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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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?

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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

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

[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...

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: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.

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???

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.