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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)."
Huh? The pirate servers are all working fine... just fine. I guess you don't always get what you pay for, eh?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
...not to mention that in Europe (esp. Greece where I live) lag is just unbearable. the doc
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.
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".
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
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.)
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.
God spoke to me.
Wha? Wouldn't it make the company #1 financially in just a few years if it keeps up at this rate.
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
Hey! $26,000 - thats what I make a year too!
... what?
Hour?
Huh?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
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.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
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.
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...
Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. -Hawking
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?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
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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 ;-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
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.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
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.
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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!
Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. -Hawking
I'll be happier than a pig in...
Everquest?
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.