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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.
What AQ is supposed to be (for those that don't play WoW).
An expansion? Just a new dungeon? What's so special about it that it causes such server overload?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As the authentication servers crash...
Seriously though, this game looks like loads of fun but everyone I know that plays it has a total life-consuming addiction with it.
I'll climb onboard once it's free and less addicting than heroin.
--
Washington DC Metro? Fairfax Underground!
Every time one of my friend starts talking about WoW, or whenever I hear news like this, half of me says "wow, this is cool, I should play." And the other half of me says "thank God I that don't."
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
all these wbesites have to be virtually unreadable? Dark text on black background....What are they hiding?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I can't understand one word of this slashdot post. Maybe there's hope for my sex life after all.
...and don't have to deal with buggy content, server crashes, mapserver disconnections, developer nerfs, and--stop laughing! Dammit, stop laughing already!
Oh well, at least I have a good time RPing and writing in it...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whoa. Generally, I take slashdot to be a lighthearted place to read interesting techish things. This post really does give me pause though. Not only does it sound like a mad World of Warcraft player's blog entry, it doesn't even explain the elements of what happened. If it wasn't for the fact that I play World of Warcraft I wouldn't have had a clue what he was on about.
I agree, Blizzard should have tested that part of the patch more specifically. Apparently, the gate was already opened on the test server (this is what I've heard from other players, I never did test the patch) which would leave me to suspect they never tested opening the gate very much.
I actually expected this crash.
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
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.
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
These games are the biggest regret of my life. Seriously. I once spent over 1400 hours in one year playing one (back in the text days). That's seventy days, if you are counting.
I could have been getting good grades, chasing chicks, and figuring out what the "#$# to do with my life. I seriously messed up all three. Instead, I just had the coolest equipment in some worthless game. A couple people I know failed out of school entirely because of these games.
You can do better.
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.
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?
Actually, I'm in a guild that runs ZG/MC weekly. Many people who "Know how to play" think ZG has harder bosses than MC. Nobody ever runs a pick up group through ZG. There is a simple line between UBRS and ZG, where as the casual player can run through UBRS with strangers, you need a guild, vent/teamspeak, etc to do ZG and above. UBRS typically is run with 20 people over an hour or two, so I'm not sure where you get your '3 man in 20 minutes' idea other than the typical blizzard fanboy crap.
The war effort isn't 'cool' either. I played world of warcraft for the WAR part, not to team up with the other faction. They could have made it a competitive effort on the pvp servers. Of course, they haven't cared about pvp since last June.
If they continue to release carebear crap like this, and endgame super dungeons for the ubernerds, they will lose a good deal of their playerbase. Personally, I'm getting sick of having to do lame ass raids just to hang in the battlegrounds.
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
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
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.
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."
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.
Had you spent the 1400 hours chasing chicks, what do you think you might have had to show for it? Other than VD or a seriously brused ego?
Spend 1400 hours chasing chicks, and you're bound to get really good at it! Then you can write a book on the subject and make tons of money off of geeks who get tired of playing World of Warcraft, but who can't talk to a girl to save their lives.
Silly boy. That's now why the wrold went down. Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked the server because people in the game wouldn't shut up about him.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
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.
Also serving static web content is trivial compared to tracking the state of 5 million clients and letting them see each others in real time is so far beyond web hosting that it is laughable.
I worked at video game companies (Turbine) and I worked at some of IBM's large server farms (Poughkeepsie, Southbury) doing performance balancing. As far as software goes I have to say video games server technology makes web content delivery look like the stone age. The only thing that even compares in complexity is when IBM hosted the Olympic coverage. Trying to compare simple web content to a system where clients are all making updates to each others environments in real time is impossible.
I hate it when the Wow server's crash, but I have had my ego battered by what the guys at Blizzard have managed to do. They have done some great work and I am curious to see other game companies surpass the work Blizzard has done.
Nothing here is trivial. If it was it would have been done right the first time.
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)