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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.
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...
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.
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Maybe MS will stop selling Windows until its problems are fixed :-)
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'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)
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.
If I might make an analogy,
A: "Hmm. The amusement park is closed."
B: "Let's go and break broken bottles in this deserted, garbage strewn alleyway! It's filthy and no fun, but it's always open!"
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
I've been playing from day one (and a few months before that -- in demo) and let me just offer you my subjective experience. As soon as the problems surfaced on a number of Western servers, Blizzard suggested players to spread out without regard to the time zones, and they promised that the choice of a server in a different time zone will not affect the performance. I did just that, (moved to Sargeras, in central time) and did not experience any significant outages ever since. Little annoyances are abound -- mostly related to a huge population in the capital cities, and small outages still happen from time to time, but there was ultimately nothing that caused me to think "OK, I want my money back". If anything, I played too much :-)
I think Blizzard is doing the right thing now, aiming to satisfy its current customer base, while sacrificing some of the profits they could make on additional sales. As a current customer, I give them two thumbs up.
And you know this because? (and dont say its because they said so. They aren't going to go around admiting its a design flaw.)
? se archid=7415
Ok then, answer me this... why are the South Korean WoW servers not affected?
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp
And don't say its because everyone is playing Lineage... according to the above link, WoW is setting concurrency records over there. But then why aren't those servers suffering from the same fate as the U.S servers?
I submit its because of the network infrastructure in South Korea which makes the U.S problem a "front end" issue. We'll find out soon enough.
Incidentally, if I am a moron, then what does it make you for arguing with me?
> 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.
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
Blizzard hasn't made any copies since the launch. It became exceedingly hard to find in some areas weeks before PA even started chirping about the problems.
Penny Arcade has been incredibly influential in the past, especially when running the "Child's Play" drive, but this particular time they were with the curve, not leading it.
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Have you metaroderated recently?
But something like BitTorrent would be completely useless to try and address the issues that World of Warcraft is suffering now, which have less to do with bandwidth and more to do with some problem with their database software or the hardware it's running on. The latency, etc. isn't bad at all.
The breaking up of the people into different physical servers is the main reason you do implement instances/zones/areas. Then you have a seperate comm server to handle the communication between players.
With the lack of instances for such large areas as WoW does, does mean that people are all on the same physical server and why they are needing to upgrade the hardware.
In the older days of MMORPG(3-4 years ago) 3000 was the magical number passed around as the max number of people that could be logged on at once with, just looking at numbers and WoW far exceeds that. Then to make matter even worse they implemented that very stupid time zone stuff so you get people filling the servers at the same prime time.
Tie that in with the announcement that they implemente code tuning along with the better hardware then look at what is the result and thoses queues are not going away for a long,long time.
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
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.