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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?
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."
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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MSIE: File->Exit
Or, you could have spent those 70 days doing something equally stupid.
The only problem I have with your logic -- or anyone that heavily criticizes people for spending too much time on any one activity -- is the assumption that if they did other activities, they would inherently have more value.
I know people that spend hours a day, pretty much all of their leisure time, watching sports on TV. Is that really any better or worse than playing WoW for an equivalent amount of time? I don't think so (especially given that ESPN costs more).
I'm willing to bet that most people who are on WoW, if Blizzard went under tomorrow, would find something equally useless to do in their spare time. This idea that people who play games are all going take up triathlon training or feed the homeless in their spare time, if games weren't available, is dumb. In all likelihood they'd just watch TV.
I'm not arguing that too much of anything can't really mess up your life -- when people stop going to class or work to play games (or watch TV, or whatever), it's a real problem. However I'm not sure that games are much worse in this regard than any of several "time wasters" that I can think of, it's just that you don't hear about the other ones.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
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."
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.