World of Warcraft Outage Charted

miller60 writes "World of Warcraft has had extended downtime in the past 24 hours, apparently due to problems with a content patch installation. Blizzard's first MMORPG had recurrent downtime problems in January. The performance problems haven't slowed the frantic growth for WoW, which now has more than 1.5 million subscribers (which, as the article notes, works out to at least $26,000 an hour in assumed revenue)."

Comments

Fine to me!

[obeythefist]

Huh? The pirate servers are all working fine... just fine. I guess you don't always get what you pay for, eh?

Re:Fine to me!

[KronusOverlord]

I'm on the Blizzard servers and I've only had minor lag most of the time, except in instances... then again, I'm on one of the newest servers (Scarlet Crusade)

More problems

[ppolitop]

...not to mention that in Europe (esp. Greece where I live) lag is just unbearable. the doc

Re:More problems

[GuyWithLag]

I'm from Greece too - do you use European or US servers ?

Re:More problems

[ppolitop]

European! :) the doc

And yet, it's still better than FFXI!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they've been having issues recently - took me four minutes for their log in servers to let me in today. And there was the issue where anyone disconnected couldn't log back in at all.

And yet, even among all that...

It's still more fun than the alternatives.

Heh.

Re:And yet, it's still better than FFXI!

[Anonymous Coward]

The conspiracy theorist in me says that Blizzard are putting some of this downtime in on purpose to keep people away from the higher level, before they realise just how shallow the later stages of the game are. FFXI may not be as immediately accessible as WoW, but it's a hell of a lot more rewarding in the long term.

Re:And yet, it's still better than FFXI!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. FFXI isn't rewarding. It's boring. There's nothing to do in FFXI except level. The quests, such as they are, are basically just leveling. The story starts at level 60 with Zilart (although I hear that COP allows people to start that story at level 30, but is insanely annoying to actually complete, so few people have).

FFXI is far, far easier than WoW. It just takes longer. Many, many people have managed to mistake this for FFXI being "harder" than WoW but it isn't. It's much, much easier.

WoW requires some amount of skill when fighting mobs. You can't just run in and hit auto attack and hope to defeat the mob. You'll need to use the right abilities at the right time. In FFXI, you use maybe one ability per battle: a weapon skill. And figuring out "the right time" to use that is easy: as soon as it's available. Figuring out which ability to use is easy too: the last one you got, since it's the strongest.

The only "reward" I ever got from FFXI was when I stopped playing. That felt really rewarding.

Re:And yet, it's still better than FFXI!

[tsanth]

In FFXI, you use maybe one ability per battle: a weapon skill. And figuring out "the right time" to use that is easy: as soon as it's available. Figuring out which ability to use is easy too: the last one you got, since it's the strongest.

Actually, the right time to use a WS is when another WS in the party is available, given that the other WS is able to make a skillchain. Bonus points if you have mages in-party who can burst off the SC. Likewise, the right ability to use is not always the last one you got: a properly placed SA+Fast Blade (say, to close Distortion) is stronger than Flat Blade.

Will the pain and suffering ever cease!?

[dauthur]

I wonder if this is ever going to be sorted out, or if it's going to be one of those neverending disappointments like Daikatana was?

Re:Will the pain and suffering ever cease!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the game itself is fine. They're just having server issues.

It's an incredibly fun game, when it's running. It's just that Blizzard terribly underestimated the popularity of the game, so the servers are suffering. When the servers are running, the game's great.

This most recent outage was caused by an update to the game. The update was thorougly tested (they even opened some test servers to players), but the roll-out still managed to have glitches.

Re:Will the pain and suffering ever cease!?

[Incoherent07]

I have a hard time calling a game that, despite its server stability problems which continue 4 months after release, is still beating the tar out of everything except Lineage in subscriber numbers a "neverending disappointment".

What outage?

[Temporal]

World of Warcraft has had extended downtime in the past 24 hours

That's odd. I have been playing World of Warcraft for the past 21 hours. Literally. I don't know of this outage of which you speak. I was disconnected maybe three or four times in 21 hours of play, which is more that usual, but I'm typically disconnected from AIM three or four times a day and no one ever complains that AIM isn't reliable. I did not lose any progress any of the times I was disconnected and was able to reconnect immediately.

The reports of WoW's instability are perhaps massively exaggerated. Also, note that netcraft's graph of the web server doesn't say anything about the game servers. I couldn't care less if www.worldofwarcraft.com is working while I play. thottbot.com and allakhazam.com are more important, frankly. In all likelihood, the web server was having trouble serving all the people who went to read about the patch and bitch on the forums about everything new that they hated.

(And, yeah, before you ask... I'm on vacation.)

Re:What outage?

[Inominate]

Are you on crack? Or just on a low-population server?

Some of the servers have been dying nightly like clockwork on a daily basis for weeks now. The patch only made things much much worse.

I can't actually think of an mmog launch that has gone as amazingly badly as this, even SWG pulled thier shit together faster than this.

And yea, i'm playing it anyways.

Re:What outage?

[Temporal]

Low-population server. Which is most of them. These articles really need to specify that it is only the top 10-15 realms -- if that, even -- that have problems. New players should obviously not create characters there, and existing players now have the option to transfer to a low-pop server.

I mean, really... a server can only handle so many players. The hardware has limits. What do you expect Blizzard to do about it, beyond what they have done? Either they can start assigning players to low-population realms by force (like FFXI, which everyone hated for that) or they can try very hard to encourage players to choose low-pop servers and let the rest suffer the consequences.

The problem isn't that there aren't enough servers. If all the players were evenly distributed among all current servers, there would be no problem. The problem is that players have naturally wanted to play with their friends, which has encouraged people to gravitate towards a few servers while the rest lay mostly empty. And, so, yeah, those servers have problems. And even if Blizzard added 20 more, the high-pop servers would still have problems.

Re:What outage?

[Kris_J]

Your point about the graph being for www.worldofwarcraft.com is valid. The rest of your post, not so much.

As I type this, servers were taken down for a patch install about 40 hours ago. I'm told some came back up 5-8 hours after going down only to have major disconnection issues for a huge proportion of the population. Some servers were not brought up while attempts were made to fix the problem. It was roughly 17 hours after the initial take-down that I was finally about to log onto Proudmoore. I personally had limited opportunity to do anything at that time. Some further 4-5 hours after that (almost at the 24 hours mark) Proudmoore went down hard again. I was past the "realm not found" point, but I hadn't acutally loaded the world. I had a social event for the next few hours, but it did seem to be back up at about the 26 hour mark. This was getting late local time so I went to bed. This morning (34-36 hour mark) I again had problems getting on, with large delays at the "Authenticating" point of login. This can mean that the realm is up but the login server is down. As far as I know it's been up for the last few hours.

The latest patch seems to have caused major technical problems for some users. In addition, login server problems have amplified problems with disconnects and crashes -- meaning that if the game locks up on you, you might not be able to log back in for a couple of hours. That said, my SLI rig appears to be more stable, not less.

Between personal committments and downtime I think I've spent about 4 hours in game in the last 48.

Re:What outage?

[Kris_J]

existing players now have the option to transfer to a low-pop server

Pig's arse! ONE token server has the ability to transfer characters off it to a single other pre-determined server. A dozen other servers are schedulled, none of which are the one my main characters (and guild) are trapped on.

Re:What outage?

[Temporal]

Your information is out of date. The following transfers are currenty allowed:

• Arthas to Nathrezim
• Warsong to Bonechewer
• Bleeding Hollow to Crushridge
• Illidan to Stonemaul
• Blackrock to Daggerspine
• Stormreaver to Stormscale
• Shattered Hand to Bloodscalp
• Mannoroth to Destromath
• Blackhand to Windrunner
• Whisperwind to Azjol-Nerub

Warsongers have been trashing my home server of Bonechewer for many days now. Trust me, transfers are active.

I guess your server isn't on the list, though. Sorry.

Re:What outage?

[chrispyman]

For WoW it really seems to depend what server you play on. My main character is on a fairly high population server and yeah, it seems like I'm having issues more often than not. Yet one of my other characters is on a fairly low population server, and I hardly ever seem to have issues on that (barring login/authentication issues).

Re:What outage?

[AuMatar]

I've been playing since day 1. I have a level 60 and multiple 20+ alts. I have been unable to log in... three times. I've had difficulty getting past the login server maybe a half dozen times. There's a small subset of very troubled servers, the rest work more or less perfectly.

Re:What outage?

[dasunt]

Currently, my understanding of MMORPGs is that they keep a copy of the world on each server. When a player logs into that server, that player exists only in that server's copy of the world.

Why can't MMORPGs set up the server-clusters so that the world is partitioned into seperate zones on the servers, depending on load. So a player can (say) log onto the European server cluster, enter zone Foo, and the zones Foo, Bar, and Baz are currently located on server #5. If zone Bar gets too many players on it, zone Bar is seemlessly transferred to a mostly idle server along with all of its players.

What's preventing this?

Re:What outage?

[GoofyBoy]

>The hardware has limits.

Trust me, Blizzard hasn't reached it yet. And it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling when they start posting for key database and network positions soon after the release.

>What do you expect Blizzard to do about it, beyond what they have done?

1. Not screw up how they assign players: i.e. Agent Dawn server. This is a RPG server, as labeled by Blizzard, but for 3 months(?) everyone who allowed the game to pick a PvE server got assigned to it.
2. Have the ability to move characters to another server. They are only this limited functionality now, months after it should have been.
3. Assign limits to servers. If you have a friend who is on the server, have them "sponser" you so you can get on. Do something to limit it.

>The problem is that players have naturally wanted to play with their friends,

No, the problem is Blizzard didn't forsee this and is able to handle this.

Re:What outage?

[kaellinn18]

Well, to give the grandparent a boost, I have been playing on Earthen Ring since the patch with no problems whatsoever. No connectivity issues, no lag, no dropped connection.

I'm sure there are servers that had issues, but I've yet to read any account of a server by server examination. What percentage of game servers actually had problems? Remember, this is the media: you're always going to hear about the bad stuff, and they're always going to try and make it seem a lot worse than it really is.

Re:What outage?

[Sembiance]

I couldn't care less if www.worldofwarcraft.com is working while I play.

The reason worldofwacract.com is down so often is because it's running ASP.NET

That simple.

I used to have respect for Blizzard web programmers, they chose PHP/Apache for previous websites (websites that never had a problem with load).
Sounds like when their smart programmers quit to form their own companies, that they ended up hiring some prune who thinks Microsoft products are the best.

Re:What outage?

[Sparr0]

40 hours? The servers came down on Tuesday morning, which I assume is the start of your 40 hour timeframe. I started patching at 5:30PM that evening when I got home from work, finished patching around 6:00, and was grouped (with people who had been online for hours) and whooping some troll buttocks by 6:15. Slight lag was apparent outside, none in instanced zones. This lasted for approximately 5 hours, at which point I went to sleep. I logged in again on Wednesday morning for a few minutes before work, no problems there. Wednesday evening I had a 6 hour lag-free session.

Perhaps you should try a lower population server? Or a server on your continent if youre playing on US servers from EU or vice versa. Whatever problems you are seeing are NOT problems with "World of Warcraft" in general.

Re:What outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's preventing this?

Fundamental server design?

A distributed network of game servers is easy enough, but one where game state shifts instantly and seamlessly from machine to machine "at need"? If the server "needed" to move part of the game world somewhere else, it wouldn't have the free time to wrap it up and transmit it to another machine, which in turn wouldn't have the free time to open up its new world, get the memory sorted out, oh, and all this time keep serving the content as its being transferred. Plus the whole seamless transfer of the internet connections, which would be damn hard as well, even with some kind of front end redirection, it'd have to be notified when the data/connection transfer was in progress and completed.

Re:What outage?

[Momoru]

A server's up/down status has nothing to do with the programming language/framework used, and more to do with the http daemon and server load....they could be using just plain html and the servers would still be going down as often. I guess you could be making the case that ASP.NET is crashing the server because of high overhead or buggy code or something, but I have never had a .NET server (even high volume) crash because it was running ASP.NET...

Re:What outage?

[Skweetis]

Currently, my understanding of MMORPGs is that they keep a copy of the world on each server.

Yeah, each server (more like a small cluster, really -- A WoW session opens connections to three or more distinct IP addresses depending on which zones you visit) holds its own copy of the game world, and what happens on one server has no effect on any of the others.

Why can't MMORPGs set up the server-clusters so that the world is partitioned into seperate zones on the servers, depending on load. So a player can (say) log onto the European server cluster, enter zone Foo, and the zones Foo, Bar, and Baz are currently located on server #5. If zone Bar gets too many players on it, zone Bar is seemlessly transferred to a mostly idle server along with all of its players.

Dynamic load balancing across the realm cluster is actually a really good idea. It might be overkill for WoW, as the game world really isn't that large -- it would likely become uncomfortably crowded with more than a few thousand people logged into a single realm. For a game with a larger play area and a single realm (the upcoming Wish is like this) the approach makes a lot of sense. Decentralizing it in a p2p fashion might be another way to go, but that approach isn't without its own problems.

Re:What outage?

[Skweetis]

I play on two servers (my clan plays both Alliance and Horde on PvP servers, where you can only have characters of one faction, so we picked one for each.) One server is a medium-population server, and has never had significant problems (the occasional bugged loot node, logging out and back in fixes it). The other one is one of the high-population servers that is now eligible for character transfer. It isn't *that* bad overall -- occasional disconnects, minor "loot lag", and the like. There are login queues at peak times when the realm gets full, but after the starting area congestion the first week, I never saw a queue more than ten minutes long.

I actually think Blizzard did a fine job considering how much they underestimated demand, though I have to say they should have had a clue that it was coming after half a million open beta signups, and the buzz that the beta generated. I went to buy the game on release day when the local Electronics Boutique opened, and I wouldn't have gotten a copy if I hadn't reserved one. I was in line with 50 other people, including, no joke, a man dressed as an orc, complete with green makeup, who said *nothing* but "Zug-zug" and "Lok-tar" during his entire transaction. And I live in a smallish town (around 50,000 people).

Re:What outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe the server should be fixed. If they can't handle the load of the number of people accessing them, then there is a problem.

As a player of FFXI on one of the high population server "Leviathon" I never have problems other than slight lag in very crowded zones when my PC is trying to load several hundred characters on my screen at once.

Further more one of my Linkshell members is taking a break and trying out Lineage II and he says the major cities make Jueno in FFXI look like a ghost town and there is NO LAG what so ever. And Lineage also shares the no zones design that WoW also has.

Face it Blizzard did their first MMORPG and can't get their shit together. Players should not have to recreate characters on lower population servers to enjoy the game they are paying $15/month to play.

Re:What outage?

[flibuste]

You can't say this. They also run Tomcat with a set of JSP to do the account management.

You can tell from the stacktraces that Tomcat spit out almost any time I want to manage my account...

So as much as I like people reporting bad things about ASP.NET, this is not the reason.

Re:What outage?

[cbuskirk]

They do. Based on the many crashes on Kil' Jaden, heres what I gather are the there is a master server which handles global/guild chat, auction, and mail functions. Then there is a server for each of the two continents. Before there was a bug with boats that would cause the Eastern Continent to reset constantly however those in the West were unaffected. Instance Servers. There are likely many servers which host private instanced dungeons for groups, and these probably get scaled with population and popularity. Also based on observation and what other players have said there is at least one separate server for loot drops, which is what causes "loot lag" where a player gets stuck in the looting position while the server is queried.

Re:What outage?

[kafka47]

WOW has hand-crafted network code which is kept a trade secret. At this point, I can see why. ;-)

Kidding aside, each realm has many servers, all geographically dispersed. And you're right, even certain zones in themselves are serviced by multiple machines. Your observation about distinct IP addresses doesn't necessarily mean distinct machines, however. Interview, Blizzards' Shane Dabiri.

So, you can bet that they have dynamic load balancing in place within a realm.

As an aside, Wish is now defunct. Story. Its point of distinction was one contiguous world that all subscribers would share. This is a true MMO in my opinion. We surmise that their subscriber base in beta did not survive sustainability projections, so in the end it was a casualty of simple finances.

The rest of the market that instances the VW into multiple 'shards' are inpure in my opinion. So when I see advertising that prides itself on "1.5 Million Subscribers!" I just think, "so what!". Splitting users into 90 distinct realms lessens the weight of these claims. If you have 100,000 user concurrency that means you're really only playing with 1,000 players, and we've seen what thats like.

IMO, WOW as a game system and a server system doesn't scale in any impressive way.

Kafka

Re:What outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's FFXI. High population in FFXI means 5,000 people on at peak times. High population in WoW means 10,000 people on line at peak times.

Plus FFXI cheats like hell to get that. In WoW, you never have to see .oO Downloading Data Oo. as you move between one quarter of a city to another quarter of it. In WoW, the city - and the continent it's on - is just one large zone. The only time you have to zone is entering an instance or going between continents. FFXI is segregated into so many areas because it can't handle more than about 500 people in a zone (and starts dragging at about 400).

And WoW only has lag on the 20 most popular servers. There's something like 70 other servers to play on that don't have any issues. And I play on one of the servers with "many issues" and I haven't had a problem logging in all week - so, all in all, I'd have to say the $13/month I'm paying for WoW is getting me far more value than the $15/month I had to pay for FFXI.

Re:What outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms it: you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

The World of Warcraft website runs on Linux, using Apache and Tomcat. (You can tell Tomcat because of all the JSESSIONID stuff.) Three open source systems.

And it goes down all the time.

The forums, on the other hand, run ASP.NET on IIS. And they haven't come down yet.

Yeah, I'd say using IIS and ASP.NET was a real bad idea. In fact, the only problem most people have with the forums is when the account software, running on Apache and Tomcat, goes down so that they can't log in to the forums.

Re:What outage?

[doodzed]

(quote)I can't actually think of an mmog launch that has gone as amazingly badly as this, even SWG pulled thier shit together faster than this.(/quote)

That is BS. I was a beta tester for SWG and bought the game the first day it was available. Big mistake. It seemed like it would crash all the time and patches made things unstable and/or less fun.

For me, every WoW patch makes it more fun and generally makes stuff better. The only problem so far is the transfers. Bonechewer has become no fun since the influx of 50+. The economy and everything is fscked now that most of the players are so high.

Re:What outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also... FFXI did have the same sorts of problems when it came out. And it took quite a long while to get them fixed. However, since these problems occured back during the time before it was released in NA, people tend to forget.

Re:What outage?

[weave]

which is what causes "loot lag" where a player gets stuck in the looting position while the server is queried.

Wow, thanks. I was wondering what that was about. I thought that it was a bug, although it was neat going back into town in my crouched position and floating around (I wonder if I was even seen by other people. I'm guessing probably not)

Re:What outage?

[Temporal]

Trust me, Blizzard hasn't reached it yet. And it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling when they start posting for key database and network positions soon after the release.

I don't trust you. How would you know? Do you maintain their servers? It seems to be pretty obvious that if high-population servers have lag problems and low-population servers don't, then high-population servers must be pushing the hardware limits.

1. Not screw up how they assign players: i.e. Agent Dawn server. This is a RPG server, as labeled by Blizzard, but for 3 months(?) everyone who allowed the game to pick a PvE server got assigned to it.

I'll grant you that's an obvious mistake. But that isn't even related to the main issue here.

2. Have the ability to move characters to another server. They are only this limited functionality now, months after it should have been.

This is a lot more complicated than it sounds. The servers weren't designed with this in mind in the first place. What happens to stuff you have in the auction house when you move your character? What happens to your mail? Discard all that? OK, now what happens if your name is already taken on the new server? What happens if you have unique items which are owned by someone else on the target server?

Of course, the biggest problem is just engineering a way to move the character data itself, since the systems weren't designed to be used like that. Again, this is a lot more complicated than you think. I don't know the details, but at present the Warsong and Bonechewer servers are "linked" somehow to allow transfers, and this link manages to cause lag when using mail and auction house functions even for Bonechewer players. And Bonechewer is still a low-population server at this point.

You can say "They should have allowed transfers from anywhere to anywhere!" all you want, but the fact is you have not a clue what this really means.

3. Assign limits to servers. If you have a friend who is on the server, have them "sponser" you so you can get on. Do something to limit it.

In hindsight, that sounds like a good idea. However, try to imagine Blizzard's thoughts before releasing the game. FFXI had a system in place to limit servers, and people hated it. They hated it so much that Penny-Arcade devoted a comic and a news post to bashing the concept and explaining how it ruined the game. So your options are:

- Enforce limits and piss everyone off.
- Don't enforce limits, and piss everyone off.

At least in the future, players will understand when limits are enforced.

Re:What outage?

[Kris_J]

The problem is that they came down at 9pm local time for me. You didn't even try to get on for the first, what, 10 hours?

Perhaps you should try a lower population server? Or a server on your continent

I have been spawning characters on server after server and they've all had their problems. Proudmoore has my first and highest level character, therefore if I want to experience new content that's the one I want to use. I'm happy you found a server that works. Tell us all which one it is so we can all move there.

There are no servers in Australia.

Re:What outage?

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

sounds like some ideas for extensions for openmosix

Re:What outage?

[C0rinthian]

As an aside, Wish is now defunct. Story [ign.com]. Its point of distinction was one contiguous world that all subscribers would share. This is a true MMO in my opinion. We surmise that their subscriber base in beta did not survive sustainability projections, so in the end it was a casualty of simple finances.

You mean, like Eve Online has done for the past few years? (One shard at least, the contiguous part is debatable because of zoning between systems)

Re:What outage?

[nexex]

OK, now what happens if your name is already taken on the new server?

I'm on Bonechewer (my char's name is farnsworth) and for at least a week I get party invites from people 30 levels above me and people sending me messages obviously meant for someone else. I just wish they mailed me some good items to sell. :)

WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently talked to a friend of mine who used to play Ultima Online for over a year before quitting and recently moved to WoW. His favorite comparison: The long downtimes, unexpected server boots/crashes and generally jackassery on the PvP servers.

Re:WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[secolactico]

generally jackassery on the PvP servers

Anybody remembers UO in the begining? There was no such thing as non-PvP server (shard). Once you stepped outside the protection of the town guards it was no-man's-land. Anybody could kill you. Anybody could loot your corpse (wether they killed you or not) and anybody could loot your kills.

And if you carried too much money, suddenly you couldn't move because it was too heavy.

God, I miss those days... not. Ok, so I do a little. Maybe I'll reactivate my account for nostalgia's sake.

Re:WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[esoterus]

Man, I remember UO when it first came out. Yeah that was scary stuff, stepping away from the town guards to mine ore/kill bunnies/run-like-hell-fom-griefers. Although it added that certain risk factor that delivered some excitement, on the whole I hated it.

My problem is, I'm a Guilty Gamer. I *love* to play MMORPGs but always feel guilty as hell about pouring that time down the sink. And nothing twists that blade in me more than losing all my stuff to a friggin player 'cause I lagged out, or was out-gunned by some power gamer. At least in WoW, even in PvP, I don't step backwards (ie losing everything I had spent a 6+ hour session building up). For me, that's a slap in the face hard enough to make me quit a game.

WoW is so much more insidious. I gladly pour my time down the sink and no matter what happens, I can always pick up right where I left off. As long as I have my little illusion of progress, I'll be happier than a pig in...

Re:WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[secolactico]

Although it added that certain risk factor that delivered some excitement, on the whole I hated it.

I can't say that I hated it, but I wasn't entirely hapy with the system. Being the only game in town, I didn't know any different.

I couldn't stop playing it anyway. It was like Christopher Walken playing russian roulette in "The Deer Hunter".

At least WoW never made me throw my hands up in disgust promising to quit once and for all.

I never liked Everquest and DAOC was only so so (bored me after the first month). But WoW is so much fun I keep staying up way past my self imposed bed time.

Re:WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[esoterus]

yes, good point - at the time I loved it too out of ignorance and lack of options... Although I had my frustrations at the time, hindsight makes them a whole lot worse.

I went sci-fi after quiting UO. Did some Earth and Beyond (got old really quick) and then Eve Online (amazing game really, but very complicated...). I agree though, WoW is my fave so far. So much fun. and hell, I'm just a sucka for a good fantasy setting. Cheers!

Re:WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[geminidomino]

I'll be happier than a pig in...

Everquest?

Re:WoW = Modern day Ultima Online

[IncarnadineConor]

I hate how they took that, which was SO much fun, and then watered it down patch by patch until it became the boring sandbox that every other game has tried to copy.

Why do people play it?

[CrazyJim1]

The only reason I'd play WOW would be for hope for the future. There's nothing in it that differentiates it from other MMORPGS. I guess some people can still stand levelfests.

There should be some end game tasks beyond PVP.

Re:Why do people play it?

[j0nb0y]

Uhm. yeah. WoW is one of the easiest mmo games to hit the level cap in, so I would hardly call it a levelfest. As for end game content beyond PvP, I'll just say that no one has defeated Ragnaros yet, and very few have defeated Onyxia, and there is more PvE end game content on the way.

Re:Why do people play it?

[faloi]

I have to disagree. I've played other MMORPGS, and haven't found one that's as much fun as WoW. I'll be the first to admit that it's not very different from other MMORPGS in terms of overall strategy, but then if you reduce any RPG online or not to its core they're all basically the same. You kill things for levels and loot. That's all there is to it. Your ideal party has someone that can heal, someone that can take a bunch of damage, and at least one person that can crank out damage. WOW is at least more fun than some others to go through the motions in. As for the outages, they've had their share. But nothing that other MMOGs haven't gone through.

Re:Why do people play it?

[Guppy06]

"There's nothing in it that differentiates it from other MMORPGS."

Other than the fact that it's the only big-name MMORPG that runs on Macs, you mean?

Re:Why do people play it?

[geminidomino]

Too bad Blizzard still sticks with their "Fuck you, Linux users!" line. I had a buddy who wants me to play even offer to BUY the game for me (I'd still pay the monthlies, of course), but I don't trust Wine/Cedega for sometihng that's going to charge me repeatedly like that.

Re:Why do people play it?

[C0rinthian]

Agreed. There is still endgame content to do. (especially with the addition or Dire Maul) Plus, WoW seems to have a LOT more content from 1-60 compared to other MMO's. IMO a smart move on their part. Yeah, there's less endgame content. However, you can easily add stuff to the endgame, while fleshing out the early portions would be much more complicated.

$26000 an hour

[superpulpsicle]

Wha? Wouldn't it make the company #1 financially in just a few years if it keeps up at this rate.

Re:$26000 an hour

[Paul McMahon]

$26000 an hour in revenue, not profit.

Re:$26000 an hour

[ZephyrXero]

That would equal almost $228 million in a year. Maybe my numbers weren't so dramatic after all ;)

and yes...I do realize my server price estimates were a little off...

Re:$26000 an hour

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be overly picky, but revenue and profit are essentially the same thing. The term you're looking for is "gross revenue."

At least Blizzard gives credits...

[antdude]

for the major downtimes, even on specific servers. I think so far, I had six total days credited since the first week of the game release. Also, they give you XP bonus in case you got disconnected outoside of the inn/city.

4 races

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on Blizzard's Warcraft series depicting a war between four unique races (Orcs, Humans, Night Elves and Undead) each armed with magical abilities and distinctive weapons.

Well I'd say it is more along the lines of a war between eight races in two factions (Orcs, Humans, Night Elves, Undead, Trolls, Tauren, Dwaves, and the Gnomes (note the subtle syntax there))

Re:4 races

[Deathdonut]

The statement was that the game is based upon Blizzard's [I]Warcraft series[/I] which did in fact depict a war between four unique races (though the human alliance really included elves/dwarves, and god knows how you would describe the scourge).

Title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The only downtime that is charted is for the website http://www.worldofwarcraft.com, not the game servers.

Still the new kid on the block

[flipper65]

Keep in mind that WoW is the new kid on the block. What has happened to them is virtually the same as what we see every day here. They were /. According to every interview I read they were not expecting anything like the response they recieved. That kind of slammage is gonna requre a serious rescaling of the backend which will not happen overnight. Imagine if you had 1.5 million users banging away on your project, no matter how careful you were or how much you tested, things happen in the real world that don't happen in the dev sandbox. As far as endgame content is concerned, again, it's a new game. To compare it to games like EQ with its X number of expansions is insane. Give them time to stabalize their platform and I am sure you will see more content.

Re:Still the new kid on the block

[CFTM]

Thank you for having a sound and valid statement unlike most of the yahoos on /. Blizzard is operating in the real world, with real problems and real dead lines; not geek fantasy camp. Blizzard did not anticipate this kind of success but I do believe they are doing everything within their power to allieviate any future problems. Besides, if it's that bad cancel your god damn account for six months and then come back. No one has a gun to your heads...

Re:Still the new kid on the block

[Fazlazen]

But at the same time, they still had to get the number of copies of the game printed up and issued through distribution in order to get them in the hands of all of those subscribers, did they not? I don't see how you can say they were taken by surprise when they had set up the distribution channel with each of the copies that have been sold.

Re:Still the new kid on the block

[Anonymous Coward]

There were at least 70 servers up on launch day. Don't give me this "they weren't ready" shit.

Salary

[senocular]

Hey! $26,000 - thats what I make a year too!

... what?
Hour?
Huh?

This IS a bit ridiculous

[BladesP9]

I play World of Warcraft. And during my non working hours I have been playing it a lot the last several weeks because I really enjoy the game. I enjoy playing online with my friends and clan-mates and I enjoy the fantasy-based concept of the Warcraft universe even though I did not enjoy other Warcraft games.

That said, the downtime and disconnect issue with the WoW system is seriously irritating me. The other night I lost about 2 hours worth of tasks and resource building because of a server glitch. If this had been the first time this had happened then I wouldn't really think too much about it... but I've been disconnected on almost a nightly basis from the "Alleria" server. So much so that I'm about to the point where I'm going to demand that Blizzard move me to a more stable server or I may deactivate my account until they get their act together.

Which... honestly, really sucks because it's a good game and I'm willing to pay the $15 a month to play (even though I once said I'd never do that because it was too expensive). I just want what I am paying for. I don't think that is unreasonable for any customer to demand. If we're paying, then we deserve consistent, stable servers. I understand the task of trying to run a server with heavy load at times and I can't imagine the logistics of trying to accommodate 1.5 million gamers - but they should have been prepared for this... and increasingly I'm of the opinion that they were not.

Re:You're probably right...

[Anonymous Coward]

blah blah blah

Wait, you've posted the exact same rant before.

And no one cared then, either.

Face it: An MMORPG means exactly what it says: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Which is what WoW is.

It does not mean "massively boring grind-fest". WoW is an MMORPG, and it's succeeding by allowing the more casual players to actually succeed at it.

As for the "hard core" players, they're freaking nuts. I don't have eight hours a day to play the game. I want the same chance to enjoy the content as anyone else. The thing is, most other MMORPGs don't really have any more content than WoW. They take care of those "hard core" players by making them pull the lever for hours on end before getting a reward.

Then the "hard core" players think that because they spent eight hours doing a quest instead of one hour, that they enjoyed seven additional hours of content. Wrong. They enjoyed seven additional hours of the same content.

WoW has plenty of content, but not enough time sinks to keep this crowd pleased. Which is fine with me, because I don't want to play time sinks or, really, want to play with people that do.

Productivity

[CmdrTookah]

I am pretty sure that University profs and middle management have sabotaged the servers in an effort to increase the attendance rates and productivity that has been seen since the outset of the game.

Anyway, service has been fine for me.

Great Game - Terrible Support

[theghost]

So many problems and yet it's still a very fun game to play!

Not only did the latest patch introduce login and disconnect problems, it's also created so much lag that the game is virtually unplayable about half the time now. I never had any lag problems whatsoever before the patch. This is the first time i've seriously considered giving it up, but if i can't play when i want to play, it's just not worth the money to me.

I'm not even mad about it anymore, just disappointed and slowly tipping over towards giving up on it.

Re:Great Game - Terrible Support

[WapoStyle]

It may do you no good, but head into the Interface options and uncheck that "Fix Lag" box. It did wonders for my game experience.

Re:Great Game - Terrible Support

[theghost]

I heard that improved framerate, but not lag itself. Are you suggesting that Fix Lag actually induces lag?

Re:Great Game - Terrible Support

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. with fix lag enabled I would completely lag out whenever i opened up bags or a tradeskill. (they really need to rename this)

after disabling it I'm now able to run around og with everybag/window open without a problem.

and yes i dumped all my mods etc, before trying this, my first thought was that recent patches didn't agree with a mod, but that was not the case.

Re:Great Game - Terrible Support

[theghost]

That is bloody brilliant! If Blizzard doesn't get their act together, WoW is getting DELETED from my computer!

why not incremental upgrades?

[egburr]

What I fail to understand is why Blizzard takes down ALL the servers and upgrades them all at once. Why don't they take down a few, upgrade them, and see how they do, then proceed with another few until they are all done? If problems develop, they can stop upgrading until they figure out and fix what is wrong.

This would mean that the upgraded game client would have to be able to connect to both the new and previous server version (in case someone has characters on upgraded and non-upgraded realms). That would mean a little extra effort from their programmers, but it would allow people to play on non-upgraded realms while the problems with the upgraded ones are being fixed.

It may make Blizzard's overall upgrade time longer, but it would significantly decrease player (customer) downtimes during it.

I work in IT, and I can not imagine even thinking about rolling out an upgrade across all of my production systems all at once unless it was an emergency fix for a serious problem I am experiencing right then.

Re:why not incremental upgrades?

[space_jake]

Unfortunately people are going to flip out that they're paying just as much as someone else and they are not getting to play the same game. You cant let one server have access to the newest patch without letting everyone have access to it.

Re:why not incremental upgrades?

[faloi]

It may make Blizzard's overall upgrade time longer, but it would significantly decrease player (customer) downtimes during it.

I don't know that it would help the problems much. Customers who have characters on one realm would still be out of luck, and might not enjoy the notion of playing on a different server. Couple that with Blizzard locking out servers after a certain load boundry is hit, and suddenly a lot of your servers are going to be unavailable anyway. As much as I hate the everything down at once mentality, it's probably the most cost effective way for 'em. Certainly you don't get the debugging time you might after seeing how some servers react under load, but customers will complain about "beta testing released software" regardless.

Re:why not incremental upgrades?

[rebill]

Incremental upgrats is a great idea for stand-alone software, but it is not so great for client-server (like MMORPGs).

As a simple example, let's say they upgrade Alleria (I am Alliance on that machine) but do not upgrade Dalaran (I am horde, there).

Now, if Blizzard did not change the protocol that their servers use in this patch . . . great. But if they did have to change something, then when I log on to Alleria, I get cut off from Dalaran until they get around to upgrading it. Can you imagine the whining in the forums if that took place?

Then lets say that they have some problem occur on Server "X". First, the tech has to check which software version is on "X", then get the way to fix the problem on "X" . . . which is very different than how they fix it on "Y". Oops! someone recorded the version number incorrectly, and now the tech has the wrong procedure . . . and uses it, screwing things up worse.

Then a hard drive fails on Z, and they go swipe a piece of hardware from X to replace it . . . Oops! X had a different software version, so now the entire database for Z is corrupt.

That, and if they are closing an exploit, they really want to close the exploit everywhere, instead of just some places.

So, to follow H. D. Thoreau's advice to "Simplify, Simplify" - upgrade them all at once, and take the lumps that this will result in.

Re:why not incremental upgrades?

[Adammil2000]

Keep in mind these are people in the games business having their relatively first "enterprise" system experience.

Seeing how the games business runs, I expected them to screw up more. They've done pretty good, except they skimped on the beta stress-testing that would have illustrated these problems sooner. Thousands of automated clients stressing the server would have been a good idea...

Re:why not incremental upgrades?

[tuxedobob]

Your choices are:

"Realms will be down from 6AM to 10AM PST."

"Realms A-D will be down for 6AM to 9AM PST, unless they're high pop, in which case they will end at 10AM. Realms E-I will be down 12PM to 4PM, except medium and lower, which will be done by 3:15. J-O will be down during peak playing hours, so suck it. P-S will be down...."

I really tire of your type

[Shivetya]

They have had nearly 5 months to fix their problems. They are pulling in how much per month? I haven't seen them stop charging people until they get it right. Sure they credit a day or two here but they continue to charge.

That 1.5m looks impressive until you realize its worldwide and the server problems most are concerned with are those in North America. We don't know what their status is in Korea and elsewhere. As for the unexpected NA numbers, well they had enough hardware on hand for 80+ servers which tells me they did anticipate a crush.

There is NO end game for WOW except PvP and Battlegrounds. New game or not they should have had enough in place to satisfy the players. Instead they released before they were done, again a common theme, and have decided to let the players sit and spin until they get the updates out.

So quit apologizing for them. Your only hurting the fans and Blizzard isn't going to reward you for your kissing up. If anything they sit back, chuckle, and think "how nice to have fanbois to eat our shit". This is a big corporation, they are selling a service, they damn well better get it right and quickly if they keep charging for it.

Re:I really tire of your type

[flipper65]

Well, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. If only it were as easy as walking in to the server room and sacrificing hundred dollar bills then yes, the problems would have been gone by now.

In the grand scheme of things five months is a relatively short period of time to work the bugs out of a large system like the WoW server farm.

Most of the servers that have been affected by the worst cases of downtime are the highest pop servers and they do need to resolve those problems and satisfy those customers even if that means closing those servers for new characters.

I don't know what industry you are in, but I am in the IT world and every time you have to patch a system, no matter how many times you have done it on the test bench, you hold your breath and cross your fingers. Multiply that by the number of inter-related systems that Blizzard is running and you begin to see that it is actually pretty amazing how quickly they are able to rectify those issues without having to resort to a rollback.

As to the end game, man, just chill for a sec. Did you even stop to look at the in game world while you were rushing headlong to 60? They are working on the content as is plainly evident by a cruise over to http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/. In fact, the patch yesterday introduced some of that content.

Re:I really tire of your type

[kyager]

They have plenty to satisfy their players, and even if 500,000 players suddeny drop their subscriptions becuase of downtime/lag/etc, they are still racking in a huge amount of money, which is all every game is about, they weren't made to entertain, they were made to provide a source of income.

Re:I really tire of your type

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is important to consider another factor. Of course Blizzard has the money to handle the fixes at this point, that's not the problem. The issue is manpower. Have you seen the hiring page for Blizzard lately? It dwarfs that of even EA. They have the money, they just can't get enough employees to fix the expansion of players, and with the game increasing at such an astounding rate, they can't keep up with the number of customers they are gaining. It's not that they aren't trying to fix this either, as they are hiring for an enormous amount of positions. Again, it takes time to hire employees, especially capable ones. I think that if you took the time and compared the gameplay to that of EQ, SWG, AO, and others, you'd easily notice the difference in quality and supportiveness of corporate staff.

Re:I really tire of your type

[C0rinthian]

There is NO end game for WOW except PvP and Battlegrounds. New game or not they should have had enough in place to satisfy the players. Instead they released before they were done, again a common theme, and have decided to let the players sit and spin until they get the updates out.

Unlike most MMO's, WoW actually has content before the endgame, and it has a heckuva lot of it. The only reason I play WoW is because the game starts at 1, not 60. Remember, it's relatively easy to add content to the end game. It's much harder to fill in the middle. Dire Maul should keep people busy for a few weeks before it's maxed out, and there is still existing endgame content that hasn't been done. (Ragnaros?)

Re:WoW is dieing

[brkello]

WoW is dieing (Score:-1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24, @02:35AM (#12033478)

Netcraft Confirms it! [netcraft.com] (well the site at least)

(If this is modded down it had better be for being redundant)

Haha...I guess he got his wish. I like things like this...while the post is uninteresting, whoever modded it gets a +1 Funny from me.

High versus Low population servers

[snuf23]

I'm not a WoW player but I may a copy up in the future when I get bored with City of Heroes.
It seems that most of the problems people are having are associated with high population servers. When you are setting up your account on WoW does it give you a breakdown of population levels on servers?

Re:High versus Low population servers

[kyager]

When you log-in and decide which server you're going to use, it tells you wether the server has a low, medium, or high population, also each server is color coded from green -> yellow -> red. Yo ucan change your server at any time, and they hold events every few days that will allow you to migrate your characters from oen server to another for free.

Re:High versus Low population servers

[Anulith]

Yes, you can see high population, low population, and medium population servers and the low are at the top by default (pretty sure of this, don't remember changing any sorting method). So, the absolute only reason to choose playing a high or medium population server is to be with your friends. If you're not playing with friends and just want to start out alone, the low population servers are great.

That's one of the problems.

[devphil]

The available realms are predesignated, both source and destination. And it's a one-way trip. So all the l33t jerks at the level cap on (say) Warsong arrive on Bonechewer, trash the game economy, and cause the once-fast server to become unplayably slow.

The low-pop server becomes the high-pop server, and the high-pop server becomes the low-pop one. There's no "rate limiter" that notices when both realms have balanced out at medium-pop and disallows further transfers (or even warns about them). There's no going back for the "immigrant" Warsongers, and the dissatisfied "native" Bonechewers can't leave.

I used to hope that my own realm would get to transfer out. Now I'm hoping that we get to transfer out, and everybody else leaves. And I'm praying that we don't appear on the destination side of the list.

Re:That's one of the problems.

[Temporal]

There's no "rate limiter" that notices when both realms have balanced out at medium-pop and disallows further transfers (or even warns about them).

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that transfers will end if the populations balance out. But I also kind of doubt that will happen. It seems that most people are staying on their native servers.

I mean, really. 90% of WoW players are too stupid to comprehend these concepts. How these people manage to get themselves up to level 60 without brains is beyond me, but I've grouped with enough of them to know they exist.

Well, the best design ..

[RedLaggedTeut]

I agree, sort of, that the design could be better, but even the best design has problems handling situations when all players converge in one place, like the central market place, for example to stage a demonstration for better servers and software ;-)

WoW == Gateway drug

[AlexMax2742]

This server downtime and lag, combined with the fact that it just got boring after Level 30, is why I ended up quitting WoW.

However, I find that because of WoW, I am now able to wrap my head around other MMORPGS's a lot easier. Before WoW, I thought the idea of playing an MMORPG was ridiculous. Now, I"ve gotten a taste and moved on to EVE and couldn't be happier. I guess I have Blizzard to thank for it.

Re:WoW == Gateway drug

[C0rinthian]

Heh, I went from Eve to WoW. Ironically, Eve is NOTHING like traditional MMO's, so I'm not sure how your WoW experience helped ya.

Eve is a great game, but I got bored after two years of it... (still got my characters training away)

Re:WoW == Gateway drug

[AlexMax2742]

Made me more receptive to them in general. Showed me that there ARE MMORPGS's out there that you don't have to poopsock in to have fun.

Nothing prevents it

[Rhys]

The little java free-MMO called Runescape does a version of it. Your character exists only once on the central DB servers. I suspect those DB servers are running some sort of replication between the US and Euro server clusters, and then the front end worlds all pull off that same, single, DB.

You only see people on your server, (so if you're on NY1 you don't see anyone but those on NY1) but if you logout and log back in to a different server (NY2) your character is just as it was from NY1.

The problem with what you're suggesting is that some games (like horizons, guild wars, etc) have a fully-seamless world -- no zoneing, ever (well unless you teleport but that's something else now isn't it?). If you have no zoneing, then you've got a harder time breaking players up into distinct chunks -- players who are on the border of two server's zones need updates from both zones, etc.

On the other hand if you have strict zones (like CoH), you only have so many zones. That makes it hard to load balance things, so what CoH does is starts pushing people to an overflow zone (aka "Atlas Park 2") when they try to zone in or log in to a too full zone.

But too many of "Atlas Park n" and it gets hard to meet up with your friends to do missions and such.

I guess my point is: it is solved, but the solutions bring up problems of their own.

Best hardware, better solution

[Anonymous Coward]

WISH had a nice solution to it - just one seamless world, without any zoning.
The world was served by a computer cluster (something like 80 dual P4 thightly bound machines),
and whenever you logged on you were on the only one "copy" of the world, and you could meet, adventure, etc. with anyone logged.

Pity it was cancelled at beta...

(fwyzard)