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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.
I am not surprised. I work for a Data Center/Hosting company. I have worked with automakers, clothing companies, and several other VERY large enterprises. Companys that do hundreds of MBPS of Internet traffic. They ALL struggle getting their hands around the load. That is a fact of life AND it is worse and will always be worse for companies like Blizzard. Load testing companies like Mercury have taken YEARS to develop systems that can reasonably simulate web load. Now imagine having to develop some way to reasonably simulate hundreds of THOUSANDS of users running a THICK client like WOW. Some using modems, some DSL, and some on college campuses. Some sitting there, fishing, fighting, chatting, etc... That my friend is a BITCH to simulate, thus the real world is the only way. I do feel for Blizzard. The customers who can't understand scaling/simulating that kind of traffic has lost site of the truly monumental task they have at hand.
My advice is this, get pissed if lasts more than a week. Else give 'em slack. As a way to compare, MOST large websites(like e-com) suffer on searches. Searches to 'full table scans' of product, product text, inventory etc... Imagine all the other dynamics WoW has vs your frigging browser.
A) Kill Monster - Get exp points
B) Get money
C) Use A&B to "level up"
D) Use results of "level up" to do A&B faster!
All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats). I'd like to see a game where NOBODY get's to see ANY numeric values for ANYTHING. The only player indication should be health which should be some sort of description at the bottom of the page which says something like "you feel awful" or "the pain in my leg hurts like hell!".
No "levels" for the players to work toward. All you could know is that you used that cool two-handed sword to kill the troll and it was kinda easy....should you go attack that dragon? These games would REALLY be interesting then.
The game producers KNOW that numeric stats addict people because people naturally like to make systems efficient.
Brilliant idea!!! I remember having a GM (specifically for Rifts, a Palladium RPG) in my paper RPG days who decided he'd take our character sheets and not let us see them. We had turned the game into such a hack and slash nightmare that he got sick of mastering the game for us. The second he took our character sheets and we stopped worrying about comparing our numbers... We started to ROLE PLAY so much more than role dice for 10 hours at a time and kicking tires on how much SDC (structural damage capacity for those not familiar with Palladium games) our armor could take.
I played EVE for around 9 months. Independent for 1-2, then finally got back into Xanadu (I was Xanadu in Planetarion, but being a member in PA didn't guarantee EVE membership. I wouldn't have played EVE if not for Xan though.)
:(
EVE had a great concept, but it was too full of bugs and no real endgame other than mindless mining and farming NPCs in 0.0 space. There was supposed to be this rich commerce market, but the truth was that the commerce market crashed almost instantly with oversupply, and the only people who could make profit were those that controlled the rare Tech 2 blueprints. The problem is that CCP made it too easy for one player organization to control the T2 market. (Yes, I know that organization happened to be MY corporation. I disliked what happened nearly as much as the little guys that got stepped on, partly because I did spend 1-2 months as the "little guy".)
I got tired of the game, and while I loved Xanadu, the game mechanics caused us to fight internally way too often. I wound up leaving the game before it destroyed friendships. Unfortunately, not everyone was so smart - I don't recall the details but Xan tore itself in half a month or two later. I wasn't surprised.
I play Dark Age of Camelot now, which has a much simpler concept (bad in some ways) but a much more well thought out endgame (very good) and game mechanics that don't easily contribute to strife within guilds/corporations/whatever they may be called in a given game. The only bad thing is that none of my former Xan buddies play.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
More pics: http://photobucket.com/albums/f324/Heldarcina/
Next came Luclin, which was more or less the worst: 2 very high end zones (Ssra Temple and Vex Thal, the latter being only available after a very long, time consuming quest, and requiring to beat the boss of Ssra temple), heaps of monsters with mountains of hit points and very few shortcuts (some of the boss monsters in Vex Thal used to take more than an hour each to beat, from the time you started hitting on it to the fall of the monster), in fact Vex Thal itself was usually done in 2 to 3 days (6-10 hours raid each day)
Then came Planes of Power, which saw much less "huge-ass HPs" mobs, but more event-driven things... that in the end took about as long, and it had 10 times the number of boss mobs Luclin had. Not only that, but even the short events were a pain (a single error and you'd have been preparing for 3 hours for nothing, thank you drive through, come back next week... and i'm not joking here), most of them were buggy and unreliable at first, the top tier guilds spend a year "debugging" the various scripts before being allowed to reach the final zone of the expansion.
I got done playing soon after my guild beat PoTime (disc: I wasn't in a top tier guild, so that was in mid-2004) because it was just taking too much time, and wasn't fun anymore (to me), but I'm pretty sure the high end hasn't changed much (may be slightly funnier, but it's no less time consuming)
When I stopped playing, I had a /play of 160 days over about 4 years I think (160 days as in 160*24h with the character logged in the game), I know some people who had been averaging that kind of /played every year since the release of EQ (had a guildmate with 500 days of /play)...
There, you have it, that is EQ's insanity. And we even liked it.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Also, with the opening of the gates, many new cenarion circle centered quests become avaliable. Most are in the form of 'get x number of these items' or 'kill x number of these beasts', but most can be done solo or in small groups. Each gets progressivly more difficult and do end in epic items. I did not play on the test server, but apparently virtually all of them can be done in a 5 man group.
How hard is it to get into a High-Level raid guild in WOW? Is it like in the orginal Everquest where it got almost impossible because the gear/content you needed to get into the guild was almost impossible to get into without having a large guild, or in WoW all you really need to be is level 60 and high playtime
I just have to say that:
1. I was an EQ addict
2. I replaced my TV time with Game time...
Now I dont play EQ anymore, but I have returned to TV..
What was better?
New players get almost nothing from it as far as I can tell.
:) I was 37 at the time and saving up for my horse, this was a huge help.
As a level 43 undead rogue on Darkspear this is not entirely correct. Even if we can't raid the new dungeons yet contributing to the war effort is fruitful in the way of items and reputation. Every time you turn in items you receive tokens you can turn in for reputation as well as a chest which has random items in it.
Turning in 20 wool bandages that I made from wool dropping off of mobs netted me 25 gold when that chest had a blue (rare) mace in it that I was able to sell on the auction house.
The wife and I both quit WoW about 2 weeks ago. I'd say that we are much happier without it. We are more relaxed and get a lot more accomplished in our lives.
MMORPGs in general, and WoW in particular, have a way of slowly sucking you into their world and chewing up ever increasing amounts of your time. It's human nature to want your virtual character to grow stronger and do well. But WoW is a game of timesinks. You invest massive amounts of time or you don't progress. In the end you may find it feels more like a vaguely exciting 2nd job.
My advice: if you are playing WoW more than 10 hours a week, give it up for a month and see if you don't feel a lot better.
That is something I never quite understood about Blizzard. They should do more for the casual player. When you think about the resources each kind of player consumes, hard-core 16-hour-day guys demanding new and greater epic world events or casual players just logging in a few hours a week that would be thrilled to see it rain (for example), by far the latter group is the more profitable ones and should be encouraged to stay.
Amen, to that brother. Just adding content that allows scaling between hardcore player and the casual player would be a great boon to ANY online multiplayer game. You know, give a little something to all the players making it worth their time to play and pay for your game. Casual players pay the same amount as the hardcore players and don't use as many resources.
But I also think that when you looking at raw numbers casual players are much more likely to dump your product for the next big thing. Those Hardcore 16-hour a day guys are much more likely to keep paying long-term because they've already invested a lot of time getting that ultra-super-pimp-smack-yo-ass-elite gear. So even if they do decide to try another game, they are less likely to discontinue their subscription due to all the work they put into it. I'm just not sure if Blizzard has enough of those uber-gamers to maintain all those servers when the casual players start dropping in droves for lack of content.
Of course some casuals just re-roll and start a new character. I did twice but never felt like playing the new characters, I was just re-doing pretty much everything I did with the other character just in a slightly different play-style. SO I walked.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
Ok, seriously, what exactly motivates all these "I'm so glad I don't play MMOs" comments? Are we supposed to pat you on the back for avoiding the big bad mmo?
Or its is some strang kind of elitism, "Well I may play games, but least I don't play those dirty MMOs." I know people that play console games MORE than I play WoW (more hours a day that is) and yet people always blab about "MMO addiction." NEWS FLASH, any form of entertainment can be addicting, but its easier to marganalize people with a form you don't particularly like. But tell me, which is "worse" spedning 4 hours in from of the tube with a controller in a completely self absorbed activity, or spending 4 hours in an MMO where you actually can speak and interact with actual people.
So for all the "I'm so glad I avoid MMOs" people, get over yourself and put your hypocracy where its wanted.
The Blizzard developers do NOTHING all day except spending it thinking about WOW. 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, they're running over stuff about WOW in their heads. To them, considering that, a 4-hour dungeon *is* casual.
Also, the hard-core players are (generally) the ones who post on the forums. I tried once, but the forums move too quickly for me to keep up with and, like you, I have a life and a job. When your topic goes from the front page to page 13 in like two hours, who can possibly have any kind of meaningful discussion on those forums?
But anyway, yes, I left WOW for the same reason. They don't give a crap about casual players. Sadly, the other post is right... probably one of the best games for casual players right now is EVE Online. Too bad EVE is so boring when you start.
Comment of the year
I believe it's not a bug with the new area; it's an architecture problem.
A WoW "realm" is split over several servers, each handling part of the game world. As characters move from area to area, they're handed from server to server. Whilst the servers can cope fine (using that term loosely) with a full load when everyone's spread nicely randomly about, they've proved time and again to be incapable of handling the abnormal case of very large numbers players concentrated in a single area (and therefore on a single server) - get enough in one place, and the whole realm dies, every time. As I understand it from posts above, that's what happened this time - people crowding into Silithus to witness the World Event.
What's unfortunate, though, is that this doesn't bode well for other realms, the World Events of which may well be doomed to suffer the same fate, and for similar reasons. Whether the actual cause of failure is something that Blizzard can ultimately address, and whether they actually do anything, remains to be seen.
So, okay, WoW has a series of 'endgame' raid dungeons. By this, we mean 10+ players investing their time and effort into a single dungeon until they beat it.
When my guild started working on Upper Blackrock Spire (a 15 player dungeon) in March 2005, it took us 6 hours to reach the last boss and we didn't even beat him. A few weeks later, we were beating it in 4 hours, then 3 hours, and now we can do it in a little over 1 hour. Each time we played through the dungeon, we got better gear, and we became more knowledgeable about the environment.
Once we got UBRS worked out, we started in on Molten Core (40 player dungeon) at the end of May, and devoted 4 hours to it on Tuesdays and Sundays. We started killing the first boss, then the first two bosses, then three, four, etc. Last week, we changed our raid schedule to clear MC in a single day instead of over two days. We'll get MC down to 2 hours in due time.
Some of us started working on Onyxia in September, and we eventually attracted enough attention to beat her in October. It wasn't a requirement, but people saw our progress and wanted to take a part in it.
Now we're working on Blackwing Lair, the second 'endgame' dungeon. We devote 4 hours to it on Tuesdays, and we'll beat it, too.
So who are we? We're a middle-of-the-road guild, 15th on the server to kill Ragnaros. We field 2 separate MC raids per week because there's enough interest in the guild, and we have new players join and old players leave all the time.
We don't require attendence, daily logins or certain amounts of raid 'points'. We don't require people to level to 60 within a certain frame of time. We do require maturity, a minute amount of intelligence, and the desire to avoid causing inter-guild (and intra-guild) drama.
We think things've worked out pretty well.
present day... present time... hahahaha...