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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.
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.
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?"