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;
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.
On their site they claim it's a software bug in their backend DB server. The hardware is fine but when too many transactions happen at once the software freaks and it all goes to hell. Now regardless of if it is software, or if the hardware is at it's limits, I have a feeling it'll take a bit to scale up.
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.
Well, if it does turn out they need more of that, you don't just get it overnight. Even with commodity PCs it still takes a couple days, usually a week, to get a system to you. For mini-mainframe class hardware, it's a lot longer. Then once you have it you have to get it configured and migrate over the parts of the DB it'll be handling and so on.
If all that happened in a week, I'd be amazed.
Personally I'm incluned to believe them that it's a software problem not a hardware one. Assuming they are using a major DB provider, and it would be almost unthinkable that they aren't, they'll get a fix. Again, however, you have to test and work on it. The last thing they want to do is roll out another fix that makes things worse.
That's what started this whole mess. They were upgrading their servers, hardware probably, to deal with lag. They had a big 16 hour downtime for this. They promised it'd fix all the lag. Well it didn't, and on top of that the game started bombing all the time.
They don't want a repeat so whatever the fix, I'm sure a little more testing will go in to it this time.
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.
No, you couldn't; most content is entirely server side. You could probably get terrain off the client pretty easily, but the quest information simply isn't on your end. Nor are the other creatures, any scripting, ect. I hope you like peace and quiet, because its all you'd have.
Just got a reply from blizzard support regarding my query about not being able to register for a little while. In their scripted reply this little bit caught my eye
"Also, we are currently analyzing the possibility of allowing users to move their character(s) to less populated servers. We do not have an estimated time of when we will be able to provide such a solution, but we would like to emphasize that we will try to provide this solution as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this, and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that your game experience in Azeroth is enjoyable, reliable, and fair."
This sounds like a step in the right direction to me, as since I finally made it through registration, have been having no problems playing on a low pop server.
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
EMC do storage. Usually attached to computers from Sun/IBM. Oracle would be what is stored on EMC disks.