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

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?

[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.