Slashdot Mirror
No More Players for World of Warcraft - For Now
Chris writes "FileFront has broke the news from Blizzard that they are no longer placing their highly popular MMORPG on store shelves, due to the recent server problems reported by Slashdot on Tuesday. Denying rumors that they had asked several stores to pull the game from shelves, Blizzard rep Gil Shrif is quoted as saying: 'We're just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.' The online store on Blizzard's website shows the game to be out of stock. No word on whether or not this will affect the Korean release."
Does this strategy remind anyone of Cartman's "You can't come and play here" amusement park? I just wonder who is getting the hemorrhoid.
As far as not affecting the Korean release, it won't. Korea will have its own servers. The MMO's in Korea are traditionally not released in boxes. They are downloaded for free and the players pay a greater fee per month. I believe the number was around USD$23/month in Korea compared to $15 in the US.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
{melt}
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I guess no one remembers when Diablo 2 came out. The first few months it was released in the US the Realms were crowded. They crashed all the time, most people couldn't get on. They had to implement a queue much like WoW has. It's not the first time blizzard has had these problems and they always took care of the server problems in the past. at least they are trying. It's just amazing that they don't forsee the ammount of people. Especially right at launch and the months surrounding when you have most people logging on. But you live you learn..
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
Perhaps Final Fantasy had it right - if they had implemented manditory load balancing on the servers, they probably wouldn't be having these problems. Yes, it sucks in some ways, but if the alternatives are "not being able to play the game" or "being able to play, but you have to wait a week before you can join up with your friends", give me a week late.
This flies in the face of science.
Good for them for taking some initiative to limit the damage. I used to play asherons call back when Microsoft was calling the shots. Practically every update they needed to reset the server, do a rollback, etc. At least blizzard is acknowledging the server issues and doing what they can to limit the number of people inconvenienced.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
I gave up less than a week ago. I have all this free time now, I don't think I will go back even if they get the servers fixed.
Because they run off different servers located in....
Korea!
Just as I'm thinking of purchasing myself a copy too!
Do we know if demand has just been significantly higher than expected, or have Blizzard messed up in some fashion? I know if we hit load problems like this where I work, so soon after launch, I'd be out of the job.
I wonder how this will affect the demand for WoW.
There's probably ample discussion of this in economics, but it seems pretty clear that some shortage scenarios result in people 'panicking' (perhaps too strong of a term) and really really trying to get whatever it is that's in shortage; I'm guessing there are people out there now who are thinking "OMG, WoW is closed! I've got to see if I can find a copy somewhere near me because I might not be able to get it later!"
And then, at some point, at significant enough shortages, people just sort of give up and don't care anymore. I'm guessing vendors would love to optimize their shortages to fit between these two points.
(Case in point: I wanted an iPod Shuffle, and called the Apple store a bunch of times, waiting for a shipment; they finally got one, but all of the Shuffles went to people who had pre-ordered; they were no longer accepting pre-orders, and told me to check in Friday. At that point, I got tired of the whole ordeal and decided not to get a Shuffle, at least any time in the near future. Not that Apple's hurting).
Let players kill each other off... and make it permanent. A little population reduction.
Blizard is not a small company. you would think that they would have the resources to buy the appropriate bandwidth/server capacity. I wonder if this is more of a problem with how the software itself is written. A rewrite in order to scale better is the only I reason I could see for a major delay.
sorry 'bout the mess...
Penny Arcade dubs WOW "Game of the Year."
Penny Arcade blasts WOW for technical difficulties and discusses recinding "Game of the Year" status.
Blizzard pulls game from shelves as part of an attempt to fix the technical difficulties.
I'm not saying they were the sole reason for Blizzard's actions but I'm sure they played a role... A LOT of gamers frequent P-A.
It's gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the "best" problem Blizzard could have had with this game.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I would have thought that Blizzard had more experience handling a massive amount of players. If I remember they had the same exact kind of problem with Warcraft III on Battle.net, underestimating demand, creating endless queues to join a game. The fact that they have to pull the game from the shelves is surprising; it shows that they don't have the control of the situation, and that they don't plan to in the near future. Of course, it could be a marketing ploy, to create demand by rarity, but I doubt it. It's producing a very bad image for Blizzard.
Meanwhile, players are still beta testing, but for 15$/month.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Looks like the dwarf-terrorists won
A piece of software that can be multiplied infinitely, running 'out of stock' ;-)
We could just set up our own servers...
Maybe MS will stop selling Windows until its problems are fixed :-)
I'm honestly suprised that Blizzard is taking such an initiative with their server problem. I still don't think that there will be a satisfactory resolution until paying subscribers actually stop paying due to the poor performance. Pardon me, but right now, you're all Blizzard's bitches until you're unsatisfied enough to actually stop paying to play an game with such a poor uptime track record.
What they need is a more scalable enterprise solution.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I play WoW and I can say that the situation is/was unacceptable. The game was crashing all the time, like 4+ times per day, and the database would roll back to a much earlier state (meaning all progress since that point wsa lost). To fix that, they implemented server caps and a line that could take TWO HOURS to get in and play. Sorry, that shit doesn't fly, I am not going to pay to wait in line to play a game. I was ready to cancel my account.
However, they've been making strides in fixing the problem. There are still lines, but they are much shorter (minutes long instead of hours) and the servers seem to have stabilised. Ok, that's good, but not good enough. There need to be NO lines and the servers need to BE stable.
According to Bilzzard, it's all related to peak load on the servers, and is a fixable problem. So I agree with their decision: fix it, then resume sales. Don't sell more copies, make things worse, and lead to people leaving.
They aren't saying "you can't come and play here". they are like ar estraunt saying "I'm sorry, we are full and completely booked, you'll have to wait until later to come eat here."
I have no doubt they are eager to resume sales as soon as this problem is fixed. I'm betting it will be sooner rather than later. They claim it's a software bug on the DB servers causing them to freak when there are too many transactions, even though the hardware can handle it. I imagine if the hardware does turn out to be the limitation, they'll throw more hardware at it. Remember we are talking a $100 million revenue stream at the current subscriber level. It is in their intrests to spend money to maintain that, and allow it to grow even further.
I've been looking at local Best Buys here in San Diego for the last couple of weeks and none of them have had it. I haven't searched other stores though because I felt it was good not to be spending the money at the moment =)
It's funny to see the bitching going on the WoW boards, probably all the whiners who left EQ are coming back with tails between their legs going 'hey, eq wasn't as bad as we thought it was'
People forget how well eq actually holds up, apart from the collision/gfx issues mid last year, the servers are up alot, downtime is incredibly rare.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
WOW sales record in korea is not that good due to high price, 23*12 == way too expensive.
it could have been big hit if blizzard lower the price, but they blew it.
Demand was much higher than expectations, according to Blizzard with 600,000 copies sold and 200,000 simultaneous players (self-congratulatory press release). That's a lot more than predicted.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
the issues aren't half as bad as you have been led to believe (except for a couple of servers). im on proudmoore, one of the higher population servers, and in 3 weeks i have had to queue for 20-30 min to play only twice, there has been some lag at times which is annoying, and 2 rollbacks of 15 minutes which was inconvenient, but it's hardly disastrous.
on blackrock the queues are bad, you can be waiting an hour or more... just start on a different server.
it makes me wonder who is fanning the flames turning this into a big issue.. players or other companies.
people on low population servers would be asking 'what network problems?'
I'm sure the Korean WOW players will take the server problems in good humour, now if the Starcraft servers went down it'd be a diferent story. Kekeke!!
I work at an EA Games in Manhattan. We were told by management this morning to pull our copies of WoW from the shelves. Guess this is the reason.
Sad, really, that your system isn't scalable enough. Your loss!
Letter
This actually seems responsible to me. Rather than sell the promise of server space along with the game or selling a game that has no value without the ability to long onto the server, they are holding copies back until they can fix the issues properly. If this is what they are actually doing, kudos to Blizzard; certainly the backlash they've been getting has something to do with it, but this is more responsibility than many game companies will take (and I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of WoW or the company's RTSes). To a large degree, WoW is like a forum or chat service and I've known forums to freeze new accounts to fix mySQL problems.
Of course, this could be a ploy just to drive up sales with rumors of a new player "blackout." But Blizzard is really well known for taking drastic actions to make sure their games are as good as possible. Is there any reason Blizzard should be bashed for this?
This will create a huge blackmarket for people selling their characters and accounts, though...
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
When I bought my copy on release day the guy at Gamestop told me to tell ALL of my friends who intended to play WoW to go buy it and buy it that day. He said once the initial shipment sells out thats it until Jan' 05 - Feb '05, as Blizzard does not want to max out their servers.
I didn't really believe it at the time, but I actually would expect Blizzard to take this stance. Was just a little off with the time required to max out the servers.
This isn't news.
Of course not, it's olds. Didn't you see the Korea reference in the summary?
You gotta pity the guys over at SOE... WoW having so many players that their servers overflow, while many EQ II servers are still ghost towns in most areas... also, I would guess that EQ II servers have a higher load/client ratio since EQ II is a much more hardware intensive game than WoW, most notably in terms of graphical stress on your PC's video card.
:)
Don't worry, SOE, will still love ya... and thats why we haven't Slashdotted you and crashed your servers
Its amazing how much these are going for on ebay. I started looking for the game about a week ago and it was sold out of all the stores. Even all the little computer stores. And I'm talking about all of Orlando. Ebay had the game going for about $90 the past couple of days or you can Buy It Now for $100. Yikes!
WoW has, according to the recent charts, approximately 350k "players" and 1 million characters created(works out to an average of 3 characters per player). Keep in mind the 350k number is what counts since you can't play multiple characters at once. This puts the game at about 50 to 100k more than Star Wars Galaxies at the moment, about 25k more than everquest 2, and about 300k less than Final Fantasy XI. But, also keep in mind that Final Fantasy XI is worldwide, and WoW is not fully worldwide yet. But, looking at those numbers, with 88 different servers(more than most MMORPGs) it really is no excuse that Blizzard should be having such hefty server problems. It is a combination of no ability to move existing characters from one server to another, the reliance of a queue system instead of other methods to spread out the population, and issues with their netcode that have really made this a mess. Note that it is not a problem on the low population servers, only some mid, and most high population ones. They really need to shape things up because it is impacting their potential growth.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
World of Warcraft uses TCP ONLY for its client to server communications and this seems to have been a big mistake for Blizzard. In South Korea, their network infrastructure is first class. They have fiber everywhere and virtually everyone has MEGA bandwidth broadband. That is why WoW and other mmogs in South Korea like Lineage I and II can get away with using TCP only.
However here in the U.S, our network infrastructure is not so homogenous nor cutting edge in all places. There is a reason so many mmogs that are popular here in the U.S use UDP datagrams over TCP steams. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard decides to quickly hack in a UDP based messaging system to fix this issue. If their code is well architected, it shouldn't be too difficult to do this... the question is, are they going to turn paying customers into testers for the next month while they experiment with fixes to the problem?
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w ow-general&t=902431&p=1&tmp=1#post902431
The overwhelming success of World of Warcraft has brought hundreds of thousands of people together to adventure in Azeroth, and concurrency numbers are well beyond what we expected or even hoped for. Unfortunately, this high concurrency, especially when concentrated on a small number of realms, initially caused issues with our hardware infrastructure. We were able to streamline our code to increase performance in the weeks following launch. However, the holiday season nearly doubled our player base, and it quickly became apparent that in order to handle not only the current player base, but all future players as well, we needed to make some upgrades to our infrastructure.
Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.
In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.
The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our players this weekend. This process coincides with our constant efforts to improve the current performance of World of Warcraft, and sometimes issues can arise when implementing these improvements. We will do our best to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, and we once again thank you for your patience and understanding.
It's silly, I couldn't believe they had the balls to charge me for a product that wasn't stable at all. I spent more time looking at my character screen than the game itself because the server kept bombing out on everyone. I honestly have no idea why they were charging people, if there is ever a class action lawsuit to regain money for stuff like they i'd gladly join it. I'm pretty pissed that I spent $70 on the collectors edition and then they charged me 6 months of play right around Christmas while the servers were totally overloaded, crashing, and unplayable.
Seems that part of this may be Blizzard giving VU the finger. VU told investors that Bliz would release WoW by a certain point (before the end of the financial quarter I believe), and so of course Bliz had to comply. Normally Blizzard does what they want, how they want, and they do great. I'm sure there are many at Bliz upset about having to release a major, difficult game before they felt it was ready. VU wanted them to release at a certain time for money purposes, and now Bliz is giving out free play time to players on a regular basis and now (if the news is accurate) keeping it from shelves until the game is actually ready. Both things meaning happier players, less focus on money. The Blizzard way, in my view.
Thoughts?
The last time I heard, Blizzard had 600,000 active subscribers to World of Warcraft. At $15 a month, that's $9,000,000 a month of revenue.
Now I'm not a networking guru or an economist, but $9 million is a fucking lot of money. Like so much money Blizzard and its employees could wipe your ass with dollar bills and still have a lot of money left over. While money doesn't buy happiness, it buys a lot of hardware and networking expertise.
Even if the game's networking code is poorly written (one possible cause for the server lags/drops/crashes/timeouts/etc.), you could throw so much hardware at the problem that it shouldn't matter! In the latest patch, they claimed that many of these issues would be resolved. Sadly, the latest patch has caused more problems than it has fixed (at least for me). Mail and the auctionhouse are completely inaccessable during peak hours, and the game is practically unplayable except in the most underpopulated of areas.
Anyway, that's my two bits and WoW experience. Any insight anyone else has for me is appreciated. I'd sure as hell like to understand what's going on with them.
CromeDome
TCP vs UDP has nothing to do with it at all. The problem is with their backend dealing with managing all the data constantly changing, the front end servers handling the connections to clients are fine.
because it's segmented and you can't freely travel between servers. It's 50 separate games. It's stupid and you're stupid. I hate you, I hate your country, and I hate your face.
"No word on whether or not this will affect the Korean release."
We don't need no steenking Korean release, we got bittorrent release!
Jobs are listed on the front page.
I also recently gave it up. But this instabilty your talking about, they gave out a bunch of time extensions based on how long the server was down. I ended up getting 7 days of free play because of this.
If they lose the original (can't make a copy of something you don't have 1 of) but yeah, its just to control supply until they can fix this problem.
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
That I bought two copies today at CrapUSA... :)
Bids start at $500 gentlemen.
_Phixxr
ungggghhhh
You can't find WoW in retail stores anymore. They've been sold out since after Christmas and haven't been getting shipments. What's more, they have no idea when they're getting new ones. Clerks just spit out the ol' "try again next week" with no guarantees whatsoever.
Supply and demand? WoW is going for almost double its retail cost on Ebay.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I've been wondering, what does it take to run a Realm hardware wise?
I'm on the often troubled Uther and wonder, how do they run the Auction House and what hardware is that on.
Anyone know?
Yeah; I get that whiff.
What, you don't smell it? It's the smell of one of Blizzard's bullshit expansions. They're going to pull the game off the shelf, fix this problem, and resell the game at for around $35 for the so called expansion pack with weapons that look the same with different names and a attributes. Yep. Blizzard for ya.
I'm f#$king magic!
I cancelled my account after the first month. It's a fine game but I find MMORPG's with their whack-a-mole style fighting to be really boring.
I much prefer real-time shooters. I used to be very good at Jedi Academy online but I had to make myself quit because I played too much. I can't get that "addicted" feeling with MMORPG's, they're just not compelling enough to me.
It's eBay Time!!!
Who wants a kick ass Mage?
$250 sound good?
Infringing releases of an online-only game usually don't work on the official servers. What other servers are there?
I should imagine that they've used something like EJB too, since Oracle is javacentric.
It's not to hard to design an EJB system that chokes under load, and they had quite a load, now if only they had found out what load the system could manage before releasing the software.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Now that a ton of the userbase bailed to WoW - City of Heroes is virtually lag free!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
owns BLizzard. .
Verant Interactive is in bad financial shape.
That would lead me to believe that:
a) a portion of the money goes to Verant Interactive
b) Verant may have pushed the release a little earlier then they should have.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Last night, I decided I should search around for copies of WoW and though, "where might this game still be in stock?" Compusa! nobody buys games there. Sure enough, they had two copies left on the shelves.
I know at least two dozen people who have gotten WoW yet every story in the Birmingham metro area is full of copies of WoW. If you want a copy come down here and get some :P
the Political Inquirer
Maybe they are trying to limit users so people maintain EQ accounts and WoW accounts at the same time?
They are owned by the same company.
I like me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fix warriors first!
> You can't come and play here
Try eBay. I have one copy, and my fiance wanted to play. (It's a good way to get her to not complain that I am playing the game).
I read this post, went to eBay, and 15 minutes later I bid on and won a copy for $75.03. The guy emailed me the CD key, and I'm installing it now.
Yes, there have been server problems especially on Tichondrius (where I was playing). Switching to another lower population server is working well so far.
Seriously, if you want to play (and you should), go her yourself a copy on eBay now.
Now, reading this, I wonder if those copies are gone or still on shelf... Maybe I was really lucky.
Verant is owned by Sony Online Entertainment.
Blizzard is with Vivendi. EA also now owns a stake in all of this, just to make things even murkier.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
http://www.eve-online.com/Does not have any problems accepting new players. All players are on one server. Everyone can see everyone (apart from WoW where people are on "shards" if I'm not mistaken)
Are you looking for a cross between Star Control 2 (role playing) and Trade Wars 2002 (market, business, pirating)? This is your game!
Now everybody who was thinking about Buying WoW go out and Buy FFXI instead......
Insert Pithy Quote here.
Remember Starcraft? The instability of the servers at Starcraft's release prompted the development of bnetd. Yet, there are now thousands of fanboys saying that bnetd was only for stealing. Maybe now some of them actually see the pain. I spent hours just trying to connect with Diablo.
At the time these games came out, the only way blizzard offered a way to play on the internet with these games was battle.net. Kind of defeated the point of buying the game for multiplayer. Of course there was modem, which some War2 veterans did in the ancient days (with people in the neighborhood huh!), but that's only 2 player. Then there was kali, which provided a type of IPX tunnel. Which, I might mention, kali got a few kids jobs at blizzard. Of course something like Kali would be against the TOS today, despite it was *OK* by blizzard back in the day.
So with the shutdown of bnetd, I only despise companies like blizzard. It did nothing. Only put out the talented people that created it.
I also think that it is still ironic that people are actually paying for WoW, yet they are still having server trouble. Although it's not terrible, but I have still heard there have been problems with the servers from friends. Taking the game off the shelf is a way to slow this problem, but I think it will continue until this MMO loses interest, which will ultimately happen.
My guess is they have a poorly designed backend/database system that is simply broken and cannot be fixed even by throwing more hardware at the issue.
I'll show you a poorly designed backend. Ever heard of Rosie O'Donnell?
It's funny how much of an interest so-called customers suddenly take in the business interest of a MMORPG deale^H^H^H^H^Hprovider when they can't get their fi^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplay their game. The world won't end just because servers go offline, nor will the company go belly-up, because people will keep coming back for more, no matter what. They'll bitch and moan and sulk, and then start playing again the moment the servers are functional.
But, to address the technical aspects of your comment, one minor bug can wreck havoc in any piece of software. You'd be amazed how easy it is to omit a single character which can change the entire functionality of an algorithm. That doesn't mean that the software was poorly designed, rather that it was insufficiently tested before being implemented.
Now players can sit in queues for anywhere between 1 to 3 hours...and if they're lucky enough to wait that long and log in, they may get 10 minutes of actual playtime before they get booted out of the game or lag out and forced to sit in the queue yet again.
Now THAT'S news. I would understand if Blizzard would let people excercise free will, but forcing them to wait for 3 hours with only 10 minutes in game before making them wait 3 hours again? Could you provide some details? Are they using cattle prods or firearms to do this? What happens to the people who try to resist and go do something else instead? And what are they doing with the bodies? Thanks.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Started charging on Monday.
They were down several hours yesterday, but were back up again today. Game is very popular and seriously competeing with Lineage and Lineage II in time in the PC Baangs.
Bruce
Could this be a potential practical use for something like Bittorrent? You could load balance all the data, so both transactions and shear data ammount wouldn't overwhelm servers. In the words of Mythbusters: Possible, Plausible, Busted?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Didn't you -choose- the 6 month plan? Doesn't that make it -your fault- that you got charged for 6 months at Christmas?
I've been playing since 26 December and have never queued once. Then again, I chose to join a "Medium" load realm instead of a high load realm.
No WoW for you! Come back one year!
I've had to reinstall TWICE after their "patches" for OSX.
I'll give their support some credit... for OSX they have always gotten back within 24 hours and the major OSX problems they have put at the top of the support forum.
I can't find WoW at BestBuy or EBGames, but GameStop is still selling their copies. I got a copy of the game at the mall there yesterday, and their website still lists it as "Usually ships in 24 hours."
I got an account a few days back now, and I joined up to the server it suggested for me, not having any actual friends nerdy enough to want to play this sort of thing already on a server.
/. long enough to know how bad an idea that is) but i've made a few "friends" and we do quests together and kill monsters and whatever the hell else these games are about, and it's all worked perfectly well. No queues, no lag, nothing but fun fun fun.
Well, the whole experience has been fine for me. I don't want to tell you what server I landed on (God, i've been on
Goddamn it this game is addictive. It's enough to make me want to cash in a few weeks of annual leave...
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
did you pay with visa? dispute the charge.. say that they didn't deliver(which would be true).
if enough did it they'd be in real trouble.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's not just a bunch of capture the flag runs. It's an evolving persistant universe spread across a lot of servers. It would be really cool if someone figured out a way to spread that across at home servers, but can you imagine how big of a pain it would be to manage to whole mesh with people servers going up and down, different versions of the software, load balancing servers with different capabilities, hacking, etc?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
You also quit Jedi Academy, because it was addiciting.
By that reasoning you should be quitting every game you play! Can I have your spot in the next game you try? :)
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
Hot New Job! - Network Operations Manager
h tml
Are you experienced in managing IT personnel and projects? Is keeping gamers happily playing games a top priority for you? If so, then please see the Network Operations Manager posting for more information on how you can join Blizzard and help us support our players.
See:
http://gotwow.net/jobopp/netops-manager.s
For more information!
Have you metaroderated recently?
I was mildly interested in WoW, but I purposely waited for exactly this reason... It's not just Blizzard having these problems. It seems to be pretty much everyone who releases a successful MMORPG title! My ex was a big Shadowbane fanatic, and I never understood why, really. Seemed to me like she spent half the time she played complaining about lag spikes or crashes, or suddenly getting stuck someplace, or signing on and finding items missing, etc. etc. More an exercise in frustration than fun - and to top it off, you pay a monthly fee for it.
What I don't get is why these servers can't be adequately load tested with simulations before they're turned loose to human players? Is anyone really trying to do this, or do they just think it's easier/more profitable to let "beta testers" do it for them while they pay to play?
Did the problems start on Christmas?
I bought the game is early December, figuring I'd have some free time to kill during the holidays. There was a little downtime, but nothing I'd call unacceptable. (There was also a incompatibility with my machine, which caused a lot of crashing. That was unacceptable. I had to play from my laptop.)
Funny thing was, I never enjoyed the game, and the last time I played was Dec. 23, right before all my days off. I unsubscribed with over 2 weeks left on my free month.
Oh, well. Someone can have my spot, I guess.
Since they can't pay too much for the game up front and keep paying for it and never own it and would be shit out of luck should the servers or blizzard crumble permanently.
Morons.
I work at a SoftwareETC (which is apart of GameStop) and I've been telling people for a little over two weeks about Blizzard holding back copies of the game. I hate to say it but all the retail companies have known about it for awhile now, but it seems a lot of them have just been giving false hope about it regardless.
Anyone else read this as "Denying rumors that they had asked several stores to pull the game from elves..."?
I was wondering of gnomes would be next...
-- Terry
I don't know much about hosting thousands of clients on a game server at once, except that I imagine it would be pretty difficult. Do problems increase exponentially as the number of users rises? Are the problems well-known or do Blizzard and the other MMORPG operators keep their issues to themselves?
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
I've played WoW for a bit now and recently since the last patch I've had times where I experienced disconnects almost 5-6 times in a row. An issue tonight at the timing of this post my game crashed and now I can't log back in. Apparently their authentication servers are down or something.
The notion that I should play on different servers just because one seems more popular is crazy for one simple reason. You can't move characters between servers. If you invested time building a character on one server and don't want to loose that, you won't move.
I seriously hope they fix their problems. I don't want to sit in queues for any length of time. Otherwise my monthly subscription will end. They made a damn fine game and it's a shame this is happening.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
And they are totally denied the ability to play it and wait around hours to do so.
In the words of Nelson:
"HA HA!"
Morons.
So treating them like they have unlimited manpower and funds is ridiculous. Yes, it could have been planned better. Yes, there are problems. But half the reason FFXI and Galaxies stay up is because there are unlimited resources to pour behind them. If it were Sony that were having this problem, they would NEVER pull the game from the shelves. They would just keep shipping as many as they could sell and expect people to suffer through the problems because they have no choice.
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
Interestingly enough, the front page at blizzard.com lists job openings on both Network Operations Manager and Senior Server Programmer.
Could it be related? Nah...
They just messed up. Even the low population servers have problems, as it feels like they've got a backend centralized database that really should have been designed to scale better. They're currently trying to throw hardware at the problem which we all know as programmers does pretty much nothing to fix a design that can't scale. 16 hour downtime to do that, and it's just as bad.
;)
They also can't keep their forums running. 50% of my posts result in a "Login Server Down" error, and sometimes you get really fun errors like "Forum Not Ready" and nothing lists, "You've encountered.. an error!" banners, etc..
Basically, they've really blown it with the server-side. The beta testers told them that in beta, that they were having the lag problems and such, and apparently Blizzard just blew it off saying they'd be running on better hardware after release. Well, welcome to scalability 101, eh?
As a geek, I understand server/network problems. But I also understand change management and rollbacks. Not the rollbacks I've been getting play WoW, where the game crashes or logs me off and I have to play the last 10 minutes over - I mean rolling back changes and making sure you can do so before you start the change.
The authors are not exaggerating at all. I can't log in to servers for my main character OR my alternate, for which I made sure to choose a "low" population server. When I do log in I get a couple hours play and then it starts locking up and crashing. Considering that this is a pay-to-play game, I'm doing a lot more paying than playing. 2 days of compensation is far far less than what I've lost in time and sheer frustration.
So yeah, I'm pissed. But I've been a rabid Blizzard fan since they blew me away in 93 with Warcraft 1. So I'm giving them until the end of the month and then I'll decide if I should just sell my character on ebay and quit for good. There are plenty of great games out there; I have an unopened Doom 3 20 feet away....
I haven't had those problems at all. The client crashes normally as I'm logging out oddly enough.
It also crashes 100% of the time when I'm running teamspeak at the same time. Without teamspeak running it's very very rare that the game crashes other than logout.
My server never has these lines you speak of either.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
And to think, I was in Circuit City today looking for a copy of WOW. Thank god they were sold out -since I have no patience for these kinds of technical breakdowns I would have definitely been disappointed. Thanks Slashdot for saving me some dough!
Conspiracy I am starting is that they want to stop people from leaving EQ in droves, and Ideally have people paying for both.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A MMORPG was just canceled (Dragon Empires I believe) because during testing they discovered there code could only support around 500 maximum players on a server. Rather then do a complete rewrite they canceled the whole project. If there was any hint of population issues in WoW the game should have been held back until they were solved. I bet anything the developers knew there was (especially after having hundreds of thousands of beta testers), but thought they could fix them shortly after release.
Well they bet wrong and have probably worked 24 hours a day since release trying to solve them. Let's get real people, WoW was released almost 2 months ago. If the developers are still trying to fix the population issues there is a serious flaw in the way WoW was built.
WoW has been pretty much out of stock and off the shelves for the past couple of weeks anyway. I've had to get my copy for a ransom on ebay, but I've had no regrets. I don't experience the server problems many other users have complaint about. Yes, my latency is high, being somewhere far from the US, but I do not have to wait in queue, or had server crashes or anything like that.
Here's a simple hint: If you're an idiot who pick a High Population server to play in, stop whining about spending hours on the fucking queue. It's only own fucking fault and you should have known this was coming. I picked a just-turned-medium population server and have been very happy with it. If you joined a server in low or medium population and it turned high, then I'm sorry, tough luck I guess. Anyway, Blizzard has mentioned that they are looking to allow players to transfer their characters from high population servers to low population servers. We'll see how that turns out.
"They don't specify, but I suspect by "backed DB server" they mean "IBM zSeries running Oracle" not "Dell Poweredge running MySQL"."
based on the current service, I wouldn't be so sure...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
your DA office,tell them Blizzrd was knowlingly riping people off. Contact the BBB.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
did they press so many copies to begin with?
Also, when 500,000 people clamor to get into the beta, you would think they would plan for more then 100000 people.
Botttom line, properly scalable, and then numbers of people would not have been this devastating.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, they're owned by different companies -- Everquest/Verant is owned by Sony Online Entertainment, while WoW/Blizzard is owned by Vivendi Universal.
:) Believe me, even at the top levels, they're only competitors, not the same company.
For the previous two E3s, Sony wouldn't even let any of us from Blizzard get near their private EQ2 booth, which we found somewhat amusing
My understanding/experience is it has been near impossible to find a copy of the game anyway. Sounds to me like they're maintaining the status quo.
From what I've heard from people who are playing though, most seem content enough with how Blizzard is trying to handle it. Sure, it's annoying, but Blizzard is trying.
BS...
/. "news" is was first posted LAST WEEK.
Shop around dude. I was in a major electronics chain store yesterday and they had a few copies on the shelf.
Now before you tell me they stopped selling as of today, you're wrong. This
I work for a Wal-Mart in Western Canada and we never saw any copies of WoW hit our shelves... the only local store carrying it was Best Buy.
I play WoW, the problem they ran into began at launch when they decided to split the servers by localizing them to time zones. This in essence made a lot of guilds/friends decide what side of the US they would choose their servers from. Of course East coast servers being instantly over-populated and then West Coast. After many complaints from their playerbase this was removed and all server names were placed in a pool you choose from... makes more sense that way. Now people did not really know if they were on east coast, central or west coast and people began to log on to underpopulated servers. But to my understanding the damage was done and it looks like those servers as well as the SUPER-Overpopulated Player-vs-Player servers are still giving them headaches. I for one am glad that my friends picked a quiet server and have not once been on a queue to get into the server. Whereas the first server I chose is still to this day repeatedly being rolled back and lagging badly. I feel bad how one small decision as localization can do this much damage down the line and hope they don't do that for korea and European servers. It is a great game still and I give them kudos for all their efforts... for the Horde!!
If I was so inclined, I could have pinged you 7 times already.
what about the euro release... ;)
We bought the last 3 copies at the Compusa in Kirkland Washington today. :) They had about 12 already paid for waiting for pick up.
No ETA on new shipment, so must be true.
Just wondering about those numbers there, last I saw EQ FFXI and Lineage all had playerbases outnumber WoW's sales figures. And remeber just cause people bought it doesnt mean they played it.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
The primary purpose of bnetd was to provide LAN based alternatives to Blizzard servers which, at the time of development, were in total disarray.
The primary use to which they were eventually put may have been different, but that's a different argument.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I bet those fools at Blizzard wish the Bnetd team would distribute server software to offload players to private nets now. Of course they would lose some revenue but I think that is going to happen now anyway!
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
you are worried about korea, but not about europe, arghfl.
anyway we'll get our own servers, so depending what the problem is exactly, we could run into the same issues when the game is released over here. still, it will probably be fixed by then (i hope).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
"...has broke the news..."
Are English you're most language?
It's either "...broke the news..." or "...has brokeN the news...", with the former being slightly more palatable, IMHO.
Ciao
Zak
It has been and always was Turbine's fault. They were the reason that playing on patch day was a mess. They were the reason why bugs took months to fix. They were the reason why exploits didn't get fixed pronto but took months.
Sure MS was in charge way back when but even today as Turbine has been in charge nearly a year the very same problems occured. Exploits lasted multiple patches. Lag reared its ugly head. Bugs which were the result of an obvious lack of QA process appeared each patch.
It probably is one reason they needed a real publisher to take over distribution for AC. They had it for nearly a year and got NO WHERE. In fact their game populations TANKED.
Turbine still hasn't said diddly about MEO's upcoming release other than to deny rumors it was cancelled. After getting Jessica (biting the hand fame) and such many of us thought that they would experience a big turn around. Instead we got a perfect real life example of Animal Farm.
what does all of this have to do with Blizzard? Simple, Blizzard is at least reacting PROPERLY to their problems and working to fix them quickly. Unlike Turbine Blizzard also acts fast to stomp out any exploiters and bot users. Too bad Turbine actually CATERS to the bot users!
Blizzard earned their success and is taking the proper steps to insure it continues.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Some servers had problems last weekend not all. I know as I play this game and any time I wanted to play it this weekend it was available to me.
/.
Perhaps a I was lucky in my server choice. Still all I see here is the typical exaggeration that is common to
Two issues that do plague all servers in WOW is poor response during primetime of their in game mail system and Auction House. People actually make jokes about it online because they expect it to be problemsome.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
In most kinds of "streaming" situations, where packets do not need to be ordered or re-sent, UDP is preferable to TCP. Nearly all MP games and most video-conferencing or VoIP applications use it.
-Stu
They don't specify, but I suspect by "backed DB server" they mean "IBM zSeries running Oracle" not "Dell Poweredge running MySQL". From the amount of data that goes on, and the fact that multiple actual game servers talk to one backend DB, I'm betting it's big iron from IBM, Sun or the like.
There's a good chance it's Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), which is what EA uses for their backend gaming database. Oracle is a big pusher of Linux/Intel/AMD blades or 1U racks attached to shared storage.
Though the downtime doesn't say anything about the quality of the DB software -- we really have no idea if it's a configuration issue, capacity planning problem , or software defect.
High profile database failures in the past (eBay, Orbitz) were blamed on the hardware/software vendor in the press, but afterwards reality showed it was administrator error (ID-10-T type mistakes) that exacerbated what were reasonably normal issues.
-Stu
there where no copys for sale down @ my local EB store today (in melbourne australia) also they where out of pay cards as well
I guess maybe now my Flamebait post http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=136393&cid=113 95058
Would be +4 informative now?
Well, at least now Blizzard has several hundred thousand beta testers paying them monthly. I'm sure it makes the pain on their end just a bit less intense.
Maybe instead of not selling any more copies, they should just remove the monthly charge until they get things working.
I used to work at a credit card processing company. In order to dispute the charge, you would need to provide some kind of proof to the bank that issued the credit card that you didn't make the purchase. It sounds like you bought the six month package; trying to say you didn't would be the equivalent of committing fraud.
However, you still have some recourse: contact the card-issuing bank and tell them that you'd like to perform a "chargeback" on the transaction. In a chargeback, the onus of proof is on the merchant; in this case, Blizzard would have to prove to their credit card processor that they provided all services they claimed that they would provide in a timely manner. If I'm not mistaken (I haven't worked there in a long time, and I've blocked out most of the memories), Visa and Mastercard both allow a cardholder two chargebacks per year. The money is immediately placed back into the cardholder's account (or refunded to him on his CC bill, depending on whether or not it's a check card), and the merchant must file paperwork and jump through a series of hoops to dispute the chargeback. If enough people did this, Blizzard probably wouldn't have the resources to dispute them all. The chargeback would be the better way to go.
Incidentally, I'd like to add that I've had the game since January 10th (and I've been playing like an addict), and last night is the first time I've had any trouble playing. It took me three or four tries to get through the authentication server, and I wasted maybe five minutes. Once I logged in, I noticed that the in-game lag (which had been brutal in certain zones) had almost completely disappeared. My attitude is: they've acknowledged the problem and they're fixing it, so give 'em a break. You don't get 600,000 new users (or whatever the number is) on a system without new problems popping up. But that's just my two cents.
Hope this helps.
Perhaps a I was lucky in my server choice. Still all I see here is the typical exaggeration that is common to /.
It's not an exaggeration. But not is it a consistent issue with all servers. I play on a Mountain time zone PvP server, (Deathwing) and are facing similar problems. AH and mail system lag was getting extreme, so Blizzard brought this, and several other, servers down for that wonderful 16 hour maintenance. After that, the server would crash and restart every few hours during peak time. Then queues were instituted. The threshold was obviously set below the current server population, so the lines got pretty long. I've personally waited an hour, and simply said "fuck it" on anything longer.
Now, keep in mind, Deathwing wasn't a heavily populated server from the getgo. In fact, we specifically chose it because it had a light population. Hence the Mountain time zone. Sure, there were minor queue issues at launch, but that's not news. It appears that the mail/AH system simply gagged and choked under the presssure of what I assume was an increasing usage. Then the 16 hour maintenance just fucked things to high holy hell.
--LordPixie
Weird I bought the game 2 days after it got released and have had little problems. Once they said the server would be down for 3-4 hours which was good because I NEEDED to get up and do something else. I have been playing A LOT and haven't had any problems so far. Only 1 bug is a bit annoying, it's the mining bug where sometimes i mine but the loot screen doesn't pop up and I am stuck in loot-mode. Re-logging fixes it though.
B0mbtruck - in your base!
i'm on the 5th most populous server, out of 88 servers. Mannoroth. yes, it crashes occasionally, but it's more like once a day on average, not 4+ times. also, i have yet to see a single rollback of more than 2 minutes. the lag has been bad, but the waiting lines haven't been more than 3 or 4 minutes to get into the game. compared to the hour and a half line when the game came out, that's not so bad.
i think WoW's problems have been blown out of proportion in recent days. i played for about 6 hours yesterday with no crash and no lag to speak of, except it was just a little slow in Orgrimmar, the main orc town, near the auction house. the problems are not non-existant, but i tihnk one of the reasons we're hearing such an uproar is because Blizzard brought in so many people who've never played a MMORPG before. this is pretty much par for the course, if not a little better. NOBODY could have anticipated the sheer volume of people who bought this game.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Vivendi (owner of Blizzard) hasn't sued anyone? Oh but they have. They have sued guys who made open-source battle.net server and shut down that project.
--Coder
Maybe I'm the oddball, maybe I'm playing on the right server or maybe my karma is just perfect, but I received this game for XMas and have had no issues at all, other than a minor glitch here and there. No queue, wait time, anything - I want to send props out to Blizzard for doing this, realizing they have an issue before things get too crazy...and thank them for creating a wonderfully deep, rich, fun, world, where me and my level 24 undead warlock are most happy together :-)
they should make it go to 11, naturally.
music lover since 1969
Just yesterday there was an uproar about this: "Jail Time For P2P Developers?"
= 05/01/19/1419238&tid=156&tid=95&tid=17
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?
sid
Today, however, we need to praise them for fixing their servers, so they can collect more money and buy more laws.
It was just yesterday my friend was talking about someone who was bidding for the regular game on eBay, and it shot up to $110. Man, for the regular game! While I love the game, all I can suggest is just wait. With MMORPGs, things only get better with time. This was a hard move for Bliz, but it was smart.
So the private beta period isn't over?
#####Free and Open Source Game Directory#####
Death to em.....pay to play blech, give me diablo 2 again. Guildwars shows promise.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
NOw everyone get off the Blackrock Server so the Queue's get down to manageable levels.
What should be realized is that Blizzard, presumably, has staff working around the clock to resolve this issue. Situations like this cannot be fixed overnight, as most players seem to be expecting. I commend Blizzard for both their efforts to stabilize their network and for developing one of, if not the best video games ever created.
I am a seasoned gamer, first time MMO'er, I purchased World of Warcraft on the first day and have been playing ever since. Yes, I have been affected by the issues they've been experiencing, but its not as bad as people complain about. Note that I've had my game rollback 2 hours, I've sat in a queue for an hour, and I've fought through lag. Am I going to unsubscribe, complain to Blizzard, or cry and moan that I cannot play? Nah.
In a few months time (perhaps even sooner) you will notice that these issues will be ironed out and Blizzard will be more than happy to compensate its subscribers.
Besides, if these problems are causing you grief, don't play right now. I'm sure you've got some vacation time you're just itching to waste.
aka the cursed mines ... one is even in a newbie zone in IronForge ... anyways mine something else and you'll get unstuck. You'll look funny a little while but no does not affect the gameplay. (Same if you get stuck in other looting/collection cases)
The reliability guarantees of TCP are not needed for many streaming application -- it's too heavy, hence why it's not used. Secondly, many streaming applications are locally multicast, hence the need for UDP. As you say, a form of re-ordering is required, which is why we have RTP.
Almost all VoIP implementations use SIP and RTP over UDP. Most streaming mediums that use RTSP (such as Real or Quicktime) use RTP+UDP. As do AIM and iChat AV video conferencing.
-Stu
I have been playing very happily for over 2 weeks with absolutely no problems. I have a few friends that are on the same boat (no problems for a few weeks). Luckily, we are not on one of the servers that Blizzard decided to migrate over last week. I do expect that I will have some problems in the future as they try to resolve these issues and/or more unhappy people try to move over to the lower population servers. Only time will tell. I have to commend Blizzard on the game and their approach to handling problems. It is never easy to manage a MMOG, but I think they are doing the best they can.
While I think Blizzard is handling these growth problems more responsibly than most, I wonder if they'd have been better off rolling the game out more slowly?
In other words, they should never have made more copies of WoW available than they were sure they could handle.
They could have started with 100K copies available, made sure that worked ok, then rolled out 250K more copies, and gradually ramp up.
(Of course, they did release WoW shortly before Xmas, and I'm sure they wanted to sell as many copies as possible over the holidays...)
I realize everyone complaining has good reason, but since all we seem to hear from are the people complaining, I wanted to point out that some people are very happy. At least one, that is.
I started playing the game on 12/29, and have played every day. I'm on the Shadowsong realm. There have been a few times that I haven't been able to log in, but unless it was a scheduled maintenance, I was always able to get on in less than an hour. That 16 hour maintenance was frustrating, especially since my server was the last to come up and it was over 16 hours, but I understand they're going to need to do that sometimes. I've never seen the queues that I hear about.
Yes, I pay for the game monthly and deserve to be able to play it when I want to, but come on, be fair. The game is so great that I know they're smart people - I believe they're doing their best. This game is so addicting that the limited downtime is about the only time I've spent away from the computer or work since I started playing.
Last Tuesday evening I ordered my copy of WoW from Blizzard's online store, after not finding it at any of the local stores. $50 plus tax and overnight shipping came out to around $60. I got it on Thursday.
Don't buy it for twice the price on Ebay, go to Blizzard's online store.
BTW, I'm a level 22 mage now and having fun. I picked a low population server and have yet to see a queue and have yet to see a server crash. In fact, every time I've gone to play the servers have been up.
Canceled my EQ2 account, too.
Blizzard is a great company, and they've just established their first MMORPG, which turned out to be much more popular than they expected.
They, like any company in this kind of situation, are going to go through some major growing pains at first.
The important thing is that you can trust Blizzard to take whatever steps are necessary to correct the problems and provide great customer service.
Guess I should have RTFA. Looks like I got mine just in time.
I had that a lot at the lower levels, but my main is a 50 orc warrior and I haven't seen that problem since I started mining in 1k Needles (around lvl 25ish). I didn't realize mining something else would fix it, but on a PVP server running around like that is not advised. :)
Lag? Lines? What server are you on? I hardly ever get lines or lag and i play every day on Bleeding Hollow. They say that that server is even one of the most packed pvp servers out there...
occasionally i have a line of no more than 5 minutes, which is a good time to go to the kitchen and get a drink or something. They need to deal witht the auction house lag, and around iron forge is pretty bad, but thats where the most people are.
I don't know why all these fanboys who probably play 24x7 get off having so much whiney bitching. I get home from work, play for maybe 4 hours and its always an enjoyable experience.
I bet its like 1% of the total players creating 95% of the fourm noise. Why do you people need to bitch like this? Its a really fun game! some ppl are just never happy i guess.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Oh this is revenge served cold and sweet.
/me returns to playing EverQuest II and its photorealism now and woh, all servers up... i could make a new player if I wanted to...
I have been SOOOO sick of the Blizzard and WoW fanboyz who have touted this cartooniverse crapware game and have darkly predicted the failure of the stunning EverQuest II.
And now 'mighty' Blizzard has dropped the ball. Serves you right for all the crap you talked about Sony and EQII (without any really good reason other than an urban-legend of 'poor customer service' which is only needed by stubborn geeks who insist on trying to make next-gen games work on K5 or Cyrix processors)
Sony does it right, and people bash them just because they are big and successful (like Microsoft).
Blizzard has NO track record of big successes online. If you'll recall, for the first few days Diablo II came out, you couldn't log on to the protected servers. "they were overloaded/unavailable". Sound familiar?
Stop bashing Sony just because it's "fashionable" or you are following the pack like a mindless sheep trying to be clever. Go get EverQuest II and enjoy a graphic experience that re-sets the bar and makes WoW look like, well, the Choco-Bots Power Hour.
EQII has proven to be extremely stable and runs great. Unless you're one of those k5/cyrix guys...
It's also a kickass game. Check out what Sony has implemented as their 3 tier update schedule for the game.
Maybe someone knows the answer to this: My friend got the Collectors Edition that came with DVD + CD version and a buddy key. He offered it to me, along with one of his versions (CD install version), if I wanted to play. Does anyone happen to know if I can use that key and upgrade it to a normal account (I think it's a 10-day trial account)? Do I still need to purchase the retail game, or just install and use the buddy key?
Instability of the servers at Starcraft's release?
Isn't bnet just used as a way to arrange games? Aren't the games of *craft hosted on one of the players box?
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Has anyone tried to create a new account as of last night. I was trying for a while but I kept getting an apache web server error. Once I get off work I will try again. I just hope they haven't stopped new registrations or else I have a nice 52.00 box with shiney round things in it.
Blizzard warned everyone to choose a low-population server in the first week or two, whenever they doubled the number of realms. It was a little late for me, since all the original servers (at least the PvP ones) are pretty crowded, but my friends and I started playing on a second, much smaller server as well, and have not had a single problem there with lag or drops.
Instability of the servers at Starcraft's release?
Yes. I take it you weren't there then.
Isn't bnet just used as a way to arrange games? Aren't the games of *craft hosted on one of the players box?
Yes and no. I'll briefly describe the evolution of battle.net. First off, let's be clear that both Diablo and Starcraft network games are hosted from someone's machine. The only way to initiate a match was to connect through battle.net, or over IPX. The games don't allow entering addresses. Diablo 2 does allow IP connections, but I don't expect that to occur in future as they think their product's copy protection depends on battle.net. In Diablo 2, there was what was a called a closed realm. The games are actually hosted on battle.net, and characters are saved there too. The open games can be played over battle.net or straight IP. Blizzard must have thought that closed would be what most people would play anyways, because it prevented easy cheating. Actually, I do think most people did play some of closed. Though there was alot of cheating on closed anyway, despite blizzard's hope.
Diablo was released in 1997. There was internet gaming already going on, but for whatever reason it wasn't too common. I'm pretty sure initial predictions on server requirements were underestimated. 7,000 people on a typical day was pretty phenomenal. And you have to take into consideration this was blizzard's first attempt into hosting a match-making themselves. The servers were without doubt laggy throught the first year.
Starcraft was released in 1998. In preperation for the release, blizzard expanded battle.net and ran a battle.net beta. However, when the game hit the stores, they sorely underestimated their success. In the first few days, 30k, then the first few months, 70k, 80k people. By then end of the year, 250k, and in '99 the average was well over 300k. This is stark in contrast with Diablo, which probably didn't do as well as it could have if it wasn't for the cheating.
In preparation of Diablo 2, alot more was done. Diablo 2 really meant they would do alot of the game hosting. They decided to split battle.net into regions "realms" around the world. Before, 300k people would be connected basically to the same network. They had servers already in other countries, but they communicated back and forth, sharing data. With those high numbers, and the problem with intercontinental communications, 300k is killer ever today. After splitting battle.net into realms, they performed a 100k stress beta test on a sample realm to make sure everything is ok at the initial release. Well, when the game hit stores, they exceed 100k in a weeks time for a single realm. They soon hit 200k, and 300k, for each realm!! And what happened isn't too suprising: They sold about 1 million copies and everyone of them were logging onto battle.net to play their closed characters. Sure they greatly expanded capacity, but the gamers filled it right up again. It seems they underestimated the numbers. What made it worse, is when one realm was brought down, everyone would jump on another realm bringing that one down too. So Diablo 2 was wrought with constant downtime too.
Warcraft 3 was a bit different. It's release did not make a terribly big splash in numbers of sales, comparing to before. And many starcraft players did not buy the game. But the ones that did, *stopped* playing starcraft to play War3. So in a sense, Starcraft players turned into War3 players on battle.net For the most part, blizzard was able to handle essentially the same amount of capacity. Also, War3 hit big with Warforge... (er because of the beta), and there were many legitimate game owners even playing on it just because there were already lots of people there. Many stuck with the alternative servers, well, many reasons!
WoW is no different because blizzard pretty much beat even the best expectations for an MMO at this time. Maybe, they will get it sorted out, but this time they will know through paying, or not paying, customers.
Well it seems like the stores that still have copies of WoW are still selling them till they run out.. Glad I got my copy, but the only thing is right now I am unable to register my account since the forums are down =(
I've been playing for weeks straight now, and the only time I've experienced problems was around the Auction Houses where it's crowded as fuck.
/. just gets a few whiners in here to make it appear a lot worse than it really is..
There are no queues, the dame doesn't crash, and people can play just fine.
I think
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Say what you will about Gabe and Tycho's delight in vulgarity, they clearly have a talent. The writing has better comic timing than half the crap you see in the daily paper (though that's not saying much), and the art's not bad on the eyes.
If it were really as bad as you say it is, they simply wouldn't have the readership they do. This is not to say that popular things are invariably good, but rather to say that they cannot be offensively incompetent. Problems that people have with Penny Arcade are problems of taste. Not of basic art and writing skills.
If it's as simple as you pretend it is, I dare you, I double-dog dare you to script a Penny Arcade strip or two. Just pop out some dialogue. If they lack even the most basic writing skill, surely you can outdo them, yes?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca