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World of Warcraft AQ Gates Open!
Tayman writes "Wow...who didn't see this one coming? The players on the World of Warcraft Medivh server opened the gates to AQ. What happened next? The server crashed repeatedly. Why create content the servers can't handle?
The very first time I read about this patch, I knew the servers would crash. The more people who open the gates, the more angry customers Blizzard will have in my opinion. With 5million+ subscribers, you would think Blizzard would have the best servers/connection money can buy. Although, I'm sure it's more complicated than simply plugging in a few ram chips and faster processors though.
Most of the people involved in the raid are having a great time though. Could this be the most epic battle ever introduced to the mmorpg market? All signs point to yes. Let's see how long the mobs will respawn. Hopefully, the people of the Medivh server haven't seen anything yet.
Either way, I would hate to be a network admin for Blizzard atm. ^_^
Here are some pics of the event. Thanks go out to all of those who took these pics.
World of Warcraft AQ Pics Check out MMORPG Veteran to keep up with the events as they unfold." Update: 01/23 13:44 GMT by Z : Additionally, brandor wrote in with a link to some video of the event.
Hmm,
I just wanted to say 1 thing as a wow player.
1. To create content that not only is unplayable for the people that participate in it (how many times did medivh crash yesterday?) but also makes the game unplayable for us not participating in it really is very very crappy. Yesterday I had 172 mins wait in a queue before I could log on only to find the lag made the game unplayable and then all crashed and I gave up. It has been like this since christmas (more or less) and it really is unacceptable for a game 1 year old. I know that this was the last drop for me and will make me look for another game.
AQ is a new 40 man dungeon. (There's also a 20 man AQ dungeon). The current 40 man dungeons have of course been played since release, but they are pretty much the pinnacle of end-game content in WoW. Opening a new 40 man dungeon adds a huge chunk of new end-game content (and phat lewts) that all the 60s who have run Molten Core and Black Wing Lair, the two other 40 man dungeons, a hundred times will want to get in on.
The laws of probability forbid it!
This is the 40-man raid dungeon that is harder than the two others that are currently in game (MC and BWL). The elitist guild on my server (Guild: Vis Maior, Server: Bonechewer) has already cleared it on the test realm, and is just working on getting the gates open. We did the event where you get your reputation to neutral with the scarabs, but the server crashed when we originally tried to do the cutscene. They did it again yesterday, and had no issues, despite it being three weeks after we had hoped to do it.
But yeah, Bonechewer is a perfect example of how Blizzard is not applying to their customers. I don't give a flying f*ck about my class (rogue) sucking, and all the buffs I need. I care more about not having to wait in a 30 minute queue on a medium population server, active crashes, lag spikes, and chaos when it comes to doing instances.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Ahn'Qiraj (sp?) is a new dungeon that only opens after each server donates a large amount of in-game items to various NPCs over the course of a couple weeks. It has content that is geared mainly towards players who have both reached the level cap and joined huge "raiding" guilds. New players get almost nothing from it as far as I can tell.
I think. I was pretty confident that I knew what was going on until I read that terrible, terrible article summary. The reason the submitter brought up server stability is that players from all the 100+ servers started creating characters on the "Medivh" server in order to watch the in-game event that opens the dungeon, because Medivh finished the quest before all the other servers. Blizzard suspended new character creation on the server though, so I'm not sure if stability is still an issue or not.
AQ (Ahn'Qiraj) is a new area, added by the last patch, containing new mobs and two new dungeons.
:P
Players have constantly complained that the WoW game world is static - there is no way for players to change anything in the game world: all the mobs respawn, dungeons reset, etc.
Blizzard's solution to this was to make AQ accessible only after a one-time server-wide event. The much-anticipated secret event ended up being players on each server having to turn in huge amounts of stuff (800,000 linen bandages, 20,000 wolf steaks, etc...) as well as one player doing a TON of grinding to get some hammer or another (in effect, the most efficient way to do this being to have an entire faction choose one player to help - cue politics and drama). After all these exciting preparations were completed (Medivh being the first such server, apparently) the gates to AQ finally opened, and... it looks like players are still waiting to find out what happens next.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
TFA tells me that AQ stands for "Ahn'Qiraj"
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats).
Agreed, the levelling up is usually just as exciting as filling in numbers in a spreadsheet, but there are some MMORPGs that try to do something new. You are even stuck on thinking that it has to be about combat and killing stuff. These people try to do something even more innovative, which might be why they haven't become as popular:
Puzzle Pirates, the first mmoarrrrrpg. You simulate combat by solving puzzles. Different players that crew the ship perform different puzzles, the better they do the more tokens the captain gets (movement, cannon shots, ship health..) to use when the sea battle commences.
A Tale in the Desert, a game that has NO combat. You "win" over other players by performing artworks, building pyramids, getting people to vote for you or performing cermonies and rituals, like for instance
"Have 20 charactars stand still and quietly observe the sunrise. If one speaks or moves away the ritual is destroyed."
or "Bury a large bag of money in the desert. Tell 10 other players where it is. If the bag remains for a week undisturbed you have passed the test of friendship. The other players get nothing for participating in the test. Unless they cheat, in which case they get the money."
You can get laws voted through that changes the whole game, and so on.
Both games are characterised by having more mature and social players than the hack and slash games, and a much larger percentage of female players.
I haven't played them myself though more than the demos. I stay away from most games and especially online games after shaking off a one year Everquest addiction 5 years ago.
Try them! Both have demos available, ATITD have a Linux client, PP both Linux and Mac (runs on all platforms that have Java actually).
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
What the OP neglected to mention is that Blizzard already had to take extreme measures to prevent players from other servers from crowding into Medivh to rubberneck. They not only closed character creation on Medivh (and a crapload of other servers), but also ported characters less than level 30 out of the relevant zone in an effort to reduce crowding.
What's unclear from the story as posted is whether the fault here is solely Blizzard's fault or whether players with no affiliation with the Medivh server caused the overcrowding and subsequent crashes.
Almost all major dungeons have a two letter abbreviation related to their name. Some have three. One is named for its boss instead of its name because that would ocnflict - DM is Dire Maul, and VC is Deadmines (VC for Van Cleef, the boss).
Short list of other major dungeons, in case they are referenced in this article:
(PS I don't know what the Hordies use for their faction-only instances. Sorry. <3)
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Because of all the damn raids. I do not want to sit and try to get a 15 man raid together to go to UBRS much less the time it takes to get a 40 Man together for one of the big dungeons.
Blizzard lost me as a customer as soon as I finished the last 5 man casual quest. Enough with the dungeons that take 8 hours to complete. I don't have that kind of time, I have a job and a wife. All i see coming down the line is patches adding more RAID content. SO I moved on.
Playing EVE now. What I like most about it, other than it being completely different than WOW, is that the play experience is dictated by me. I can be as indepth as I want, sinking hours upon hours into it at my leisure, or just login every now and then to check my skill training. Which makes it much more accessable to me during the week while I work, just login for a quick 30 minute to an hour fix and actually still come away feeling like I accomplished something.
Its also a game that involves some patience and time-management too, since all skills are learned in real time (even while not playing). The end result is as long as I choose carefully what skills to advance there is no way to literally be left behind training wise. Money still takes some grinding but not like it does in WoW.
A fun MMORPG without so much tedious upkeep.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
I've also seen Gnomeregan shortened to just Gnome, and Maraudon to Mara.
Santa's suicide mission go!
So yeah, in general, high-end content in WoW is fairly accessible. On Skullcrusher (EU), I think there's about a dozen distinct raiding groups who can clear the 20 man instance and the two 40-man encounters (A couple of the zerg guilds can support enough people to field multiple raids, and a couple of small guilds field joint raids), and probably more who regularly clear the current 20-man and will be able to move up to do AQ20 without much of a problem.
The problem is, this just turns it into "City of Speakeasies of Math" as players use statistical analysis programs like Herostats to crunch the numbers and come up with their own estimates of percentages--and it's the ignorant newbies who have no idea what's good, what's bad, or even where to look to find out who end up getting stung, as they take powers that they think look good but those in the know already know are stinkers. It's far, far too easy to gimp a character build by making poor choices.
Adding insult to injury, now City of Heroes's Enhancement-management screen will tell you by what percentage the Enhancements you currently have slotted increase the base values (damage, accuracy, defense, etc.)--but there is still no way to find out what those base values actually are without search-engine archaology.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Gnomeregan can also be shortened to "gnomer", and I've seen Uldaman shortened to "ulda" and Maraudon to "mara" occasion.
the Sleeper was one guild working together to block content from everyone else, this is the whole server working together to open up content to everyone else.
You've left out a few:
Stockades (no abbrev.)
Sunken Temple (ST)...I forget the real name of this place, but it's what everyone calls it.
Wailing Caverns (WC)
Blackrock Depths (BRD)
Just another day in Paradise
I do load testing and application monitoring for a living. Like F Scentura said, I can assure you that websites are the most trivial applications both to simulate and to maintain. Streaming video? Peace of cake. You got your bandwidth, you got your content servers, your web servers, and, if you're really big, an application server somewhere in the middle. All those servers have to handle is an inbound connection with a request for some data and then serve that data. CPU usage comes strictly from the OS serving requests, bandwidth is simply a function of users * file size and memory is again strictly a feature of users connected to the system. I can do a full-scale simulation for that for about 100K. This includes hardware, software and my time. Time to do this: two weeks. Your mileage might vary.
With that in mind, I would never, ever pretend that I can give Blizzard any type of estimate on what will happen when AQ opens. How many users will log on? What will they do? What instances will they try to access? Where will they be? At best I might be able to give them an estimation on when WoW will crash, but I will be completely unable to say how probably that scenario is. As a result, Blizzard is indeed completely on their own when it comes to stuff like this. They can minimize the risk, but it's always a question of how much money you want to throw at a problem that has an unknown probability.
This time, Blizzard chose badly. Give them some time to fix it, and start complaining if it looks like they are not doing that. Until then, keep in mind that webservers are small fry in the world of networked appplications. MMORPGs are among in the heavyweights.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Gnomeregan - gnome or gnomer
Uldaman - uld or ulda
Maraudon - mara
Wailing Caverns - WC
Ragefire Chasm - RFC (horde only...and personally I find RFC/RFD/RFK to be confusing sometimes, but that's the names people use)
And who's to say it's a bandwidth issue? MMOs don't generally need a huge amount. It's the server-side processing that's the bottleneck -- I can't imagine how many database lookups have to take place every game tick, and even after those it has to do a considerable amount of manipulation on that data. What do most web servers do? They take a file or grab some db contents and shovel them into the pipe.
Every player in an MMO needs to know about every other player and entity around them within a certain distance, at the very least, so it follows that when a lot of players are in a small area more calculations have to be performed in a given time unit. The solution is to streamline your algorithms or throw hardware at the bottleneck -- both of which I'm sure Blizzard has done or is in the process of doing. It's not necessarily such an easy solution...