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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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...