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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Oh right, gay SM then?
No, no, no. AQ is in Silithus. You're thinking of Tristfal Glades. And I don't think the Scarlet Crusaders would take kindly to you insulting their home.
The laws of probability forbid it!
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.
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The short version (not to necessarily be trusted, what with me being a lv 49 noob on a sleepy role-playing server): Ahn'Qiraj is a big hole in the ground out in the middle of the desert filled with huge ugly bug monsters. It's necessary to beat it because.... you know... bugs are ugly. So ugly that both opposing factions have teamed up to wage war against it. It takes forty top-level characters to beat, so we're probably talking days of planning and hours upon hours of setup before you can even walk in the door. Oh, and everyone on the server had to collect resources before ANYONE could try any of this.
NPC: "Hey kids! Give us 8 million linen bandages and 476,000 crisp basilisk urethras!"
Player: "Won't that be terribly boring? And completely useless for actually advancing my character?"
NPC: "You don't understand! This is for... the War Effort! You asked Blizzard for more content, right?"
Player: "Soooo.... Content means turning everyone on the server into farmers? For worthless items?"
NPC: "Shut up, kid. This is an epic adventure. This is what you're paying for."
Player: "Okay, okay. Even if it's not very useful, it won't be so bad to have all these resources stored up for when we want to storm this new dungeon.... "
NPC: "Wait, what? You mean you thought you'd ever see any of that again? We're pretty much burying those bandages and urethras out in the desert."
Player: "Sigh. I guess this is what you have to deal with if you want to see the high-end content. Or even if you don't, really."
NPC: "That's the spirit! And look, the dungeon just opened! You can find it past the--"
Disconnected from server.
I support the separation of oil and state.
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
I work for blue chip companies setting up websites that are the busiest in their respective industries, including full connection through to back-end systems.
When the systems die at peak trading, it's 10s of millions in revenue lost. An hour.
My current company provides video downloads off our main sites. We service several hundred retail outlets. We offer very complex product search capabilities, and obviously we permit those products to be purchased. We're dealing with exceedingly large bandwidth, CPU and memory use. We have IBM mainframes, more Sun kit than you could fit in your house and more Wintel boxes than I'd like.
All of this is being provided for less than Blizzard's monthly subscription revenues. Far less. In fact, 3-4 months of WoW subscription revenue in Europe alone would cover the IT costs of our entire business.
So for Blizzard to be unable to handle the loads involved is frankly astonishing. Their systems architecture clearly isn't adequate. Their bandwidth isn't reliable. Heck, they can't even keep their website up and running at peak times - quite a simple website, at that.
This is despite being live for well over a year now. They know how much bandwidth each user needs. They know how many users they have. They know what the capacity on each server is. They already have logon queues at times of peak load, to control the numbers of logged in players.
I have no sympathy for Blizzard on this matter, because they've had plenty of time to get this sorted, and consistently fail to deal with it. This isn't rocket science, you don't need to steal Google's employees to find a solution, just get someone competent in and fund the necessary infrastructure.
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.
WoW crashes when it gets only a few hundred people doing anything meaningful inside a zone. In total it handles a few thousand people connected to any given server at any given time, with some of those a sizeable portion of those people off-loaded onto other servers via instances most of the time.
In addition, they're well aware of their scaling problems, and have added things in to prevent the type of occurances that caused crashes(City Raids), as well as scaling back the max server populations(hence queues). So not having prepped properly for a World Event of this magnitude, especially given their revenues is inexcusable.
My guess is the situation at blizzard is the following:
Most of the core devs went onto other projects
Like most MMOs their network code is laughable.
Their code doesn't parallellize well, so they can't just toss more hardware at the problem
They can't fix the above without a drastic redesign, and by the time they did that it would probably cease to matter.
And yes, it's doable, I've seen MUDs/MUSHs written as hobbies that handled several hundred concurrent users on hardware from the mid-90s. An MMO doesn't push *that* much more traffic than a text-game that saturates a 56k connection(as many did), and it certainly doesn't do many more back-end calculations. Considering how much hardware has scaled and how much further we've gotten in various areas, there just isn't any excuse for several hundred people in a single world-segment causing the server(not the client) to go OMG and crap out.
No web-based business craps out under that kind of traffic. How to cope with it is well-known at this point. I mean shit, this is the type of crap DIKU's massive list of socket descriptors did under load, and that was written over 10 years ago!
Imagine a phone switch doing this! That's tech from the 70s that handles waaayyyy more traffic than one of blizzard's servers. Google easily copes with orders of magnitude more traffic every moment of every day, and holds up like a champ. Stop being an apologist for a drastic lack of planning and poor engineering.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
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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Mozilla: View->Page style->No style
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
None of what you mention is nearly as dynamic and complex as a high-traffic MMORPG server back-end.