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

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.

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.