Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Hits Europe
Mikkel Tscherning writes "Blizzard has released World of Warcraft into the European market. The game was not long ago released for the Northern American and Korean audiences, and has recently hit more than 1.4 million characters."
"Login server down" in? It seems to be one of their favorites as they appear to have every Blizz system hooked into their Access DB haxxored together authentication system
I've been playing for one month, and I go on almost every day, I've only seen their login server down once. I've seen it lag a few times, but this is nothing compared to the login problems at launch of NeverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies.
The login server only seems to struggle when individual realms are brought down. For example, last night around 7 ET they brought down about 10 realms (servers) for emergency patching. This triggers a "Herd of Nerd" on the other servers, as everyone on the 10 servers that went down try to log into their alternate characters on servers that are up so yeah there is going to be some lag then.
I cannot believe that the signup serveres didn't even last a day.
Fine, launch day is always ridiculously overstressed, but they should have anticipated this.
I guess no web service can withstand such traffic (slashdotted phenomenon being an excellent example) but still no excuse. Implement a queue for all I care, everything is better than a 404.
Some people will always say "don't buy at release" but that is still not an excuse that Blizzard can use. They should have dealt with this in a better way. I could have lived with it if only for an hour, but now it is getting into several hours. Not good.
Heh, the biggest problem is that the "open beta/load testing" period was WAAAY to short, esp. given how long it took to download the whole thing. By the time most people got it, they pretty much got to run around a little bit and that was it.
If they would have kept the beta servers up for another week or 2, they may have caught a lot of these problems in the beta, were they are easier to fix(not to mention in betas, people don't have nearly the expectation of service that they have in production systems.
Monstar L
The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the ./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW. It only covers a very small fraction of players who are online and nearby at the same time players are running the census program. It should be taken as a very rough estimate at the very most.