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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)."
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.
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.
Your information is out of date. The following transfers are currenty allowed:
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.
>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.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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.