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."
{melt}
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Let players kill each other off... and make it permanent. A little population reduction.
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.
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)
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.
Oh, the horror.