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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)."
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.
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.
I'm from Greece too - do you use European or US servers ?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.