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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.
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
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.