly flawless. SOE has experience and has had bad launches in the past. BUT... Blizzard had nearly a YEAR of beta to iron out the kinks. They put 600,000 copies in the channel. It's been over a month since release and things are getting WORSE than better.

It was absolutely appropriate that Penny Arcade to revoke their GOTY award. The game is by far the best MMO I've ever played. But the server situation sucks, Blizzard needs to step up to the plate with game credits, better communication, and whatever else it may take to remedy the situation. And they haven't been....

Re:Corrections....

[Qaztal]

The Release was to USA, Canada, Asutralia and New Zealand.

Anyway having said that. I do not seem to have much problems at all, but I chose a low population server.

Occasionally there is a bit of server lag. Latency even while often in the red does not seem to affect performance as much as server overload.

Re:Corrections....

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

We can go a step further than this and place Lag at the center of all sensory perception. Remember, the speed of light, while small, is finite. There is a lag between the entire world and your eyes, and vastly more lag in the chemical reactions that detect that light and transmit the image through the optic nerve to your brain. Philosophy majors, please make yourselves useful by writing long treatises on the metaphysical implications of Lag. Lag is all.

Re:Corrections....

[Lil-Bondy]

if you have a gf, id glady pay a $15 a month to have her off your hands...

GU

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's GU deals with the same topic. I don't play the game myself, but these game companies need to start getting their acts together, this is getting too common in the industry, that is to release a game way before it (or in this case the company) is ready to do so.

Ridiculous

[DrZombie]

I was in the open beta when they capped the registrations at 500,000. That was supposed to be their stress test. Now I've seen a number saying there was 600,000 sales of the game, and then they stopped producing it. There were not these types of problems in open beta. Occasionally you would see a queue, or there would be downtime, but from reading the WoW forums, it seems like this is a huge issue.

And then there are the people with the gaul to suggest that it's the players fault. That they should just "switch to a low pop server". Well, when I first logged into Cenarius last thursday, it was a low pop server. 5 days later I'm standing in a 700 person queue. Blizzard then, in one of the stupidest moves I have yet to see, decided they would put limits on the number of characters that could be on a server, after that population limit had already been reached on the server. I'm having trouble coming up with an analogy for something that stupid. It's like showing apartments to people, renting them out, and then afterwards find out that you rented apartments to more people than there were apartments, so you only let a portion of those people in at a time.

And then there are the people out there who say that it's not Blizzards fault. Whose fault, I ask, is it then? I've been a software engineer for 6 years. At my current job, we are required by some of our contracts to maintain a 99% uptime. When a server is down, our web-infrastructure team is called in, from home, or wherever, to fix it. Our builds are very tightly controlled to minimize downtime. Blizzard has it even easier, in that they do not allow server jumping. They know how many people are linked to each server. They could easily just stop allowing new players on loaded servers. It's that easy. Really.

This is my first MMO game, and if this is what people have to go through everytime a new one launches, I don't understand how they survive. Oh wait, yeah, they make you pay for a client that could be cheaply distributed via some kind of peer-to-peer technology. Like bittorrent. You know, that thing they used to distribute the beta.

Some of this is knee-jerk, some of it isn't. I'm not cancelling my account or anything. I've experienced exactly 2 queues during the released version. Not terrible, but when I've got an 80 minute wait on one, it does make my desire to play whither on the vine, so to speak. And Blizzard seems to only be providing half-assed remedies for the problem, which just compounds all the negativity people are feeling toward them right now.

Re:Ridiculous

[Zed2K]

There is a reason for the queues over the last few days. They are having database problems after the latest maintenance on a bunch of the servers so they lowered the limit on how many can be on the server. This generated large wait queues. Its all posted in their forums.

A lot of it is user problems though. A lot of people are playing on machines that just can't handle it. A lot of folks don't have fast enough internet. And a lot of folks are trying to play during maintence hours at very wierd times really early morning and can't log in. They then assume that the whole thing is screwed up and start crying.

Re:Ridiculous

[DrZombie]

Bull.

Blizzard should have put hard caps on server population. Plain and simple. Their server maintenance schedules are ridiculously willy-nilly. Even in the open beta, servers were arranged by location. This meant that they could easily come up with maintenance windows that were conducive to affecting as few people as possible for a given server in a given region (east coast servers could go down for maintenance between 2am and 5am EST, west coast 2am and 5am PST). They apparently did away with that for the production release.

I don't discount your statement that there are people with:

• slow internet connections
• slow machines
• people playing during maintenance hours (although if the servers are in a maintenance window, why are they even in service)

and I'm sure those people are complaining. But when I can't get on at 10pm EST unless I want to wait an hour and a half, that is bullshit plain and simple. Blizzard is not providing the service that people are paying for. And before anyone holds up the EULA that says "You may not be able to play whenever you want" yada yada yada, a friend and fellow player who just completed his 2L at Harvard has laid out to me explicitly how that can be ripped apart in court (I'm not threatening legal action, as it's overreacting. People have though, and a class action against Blizzard is not out of the question apparently). I'm just saying they can't use that to cover their ass in the face of overwhelming lack of service.

I could forgive any provider who says "We have a set schedule, for server maintenance, to impact customers geographically as minimally as possible, but please understand that we may have overage on the downtime". That is just responsible. I would have no problem with hard server population caps, but before that cap has already been exceeded. If you can't get on to a specific server to play with friends because the limit has been reached, well, then your friends will just have to create a character on your server.

Blizzard lost a lot of their excusability when they performed an Open Beta for stress testing where they had to close registration because 500,000 people registered for it. There were similar problems at that time too, but I honestly don't remember them being as bad as it currently is. They had an idea of how many people would register. They should have been able to run automated stress tests on the servers to the point of breaking numerous times, and have had a wealth of statistical data by the time it launched.

They created a great game, but dropped the ball on the infrastructure needed to support that game. Plain and simple.

Re:Ridiculous

[Zed2K]

I try to play every night from around 8pm to 1am. And I've only encountered 1 queue that took about 3 minutes before I logged in. The fact that you don't like the reasons for the queues is not relevent at all because it is what it is.

During stress test I didn't see nearly as many people around as I do now. The stress was not a good stress test or it was actually testing something else that users don't need to know about.

"They should have been able to run automated stress tests on the servers to the point of breaking numerous times, and have had a wealth of statistical data by the time it launched."

Have you ever tried doing that? I have. It is not simple to get a valid test that will simulate real world events in the extreme.

Everytime so far that Blizzard has had out of the ordinary server problems they have given the user free time credits.

I'm paying the same price as everyone else to play and I really don't understand the hostility a lot of folks have. Its a freaking game! I've already got my worth out of it for this month. If I didn't play at all the rest of the month I wouldn't care. I've been able to pretty much play whenever I wanted to.

People complain about way to many things that they really don't have a clue about. They like to hear themselves talk and its annoying. Just proves my belief that 99% of the population on this planet are made up of stupid people.

Re:Ridiculous

[DrZombie]

Actually, yes I have done stress testing. I spent some time on the performance and automation teams as part of my role as software engineer. I've written automation scripts for doing exactly what I laid out. Blizzard has it even easier than I did. They know every aspect of their system. They don't rely on 3rd party applications as part of their system. Not to mention the fact that Blizzard had half a million people as part of their beta, and your defense of that is ridiculous in and of itself. If we had that many people in our betas, we wouldn't worry about performance testing ourselves, because we would have an army to do it for us.

I'm really sick of people acting like they know what they're talking about, because you obviously don't. I've spent enough time working with software systems, systems programming, and enterprise system development to confidently come back and smack you down after such a ridiculous comment. Do yourself a favor and include yourself in that 99% of the population, because you either don't know what you're talking about with regard to stress testing, or you really are stupid.

Re:Ridiculous

[Chibi]

I'm paying the same price as everyone else to play and I really don't understand the hostility a lot of folks have. Its a freaking game! I've already got my worth out of it for this month. If I didn't play at all the rest of the month I wouldn't care. I've been able to pretty much play whenever I wanted to.

I think you're going on the assumption that everyone is exactly like you. You say that you've already gotten your worth out of the game this month, but that concept is drastically different for each person. I'm not sure how WoW handles its subscription fees, but going on the assumption that it's a monthly fee, everyone does indeed pay the same price, but they probably have vastly different expectations. Some probably plan on playing only a few hours a month, while others want to play a few hours a day. For the hardcore players, these downtime issues are affecting their enjoyment of the game (assuming they are on the affected servers).

Obviously, you feel that this isn't a big deal, but the "pay-to-play" issue is one of the biggest roadblocks for MMORPGS. Most people just do not like the idea of paying recurring fees to play something. If you suddenly tell them that there are stability issues, and they might not be able to play whenever they want, it makes the game (and genre) even less attractive, as they are getting less value (perceived or real) for their money.

Re:Ridiculous

[Damvan]

So what you are saying is, "I don't have a problem, I can pretty much play whenever I want to, so everyone should shut up."

Ever think that maybe some people are having problems? But, since "99% of the population of this planet are made up of stupid people" it is probably their own stupid fault, right?

I agree with you, 99% are stupid, but we disagree on which group you belong to, the 1% or the 99%.

As usual, players fail to learn from history

[UziBeatle]

Okay, I'm no PC gaming spring chicken. 48 years old and been around the block twice when it comes to computer games. Recent related experience: I was with DAOC from near the start of their launch, Blizzards Diablo2 as well. Was a fewl and bought Never Winter Nights at release..etc. (all the above bought at release)

What sage advice do I have for all the whining crybabys out there that can't seem to learn from experience? Allow me to beat it into your thick crybaby skulls.

Item one.: When it comes to massive online games in particular, NEVER buy the game until it has been out for AT LEAST six months. Period. THis also applies to games that are not massive online items. Any game released these days usually has a patch/fix cycle during first six months AT LEAST, other sad cases take up to ayear to get 'right', if ever. Major Added bonus. TIred of paying 50-70 bux up front for games? WAIT. I picked up Morrowind for 10 bux just a few weeks back.

Item two: As it relates to Blizzard history directly. Blizzard had a similar problem with the release of Diablo2. THe game was unplayble more or less for the first six months of release, until Blizzard fixed the servers. (Yes I'm refering to closed server realm play not the games some random
gaming jackass hosted on his/her PC>)

Item THree: Any online game of noteworthy populatrity will have launch problems Problems to be expected with the launch of WoW were written all over the wall. I propose to you that anyone with any gaming experience at all that did not understand that going into the agreement with Blizzard at the outset is a profound idiot. Period. Blame yourself not Blizzard. Sit back and wait for them to fix it, they will I'm sure... er.. yeah ,... sure they will.

Item 4: Meanwhile while all you are testing it and paying Blizzards bill and paying for their $80,000+ (ha) cars I'll enjoy offline gaming and consider buying WoW or maybe EQ2 sometime this summer. More likely, I'll wait until next fall. By then I expect both will have some shakedown things squared away and the games can be properly evaluated. As a added bonus I would expect the shelf price to drop by then. See, I'm one of the ones that concluded it was a ripoff to pay 50 bux plus up front for any online game that required a monthly service fee to enjoy it. If the games in question still cost that much by summer-fall of this year I simply won't buy them. No whining needed.

Bottome line, if your one of the whiner crybabys
STFU and buck up. Cancel the account or STFU. Wait till they fix it and come back or STFU.

Cheerio, I hope I offended some of you. Have a nice day ..

SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from?

[cnelzie]

I have been playing SWG since launch and while the first day was terrible, the game became incredibly stable rather quickly. (Within two days of launch)

There simply is no comparison between the stability of SWG and the stability of WoW. From what I have been reading WoW is like a rickety bailing wire and spit Wright Brother's airplane that can't stay off the ground for very long and crashes continually. Whereas SWG was, at launch, more like a WWII Bomber that needed very regular maintenance with a few unforseen incidents here and there.

These days SWG has become a supercargo aircraft that can go and go and go for days and weeks without requiring any maintenance, even though it occasionally has some slow-downs due to heavy loads...

There simply is no comparison in regards to server stability.

Re:SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no worthwhile comparison from you anyway, because apparently you're going on what you've read. I'm sure if you look in the right places you could read that WoW knocked up your sister but that's not any more true than your "rickety bailing wire and spit Wright Brother's airplane that can't stay off the ground for very long and crashes continually" comment. Form your opinions based on personal experience, or don't comment on the state of the servers.

Re:SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from?

[llefler]

There simply is no comparison between the stability of SWG and the stability of WoW. From what I have been reading WoW is like a rickety bailing wire and spit Wright Brother's airplane that can't stay off the ground for very long and crashes continually.

What you are reading on WoW is frustration. Small problems become big ones because Blizzard's customer service can't seem to communicate. Players have problems and they feel like they are speaking into a vacuum. So we continue to talk about problems that we don't feel are being addressed. Honestly, the game is pretty good, and other than lag (or being on one of the 'special' servers) it's pretty solid. But get one problem that gets under your skin, and Blizzard won't address it (they won't repond to messages in their tech support forum, instead they lock the messages or delete them. If you report them in game, they delete the petition), then you have a bunch of players running around telling everyone about their unresolved problem.

Re:SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from?

[Auraveda]

Damn, what server are you on? I played on Bloodfin and Corbantis, and both had bad issues at times from being overloaded.

Yeah, it's mostly better now, but it damn well should be, the game has been out for what... a year and a half? 2 years?

Re:SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from?

[obsid1an]

Servers going down during prime time all weekend and 20 minute queues to get on are not small problems. They may not be affecting you personally, but a lot of people are getting sick of it (myself included).

Re:SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from?

[yakkowakko]

Stable? Geez, neither of you comment on the Jedi-populous Bria server (home of everyone AFK, Jedi, or hunting Jedi). SoE still does not have the stability question answered, IMHO, as this server sometimes takes 2 times as long to load, and often is seen crashing during loading.

Maybe I'm just lucky

[borkus]

Playing four or five days a week since Thanksgiving, I don't think I've had problems connecting more than three maybe four times on my regular server (Gilneas).

I don't know if this helps anyone, but I was having terrible lag when I first started the game, but noticed others were playing fine. It turned out that my five year old cable modem was the culprit. I bought a new one and haven't had lag or framerate issues since then.

The biggest issue is large concentrations of PCs in one areas. I've been in the starting area for the orcs while the orc city was under attack and been lagged. The auction house in the Alliance Territory is especially problematic; I find that I have to approach it, then inch up on it until all of the player characters render. The map there makes the problem worse - there is a big trench in front of the Auction House. I frequently see players leaping into the trench because they lagged and forgot to take their hands off of the movement keys.

I would like to see Blizzard fix their player character lag issues. Overall, I find the time spent in the game enjoyable.

Re:Maybe I'm just lucky

[UziBeatle]

Well that's good to hear.

What I notice is people seem to have thresholds. SOme folke handle 'problems' and still enjoy their gaming dollar spent. Others with similar problems find their dollar horribly mispent and cry either silently and fold the door or cry loudly and wake the neighbors.

Us jaded non WoW/EQ2 outsiders will wait it out and thank you for your hard work.

Cheerio.

Re:Maybe I'm just lucky

[Stalin]

The system lag in Ironforge, for me, was a result of not having enough RAM. I recently added another 512MB stick to my system, bringing it up to 1024MB, and Lagforge miraculously became Ironforge.

The server lag though is most assuredly from too many people in one "zone". I would like to see Blizzard fix that and the damn login server.

Re:Maybe I'm just lucky

[arkanes]

I had exactly the same experience, except I went from 256 to 768 megs. I'll get a minor stutter on the way into IF, but that's all. I'm on a low-pop server, though.

Re:Maybe I'm just lucky

[Darth_Burrito]

Same goes for me, and I'm on elune. I think maybe they just need to work on the way people are loaded in high population areas. Maybe they could load rough models first or just hide characters until their models can be loaded (works in ironforge with pcs but not with monsters). On the whole, I think it's a great game, worth the occassional bit of downtime.

Re:Maybe I'm just lucky

[Zed2K]

I'm at a gig of ram and ironforge still chops pretty badly. More ram does help, but they need to further refine their network code.

I love this game

[Nutcase]

I switched from FFXI. This game is better. I have never seen a queue. The downtime has all been scheduled, and thankfully at times that dont effect me. I have seen a few flaky things like rollbacks on player locations (disconnected, and reconnect where you were 3 minutes before you disconnected) etc..but I get that. Some movement is tracked on the client side, and if the server goes down you can still move a bit. It's annoying, but rare these days.

The ONLY issue I see is that it gets very very laggy in areas where there are a TON of people all at once - like the Auction House in Ironforge. It's in a huge area, across from the bank, next to the inn, and right by the entrance - all this traffic mixes to form a great town square... at 3fps

If they could solve that issue (and it must be a hard one to solve) then the game would be just about perfect.

Course, it sounds like some of the other servers are having a rough go of it.

Oh well... I intend to keep playing for a long time to come - maybe if all the people who are having a bad time leave the load will become managable, and all the servers will work just fine.

Re:I love this game

[Rallion]

I love it too. Arthas works fine. Maybe once a day, the server will crash and come back up immediately. Aside from scheduled maintenance and that inevitable lag in Ironforge, I have no difficulty playing, ever. I logged on at 9PM last night and saw a 32-person queue. I waited less than two minutes. Big deal. Some games have longer load time than that.

Most servers and most players are having fun. You don't hear from them, though -- because they're either busy playing, or don't see the point in talking about it.

Re:I love this game

[tillerman35]

Don't know if this will make you feel better or worse, but I recently quit EverQuest 2 due to horrible response time (not to mention gameplay issues, but that's another story). I have a "reasonably beefy" system, but the idea of a 50-person raid is ludicrous in EQ2. Even on the lowest graphics settings you can't get the screen to render faster than a slide-show in a room with 10 people just milling about. I can't imagine what it would be like if there was combat going on.

Take it from a disgruntled SOE customer: stay a disgruntled Blizzard customer. Eventually the irons will get wrinkled out.

Re:I love this game

[Nutcase]

I tried EQ2 at the same time I tried WoW. Many of my FFXI friends were ex EQers, and they switched back to EQ2, thus leaving me sorta looking. I thought about playing it, but god it sucks. Speech bubbles everywhere, rubbery looking shiny people, instances for /every/ zone, so you have to pick from a drop down menu. Hmm.. do I want to go into TheRuins, or TheRuins1, or TheRuins2. Dumb.

The EQ2 game design is like someone bought a "mmorpg kit" for the graphics and then constructed a bizarre half finished game around it.

WoW has server issues and bugs, but the game design is superb. In EQ2 the game design IS the bug.

Job opportunity

[aldridge]

In totaly unrelated news Blizzard has a "Hot New Job - Network Operations Manager" as well as a few other positions including "Senior Server Programmer". If you wish to apply you can visit Blizzard.com

I quit, but not for technical reasons.

[analog_line]

I quit mostly because the WoW community was generally more annoying than even the EQ community. Normal servers were so infested with people unable or unwilling to spell such simple words as "you," as well as just general idiots flooding the General channel with so much crap my /ignore list was filling up at the rate of 20+ names a day, and it was honestly taking up too much of my time getting away from those people. I tried leaving the General channel, but that caused all kinds of wierdness for me.

PvP servers were off the list as I'm not interested in any PvP at all. Besides, they by definition aren't friendly places.

I tried Roleplaying servers, and while they were certainly quieter and mostly free of morons, I am not interested in playing a character, and in the little time I had available to look around for guilds, I couldn't find any where I wasn't expected to roleplay in guild chat (not unexpected as it's a roleplaying server) and I was having the devil of a time finding groups so I could complete my elite level quests.

So I just quit. Interesting thing is that you can't cancel WoW without giving a reason, with associated "Did You Know" from Blizzard trying to get you to keep playing. My reasoning wasn't on there so I gave them something random. Fun game. Lag was annoying but not too awful. If it wasn't so popular and therefore drew so many jerks, assholes, and other such people I might have kept playing.

Re:I quit, but not for technical reasons.

[Quikah]

I have yet to see any 1337 speak on my server (Malygos, horde). The closest I saw was someone used 4 instead of for, and he was flamed for it. Just a bunch of where is this or LFG stuff or trade requests, etc. on the channels. I have yet to /ignore anyone. Only an occasional kill/chest steal also. Seems kind of wierd, I expected a lot more crap.

Re:I quit, but not for technical reasons.

[Zed2K]

Haven't seen any of that stuff on Hellscream. Finding groups is a MAJOR problem in the game and I don't agree with how they designate elite quests and experience for them. But other than that I have not had any real show stopping problems.

Re:I quit, but not for technical reasons.

[analog_line]

The main Normal server I was on was Elune (I think) and it was just rank with crap. Straight up "d00d" speak, spamming, people without the sense the gods gave granite asking how to complete quests that are spelled out in exacting detail over and over again. Not to mention people dogpiling on other games as crap and holding up WoW as the greatest game ever and anyone else who plays those old games is a toad. (My girlfriend plays Camelot, has no interest in WoW, and this is kind of a sore point, as a lot of ex-Camelot players at the time I was playing WoW would continue to visit Camelot boards and troll fairly mercilessly). It was an East Coast server before they took the seperate listings down, so that may have had something to do with it, as those were the packed ones as far as I remember.

I'm sure somewhere there are fine Normal servers where the jerk-generally inoffensive ratio is a bit easier on me, but I don't want to spend more money and wasting more of my time on it.

Appropos of nothing, this will probably stop me from ever getting into an MMO ever again, as this kind of crap has been endemic everywhere. At least in real life I can throw people out of my apartment/property, call the cops, and other things with real consequences when people are doing their best to cause trouble.

Re:I quit, but not for technical reasons.

[tholomyes]

Let's see, you didn't want to play against others, didn't want to play a character, and didn't want to play with people who can't (or won't) spell correctly. Assholes aside, sounds like you shouldn't be playing MMORPGs at all.

My advice is to unplug from the network and go get your MCSE (Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert).

I think PvP servers can be more friendly, since your guilds band together out of the common goal of obliterating the enemy, and not so you can all just hold hands and level together.

Re:I quit, but not for technical reasons.

[Reapy]

I've found the pvp server to be pretty friendly. Nothing brings together a bunch of alliance by having some horde on the loose in contested areas.

Dieing is soooo painless in this game I don't understand why you wouldn't want to play with the added threat of pvp. Yesterday I was kind of board soloing some 17 mobs (17 myself) when after I had just taken one down a rogue unstealthed and 2 shooted me. I thought it was funny he took two hits to kill me. Meanwhile, I took all of 30 seconds to run back to my body, didn't see him around anymore, so resed and got back to playing.

But then sometimes you see something funny like a hoard at the acution house in Ironforge, or last night there was a 26 in westfall taking on a group of 14ish characters when a friendly 50+ rogue came out of stealth and ganked the guy. You just don't get random stuff like that on the regular servers.

As for l33t speak. I see people complain about this all the time, and if people are too stupid I just turn off general chat. You can really do without it, since you can solo a lot of the game. The best way I've found groups are to go to where I have to do my quest and find other players there looking to do the same thing. We'll team up and go a head and do it. Then we might go on for something else after that, who knows.

The game is what you make of it though, and if you aren't having fun with it, there is no sense in you paying for it and trying to force yourself to play.

A lot of people do that with mmorgps, keep playing them when they aren't fun. So break teh cycle and move on to another game or activity! Just keep yourself entertained :)

And so it begins

[Reapman]

Ahh this brings back memories.... frankly you haven't hit bigtime in the MMO world until you start getting complaints about downtime..

Seems like only yesturday UO opened up public, and it was quite the crappy experience... downtime, bugs, you name it. People claimed the game would be dead in a year, lawsuits were made, Coaster of the year awards given, etc etc... yet, long after the game should be gone imho, it's still kickin.

Not to say that Blizzard should'nt get these problems fixed but, sadly, I consider downtime for the first month or so to be more the norm then anything... I told friends that WoW would have downtime... they're like no, they're Blizzard, they got experience, they'll get it right. And now that I'm proven right, they're pissed at Blizzard.

I still standby the statement that, for the first 6 months to a year of an MMO's life, expect problems. If you don't want problems, wait for the first expansion pack. They'll eventually fix it, and in a year people will forget all about these problems, and complain that the Ultimate World of Everlasting Quests, the latest MMO released, and proclaimed as the second coming, has problems. And they will be suprised.

Re:And so it begins

[Kazrath]

I would like to point out that using UO is mostly an invalid point of reference.

UO was basically the first Major MMORPG release. The concepts, needed infrastructure and expectations had not been set.

There is well over a decade of history/knowledge that Blizzard could have pooled from experts to garner the information nessicary to pull off a very sucsessful launch.

Re:And so it begins

[Reapman]

Agreed... but of the 4 MMO's I've played (UO, FFXI, Galaxies, and WoW), they've all had issues at launch (heard lots of stories out of Japan when FFXI first launched), so all I'm saying is, why are people still suprised that servers arn't stable from the get go? I would actually be SHOCKED to see an MMO, with some 600k subscribers in the first couple of weeks, that worked flawlessly. I'd love to be wrong, but so far I haven't been...

Re:And so it begins

[Reapy]

Finally a voice of reason :)

The longer you wait to play a "successful" mmorpg, the better the game gets. I say successful because bad ones fold like earth and beyond.

But really, you have a super popular game released around the christmas season, of coarse the thing is going to get slammed.

People are ALWAYS going to complain, ALWAYS. It just depends what the topic of the week is.

Myself, I chose to start playing now because I felt 2 months was long enough for the game to get going. I still expect problems, and the only thing I've seen so far has been a 10 minute queue to log into my server. I think I can manage to find something to do for 10 minutes.

Again, you are right, the more ANGRY people get at issues, the more hooked they are on the game. I CANT LOG IN!!!! OH MY GOD!!! I HATE BLIZZARD!!! HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO ME??!!!

Well hoperfully lots of people will quit over this so it'll free up the server queues :)

Come on

[M.C. Hampster]

Except for the fact that XBox Live is, for the most part, a match-making service. The games are hosted on one of the players XBox's. The architecture is nothing like an MMORPG.

A note about battlegrounds

[Slime-dogg]

For anyone who has followed the hype about the PvP battlegrounds system, I have no idea how they'll pull it off.

My server, Thunderhorn, is really quite stable. I remember the login server having issues, and it messed up Thunderhorn for a bit, but that was early December. Since then, I have not had a problem logging in or playing.

Last night, the alliance traded a few raids with the horde. The climax of it ended up with around 90 or 100 players fighting with each other, in the middle of the Barrens. There was so much lag, that I could run around and "hit" everyone on the horde side, yet by the time that my "swing" got to the server, the other player was on the other side of town. The only ones who had success in making contact in combat were the magic users.

If battlegrounds is supposed to be the culmination of hundreds of players working in unison, all fighting it out, I would be afraid to go into it with anyone but a magic user. The lag would be horrendous.

Re:A note about battlegrounds

[Zed2K]

The battlegrounds are going to be instances. The instances are going to have limits on them. I bet they will have dedicated hardware set aside to handle just battleground instances so they can keep the player limits at a reasonably high level.

Re:A note about battlegrounds

[tricops]

We just had a ~160 person Alliance raid on the horde on Windrunner the other night, and that's how the lag was but worse. It was pretty much insane. We poured into Ogrammir and it looked almost like nobody was hitting anybody, npc or otherwise. I'm sure some damage was being done, but I ran back and forth by multiple horde npcs/pcs and attacked them, hit once or twice, and didn't get touched.

We actually had enough lag from that many people that on our way over there we managed to kick half of the people out of the server or something. Most of the people had just loaded up onto a Zepplin, and it moved like 5 feet away from dock and poof. I started out a ways back from where I had been, while other people randomly dropped into the ocean/etc. Fun stuff.

Suppose its to late to expect somone to read it...

[Kazrath]

I play WoW. It is a great game. The server I happened to pick on opening day went from low volume and now is a high volume server.

The lag issues I can deal with. The occasional (around once an hour) client crashes I can deal with.

The major gripe is them implimenting Server Queue's. I understand fully their reasoning. And if the game did not drop you once an hour on average it would not be a bad thing. But with having to wait 1-1.5 hours to even play its a little past being frustrating.

Last night my WoW experiance consisted of this:

Login to 1.5 hour Queue wait.
Take 2 flight paths (ruffly 10 mins)
Ride a mount through 1 zone (ruffly 5 mins)
Kill around 10 creatures (ruffly 10 mins)
Zone Crash.
Queue wait 1.5 hours.
Went and watched WWE wrestling as an alternitive entertainment.

And I bet this was experianced by 10-20% of their players on the high pop servers. SO I would estimate 50-100k people today could share a similar story.

Great, but ...

[Ryan.Rivest]

I have to say, World of Warcraft is A LOT of fun, and easily the best MMO I have ever played, imo. But the down time lately has been horrendous, and with the addition of a "queue" system implemented, I don't think it's good enough for me to have to wait 2 hours to play something that I pay for.

WoW

[achacha]

The game is really not stable. They had a patch few weeks ago that results in at least 2 crashes per play session (ones where you get a dialog to send the crash dump to Blizzard). The lag is awful with NPC updates happening too seldom which results in you running and suddenly being beat up by something.

Lag happens during combat and when a lot of NPCs are involved (like pulling a room). The lag is about 7-10 seconds and I can just sit there and rotate my camera around waiting for the server to come back, if I am solo I will probably be dead, if grouped I will just stand around and get mauled.

I am liking this game less and less, I really had high hopes for it but there is no innovation, lots of borrowed ideas from Everquest and the ever looming "grind" everywhere I go.

The worst part of this game is: travel. Until level 40 you have to run (slowly) everywhere, if you don't have a flying transport between areas you need you will easily spend 30minutes real world time running. Heck some bird trips can take 15-20 minutes, essentially causing me to switch to a browser and read some news; not very immersive, just very annoying.

My WoW experience:
1. Spend 30 minutes running from town to where the quest is
2. Spend 30 minutes killing N enemies to get Y items or something similar
3. Spend 30 minutes more running back to quest giver

insert in there: If I lag during a fight spend 15 minutes running to corpse from graveyard.

If you enjoy mindless grind and can forgive lag and tedious travel, it may be the game for you.

Re:WoW

[BenjyD]

I don't get it: I see so many people posting "WoW is so much fun". Are those times accurate - can you really spend 30 minutes running to a quest?

In what weird world does anyone consider that fun?

Re:WoW

[code-e255]

Dude, please don't blatantly exaggerate.

I've never spent more than 10 minutes running from A to B in World of Warcraft. I'm level 40 btw, so I'm not just talking about the low-level game.

Most quests in the game can be completed in less than 30 minutes (from start to finish).

Running from the graveyard to your body: dude, check your watch. The longest I ever spent running from the graveyard to my body was just over 4 minutes.

Bird trips also only take 3-4 minutes.

Re:WoW

[achacha]

Have you ever flown a bird from the Cenarion Town to Thunder Bluff (level 10 druid quest for bear form)? It's about 15 minutes in the air, I went to make food and came back and was still flying over areas.

Ever die in The Barrens?
Ever die in the north part of Mulgore?
Ever die by Razonfen Kraul?

All those are at least 10 minute run.

Let's try quests now. Lets try the quest for bearform, you have to kill a moonkin in barrens, so you run to thunder bluff to get the quest, then 15 minute run through mulgore into barrens, kill 1 thing, run back through mulgore, into thunder bluff. I timed it and the whole quest took me little under 30 minutes, all that to get a power I am supposed to get at level 10.

Another example: quest in Ratchet to get slithid eggs, the run from ratchet to stonetalon is about 20 minutes (running accross entire barrens, then halfway up stonetalon, then you kill a few spiders, loot some layed eggs and have to run another almost 30 minutes back to get the reward.

There are quests that can be done in under 10 minutes, like kill 10 of such and such which usually roam nearby, but anything involved is going to be a lot of running.

Now for yet another thing that is annoying, the dependence on fan info sites is growing.
Let me give you a few examples. You are fighting and you loot a sharp talon which is green, now you have no idea what it is used for, it happens to be used in weaponsmithing but I only found that out by searching thottbot.org.

I also get quests to kill such and such and I can't find that area without using the Brady official guide or Allakhazam. Some quests are self explanatory, some are quite obscure and the description is inadequate and sometimes even incorrect (the 3 raptor nest location is wrong in the quest text for example).

If you have played other MMORPGs like EQ or AC or DAoC then the grind and long travel times and lag and bugs may be what you can accept. I have been playing City Of Heroes more and more lately because their lag is very low even in busy areas, travel is very painless once you get travel powers and missions are easy to understand and find and there is never any need for a fan data gathering site. Maybe I like playing games that don't come with baggage, some people who like the grind are gluttons for punishment and accept it as a norm.

To each his own, but I personally do not think WoW has lived up to the hype.

Re:WoW

[Garak]

One of the keys to this game is to load up on quest and go do a few at the same time. Usually when I reach a new area I load up on all the quest. In some areas this means pretty much anything I kill will be working towards a quest.

There are a few really annoying quest where you have to find some npc and kill it. Some respawn in the same spot others are randomly placed in that region and it can take hours of roaming around to find them. Pages from books are also really hard to find, I've been working on the shreading manual for a few day and I've pretty much given up on it.

Re:WoW

[hashmap]

fill up that quest log and do things on the way. If you are trying to do one at a time the legwork can get tedious.

I've never had to travel to a distant area that had a single goal, go around explore, next thing you know you have a lot of things to do.

Re:WoW

[achacha]

The problem is not the initial trip to a new village where you get 3 or 4 quests and can doa few together, upon completion you return to the village and one of the quests is part of a chain, so you take the next step which can't be done in tandem with anything else unless you know of other quests that may take you to the right area. I have done one quest in the horde town in 1000 needles, where first part was closeby, next step was a long run to the north part of the zone, then a trip to thunder bluff which took about 30 minutes to run there and back to complete. I try to use the hearthstone when possible or take the bird, but not all quests are nearby.

Another major gripe is with trade skills, I took mining and engineering, however no small town/village has a forge/anvil and bank nearby, since many components are banked (liek gems, intermediates, skins) I can't do anything but lug around metal bars until I get to a bank, with space being at a premium already I spend quite a bit of time managing my paltry inventory.

Lets just say the gaem is very time consuming and if I didn't use it as a glorified IRC to chat with many friends who play I would dump this game. When I know my friends are not on I play City of Heroes, it's a lot more exciting without the inherent tedium blizzard decided to inherit from other slow moving mmorpgs.

This is so simple to solve:

[Sodade]

Blizzard (and every other fricking MMOG co) just needs to allow you to transfer chars from one server to another. There are so many fricking people like me who have no real attachment to the l33tspeaking population of our existing servers and there are plenty of people who want to switch to their friend's server. I am sure that the added "risks" of allowing this are minor compared to the bad PR from being down like this... The downtime doesn't bother me - gives me time to play my almost 40 Katana/Regen scrapper on CoH...

WOW --BS Maby a user boycot is needed.

[hrodnovar]

I am starting to be convinced that WOW support is just Bull s'. GM's NEVER reply in game. The only replies I get in the last 2 weeks have been computer generated. The game is just a bunch of BUGS. Yesterday I spent over an hour just getting unstuck and then getting back to the quest. It's obvious they test nothing. My dog could write better code. Maby if the users would BOYCOT their subscription renewals for a couple of months they would respond. Hit them in the pocket books???

WOW -- Maby it's time for a subscriber boycott.

[hrodnovar]

Looking at all of the problems folks are having here and in other WOW discussion areas, I think it's time for a subscriber boycott. Everybody just cancel their subscriptions till the fix the server and code bug problems that are making this exercise in relaxation into an exrecise in frustration. Their GMs and help-less desk would be well qualified to work for the Bush administration. All they do is spin-jockey and the product seems to get worse each week. Some of my probems with WOW. Servers down Lockups Stuck and either teleporting back to the INN and wasting a charge or having to log out/quit. Or just re-boot when ESC suddenly descides to quit working. The WOW-abend reporter ALWAYS abends and never sends anything back to them and when you report it....silence. Character becomming 2 characters and one running away while the other is killed. So as I ran into the INN I died. Now that one was really wierd.

Error Monster!

[jbich]

Uh oh!
You can't evil kill an Error Monster with a +6 sword! Run!

I've run MMORPGs before...

[tangent3]

I've worked in 2 MMORPG companies, and have handled at least 5 different MMORPG games, and I can tell you that no amount of hardware or network structure can handle a battle of more than 40 or 50 people within the same area.

MMORPGs were meant to have players spread out over the game world, where bandwidth requirement is similar to O(n). When you have a big number of players within the same area, the bandwidth requirement becomes somthing like O(n). Imagine each time one person swings a sword, everyone within the same area gets sent a message telling them that the player swings a sword. If we have 50 players in the area idling and watching the player, there will only be 50 packets being sent. Turn it into a battle where everyone swings a sword, we're talking about 2500 packets, which will grow exponentially with the number of players within the same area.

Re:I've run MMORPGs before...

[Anonymous Coward]

did you mean O(n^2) for the second case?

Re:I've run MMORPGs before...

[tangent3]

Hmm.. yeah. I actually typed in the ascii code for power of 2 but it disappeared after i submitted it.

Testing again ->

Re:I've run MMORPGs before...

[DirkDaring]

Didn't bother with your second paragraph since you are obviously wrong. I've been in groups and battles far larger than 50 in DAOC with no problems.

two points...

[EvilStein]

First, I hate to tell you, but I really don't give a flying fuck what Tycho and the Penny Arcade people think about anything.
I have never found Penny Arcade to be very funny at all, but for some reason they're made out to be gods around this place. Go figure.

Second, isn't this the exact reason that they're not selling the game for the time being? They know that they have capacity issues and they're well aware of the problems that are plaguing the game. At least they're taking steps to fix it instead of piling more & more users on already overloaded servers.
Gotta give them props for that...

the real problem with WoW

[hashmap]

The real problem with WoW is that the game is too good. Too many people stick around for extended periods and too many come back playing.

I experienced only minor issues, but after creating five different characters, now each around lvl 20 I'm continuously surprised and amazed at how different each race, profession and class plays

So quit whining, you don't like it cancel your subscription, I personally fully trust Blizzard to fix thes issue in a few weeks. If the server is off line I'll watch TV, read a book or shovel some snow ... no big deal ...

Eerie silence

[Tarkadot]

Where are all the SoE fanbois? Aren't they supposed to be innudating this thread with "I told you so's" and "EQ2 had the most stable launch ever" kind of threads?

Are they too busy playing? Or is it just that there aren't any left?

Re:Eerie silence

[Anonymous Coward]

/cough.

EQ2 most stable?

36 hour downtime starting Dec 17th.
Rollback of all characters prior to the Dec 17th patch. I played EQ2 a bit prior to this. Logged only one time since the fubar.

Most stable eh? /cough

Re:Eerie silence

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI there are around 300k (last numbers I saw) of us still playing and to be honest we dont care. Thats why you dont see any "WOW blows and EQII r0x0rs" posts. If you want to play WOW by all means go ahead. I dont care and SOE could give a shit less. Hope the problems are fixed soon so you can stop trying to bait somebody into a "my dick is bigger than yours" battle.

Its this posters attitude that turns me off from WOW. I see it everywhere from here, other forums, and even on the official WOW board. This shows very bad taste. The SOE forum mods are pulling the few posts regarding WOW issues and replacing them with messages saying that "Derogatory remarks regarding any other MMO game will not be tolerated". If Blizzard had any taste they would do the same regarding anti SOE posts.

Overcomplicating

[fdrake76]

This is really nothing new to anybody who has been active in MMORPGs, and many of you are overcomplicating the situation with projections and "woulda coulda's".

Just like any service where you have a choice, your loudest vote is the one you make with your wallet.

$15\mo... how many playes

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so let's be conservative here. Let's say they *only* have 100,000 players (in reality they have what? 5x that?).

100,000 x $15 = $1.5 Million/mo.
So you mean to tell me, that with $1.5 million dollars a month, they can't support their user load.