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World of Queuecraft
BondGamer writes "Gamespot has an article discussing the ongoing problems with Blizzard's World of Warcraft. It outlines how the same issues have been plaguing the MMORPG for over a year now with no end in sight. From the article, 'If there's an absolutely excellent game, but no one can get online to play it, is it still excellent?'" Anyone have any hellacious queue stories? Update: 03/01 16:06 GMT by Z : Blizzard also announced today that they've hit 6 Million Subscribers.
There are times on the weekend when there are over 400 people in the queue on my server, and the wait to get in is 40 minutes.
They need to do some server splits, the way EQ used to do it.
What would be the feasibility of turning an MMORPG like WoW into a system like, say, Counter-Strike, where the servers are privately owned and run by individuals, clans, or something like that? What I could see happening with that is people buying WoW and then instead of paying Blizzard a monthly fee, they would pay whoever owned the server they wanted to play on. Of course, Blizzard would never let people do that because it means somebody else would be getting their $15/month, but it's an idea.
The problem is that a realm can get very busy after you've already levelled a character nice and high, and then you are screwed. I understand Blizzard is trying to deal with an avalanche (yeah, boo hoo) - the only real way to deal with it is to keep adding servers and allow players to transfer their characters between them. Obviously some kind of limit would need to be in place to keep people from hopscotching all over (say, 1 transfer a month or something), but since the service is literally falling down sometimes, it is only fair to allow players to load-balance themselves, and for free, in a reasonable way.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Have your guild reschedule your MC/BWL/AQ raids for 6am weekday mornings. I mean, if you're regularly raiding those instances you probably don't have a job anyway.
Last night I got back home and went to log on, figuring I could catch the end parts of my guild's MC run. I connect to the server and get put in a queue of 303. 10 seconds later, it becomes a queue of 300. Ef that. I canceled it and went to go play an alt on a different server. No phat lewts for me :(. What really takes the cake is that even though there was a queue, apparently the entire server was lagged badly. We get put into queues so we have to wait to play the characters we've spent months and months developing, and then when we finally get in it's lagged so much that the playing experience becomes frustrating?
Blizz: "gg no re"
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Well, I was am of the unlucky ones to have been on a realm that was open for character creation over the Christmas period. Prior to the end of December we were a medium population (sometimes high) realm with no queues. As soon as Christmas hit we sprung to a high pop realm and now get queues of about 30 mins a night.
As far as horrible queue stories go, I got booted out of WoW through network problems just before our first kill on Golemagg in MC and didn't manage to get back online due to a 15 min queue until the right was over and all the loot had been dealt.
Bliz appear to be making token efforts to help ease the problem with queues such as the new "Character Creation Management System" which prevents char creation on realms already queued but this is only going to stop the problem getting worse. Migration to another realm is the only real option and Migration windows are scarecly opened, plus it means you may potentially have to leave a lot of friends behind. This means their only real option is to upgrade the realm servers to be capable of handling more people (to reduce the queues) while still keeping char creation blocked.
Just don't create a file called -rf.
This is just one of the reasons that I quit my account over 2 months ago. It was hard at first -- I'd put in almost a year, been to all the major instances, and my 60 priest main was quite epic-equipped. It was hard, at first, to leave the guild that I'd helped to form, and the "friends" that I had met -- but, I could no longer justify spending $15 per month on a game that was quickly becoming more frustrating than it was enjoyable.
There are many other games out there which are
- just as fun as WoW
- have much better customer service & support
- cost a lot less, both in terms of money and time invested
- better for your health
No one can play it! It's the best game evar! Americans hate the French! Irishmen are drunk all day long! News for nerds! Stuff that matters!
Let's go ahead and rope it in a little bit, okay? Gross generalizations and hyperboles don't usually work out too well in the end when a single case to the contrary debunks the whole basis for arguement. Even that one probably won't stand up for long.
Nis
When you're scheduling or participating in raids, a few key members queued up for an hour delays things for everyone. We've had lots of times where we have a scheduled start time of 8PM that becomes 9PM easily with the queues. Even with people trying to login earlier, an hour and a half queue is obscene.
And as said, there is no end in sight. After 15 months, if there are not only still queue problems, they are getting worse weekly, what hope do we have for getting things fixed?
But there will still be suckers like me who keep playing and as long as that is the case, and enough do that, they get away with it.
A friend of mine sat in the que for one of the PvP places (I think It was something like warsong gulch?) for 30-some hours, that was kind of crazy. . . but I haven't had much experience with queues to get into a server. . .
FP
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
If you cannot get online because the server is full and puts you in the queue, then, apparently, there are people online, a whole lot, obviously. That doesn't relieve Blizzard from being cheap bastards that don't provide enough servers, but, as long as you don't want to infer lying, someone seems to be online, it just doesn't happen to be you.
Fuck that, adding more servers isn't a plus if it splits the userbase more. I don't want to find out a friend has been playing for six months on a different server and that we can never adventure together.
It's nontrivial but I really wish Blizzard would find a way to increase the concurrency on each server. Unfortunately, in addition to all the technical limitations, this probably means making the world bigger, which means breaking literally everything about the game.
If I were on one of the realms "closed" to new characters, I'd be incredibly ticked off. Granted, I'm already ticked off that I have to wait an hour to play every night (plus an hour some of the times I get disconnected, but not others), but that would be icing on the cake.
My server was relatively new when I started on it and now it has the usual primetime que of well over 500+. Compared to other servers this could be rather minor but the fact that it is still causing me headaches shows how severe the problem is.
My example is probably one that many have experienced. My raid guild was doing its usual round of Onyxia followed by MC and right in the middle of MC, I disconnect. Usually not that big of an issue, as I just do a restart and log back in....to find a que of 780 and a wait time of about an hour. I'm one of the primary healers, so its alot harder to take on bosses without me and getting another guildmate in takes time. Add to that the fact that I wont get any of the loot I might have been able to have a chance at and the issue of my reputation with the guild. Even if I'm a good player, if there is a higher chance I'll disconnect and be gone for over an hour because of the QUE (curse its name!) I'm less likely to be brought on raids. So it hurts me and everyone I'm playing with.
I especially don't know how casual players deal with it. If they want to log on and spend a free hour questing or something, in which case they can't prearrange that time and prepare, they wont play a minute as they just sit the que.
I am and always will be a stereotype, because who in their right mind prefers mono?
With blizzards initial money from other games, on top of 50+million a month, they could have legitimate servers that can handle more than 3k per server, and more than 100 people per 'area'
Can't wait for Darkfall!http://www.darkfallonline.com/
Although, it does suck that servers are filling up as soon as they're created, during the times I play, I don't seem to have too many queue problems... save for Saturdays, but I almost never get a chance to play on Saturdays anyway.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Wasn't it Yogi Berra that said "nobody goes there anymore...it's too crowded"?
after transfering to mug'thol (to avoid large queues on bleeding hollow) i once had to wait almost 3 hours in a queue, something like 900+ people in it at first (also orginally estimated 45 minutes wait time..)
day before yesterday on mug'thol i waited for an hour and a half and finally managed to get on
then i wanted for ANOTHER hour and a half to get into the AV battleground. then 5 minutes in half the people lost connection (including me) i couldnt reconnect for approx 15 minutes. when i finally was able to connect guess what? i had to wait in an hour and a half queue again, i got in BG queue again and it was going to be another hour and a half wait.. again..
i ended up having to goto sleep before it came up, i spent the entire night in one queue or another
RPPVP and PVP servers to be specific, but I have not yet had a queue to wait in (knock on wood). The second battle ground however I have only played once (everyone wants to be on a mount, the bg is a bit large)
No matter what they (or any MMORPG) does, there is a group of people that will whine.
...?
:)
The alternative to no queues is
A) Let everyone in. I've seen that in other games. It's not pretty. Things don't scale infinitely, and the game server would be unusable. People would then bitch that the game server is unusable.
B) Static cap the server population. They tried that recently. Immediatly there were tons of threads on their forums saying "I can't create a character on world X where my friend is playing! I paid $50 for this game, blah, blah blah".
Personally, I rarely see a queue, and I've been playing WoW for a year on the same server which has been "full" for some time. About the worst I see is about 30 minutes, and I simply alt-tab and read the news for a few or maybe do a quick chore around the house my wife had been nagging me to do
- Roach
Personally I blame all of Blizzard for using ULTRA-ANCIENT technology in most of their games.
Ok, it looks all nice and spiffy and polished and runs excellent on most machines, blah blah blah, but still... the most clear-cut case ? Isometric sprites (Starcraft) when 3D rendered RTSs started popping up... eh.
EVE-ONLINE. They got the right idea. DEATH TO SHARDING.
Split the world in regions, hold different regions on different physical servers, or just have a freakin' supercomputer running the realm... but have a huge network of PROXIES all around the world that lets people access the SINGLE existant world.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Hyjal had the constant 30-60 minute queues every evening up until January. All of a sudden after one of the patches there were no more (note, this was weeks after they stopped allowing new character creation). As of about a week ago, they all of a sudden came back with a vengeance. That speaks of technical issues on their end, not the number of players.
I regularly deal with the prime-time queues of 300-400. I just get home from work, log on, and go make and eat dinner. I'm much more frustrated with the lag issues--we've gone into Blackwing Lair many times, only to fight the first boss in Matrix-like "Bullet time." It's simply not that fun to play a game when you can't actually do what the game intends you to be able to do. Another interesting note--we opened the AQ gates this weekend, at 3am on Sunday. The server crashed 8 times during the opening and twice when the 10-hour event ended. Clearly getting back on wasn't a problem at 3am, but having a server go down like that just speaks poorly to some design choices.
I have a fairly easy solution. Log on to worldofwarcraft.com, select Account Management, then Change Subscription, and click the radio button "Cancel recurring subscription plan." They even let you fill out a box with your reason for leaving, presumable someone there reads them.
Although, I'm not so heavily into it as most of you, not even 60 after six months. Still, you could do it to get the point across and re-up again later.
Isn't there an ad for this game running in the U.S. ? The video rental store has a copy, called "Let's Wait In Line"
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
At peak hours, we just get "retreiving character list" for 20 minutes when we try to log on. Maybe we'ere queued and they just don't want to say it, or maybe it's just taking that long to get the character list. After we finally get the character list, we get the loading screen. The blue bar fills up... and we wait another 10-20 minutes.
Sometimes we get to play. Other times we get disconnected after the blue bar (perhaps our connection timed out?)
Honestly, I don't think character transfers are the answer. They just need more powerful hardware running the server. Or something like that.
I cancelled my account after that two weeks and went back to Guild Wars. Why?
I know I sound like a shill for Guild Wars or something, but it really is fun. The only downsides are that:
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yet that is what 'makes' most RPG's, you the Hero! saves the day, rescues the princess (or prince according to sex and/or preferrence) and slay the evil XXXXX.
But in an MMORPG you can't do that. In fact 99.99% of the time you are in a que of other people getting the same quest from the same NPC while another que is reporting that they completed the quest. Just how many blue stones does that merchant in Everquest 2 have anyway?
EQ2 did something world altering recently. One area was altered to include griffon towers (mass transport system) and the building of them was a world event. It worked because EQ2 was/is dying and there weren't all that many people around and it was mid level so many of the high levels were not even aware of it or couldn't be bothered.
Still for the maybe 3 dozen players in the evil realm on my shard it was a lot of fun. Especially since I was really to low level but still ended up saving a high levels ass :P Good fun when a level 18 beats a level 24 enemy owning a level 28 player. Granted he was busy crafting and the enemy never hit me but still.
Anyway, that is what makes real gameplay. Not doing grind missions but reshaping the world.
But even if you could do these events constantly for year after year how do you deal with popularity?
The griffon event was split as it happened in both the evil and good area of the world and was further split by 3 towers being built at the same time. And still it was laggy in a underpopulated game at odd hours in a low level realm (level 20-30 when most are at level 60-70)
If you had a full game or worse a non-sharded world like eve-online you would have to be extremely carefull not to create areas people have or want to be in.
SWG tried this. Early on when you created your character you could select your starting planet and city. Considering the size of the planets this would have allowed a huge number of players spread out over the planets and cities so that you would have a huge playerbase but without the crowding.
Pity it never worked out. Because of some borked design decisions everyone gathered together in one city wich was then lagged and bitched about while other cities on the same planet were deserted. Hell at peak times you could go to the outer planets and be completly and utterly alone while the main city (name escapes me but is on correlia) was to laggy to play.
Frankly I think current game design is to hung up still on the single player design rules. The central city, the market place where all the goods are sold. The central hero around wich everything revolves.
In fact MMO games should be 'designed' more like goverments trying very hard to spread out employment and stop everyone wanting to move to the big city. There is a reason not everyone lives in New York or London. Part 'natural' causes like high rent and part artificial stuff like moving goverment offices to less populated areas.
Yet this seems to be completly missing in games. You want to ply your wares in the main capital of correlia? Why certainly my lad. That will be a 1000cr hourly fee thank you very much. Entertainer tax that goes up by the number of entertainers?
EQ2 doesn't even seem to make an attempt at spreading people out other then by level.
If a MMO is ever going to be truly massive it is going to have to figure out either a new way to handle thousands of connections to the same 'sphere'. Might be done, IRC does something like it and usually for free. Or they are going to have to find ways to spread their user population out across the realm.
Holding events that can only be enjoyed from one spot certainly seems not the way to do it.
WoW has shown the world that a huge pile of cash is waiting for he that creates an MMO that is playable at launch. Now all that remains is for someone to make a real MMORPG. Just as soon as we figure out what that is anyway.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Obviously some kind of limit would need to be in place to keep people from hopscotching all over
Not sure why it's obvious. Disney's Toontown does it this way, and as long as you can maintain a friend list and guildie list that is ABOVE the server level (aha, I have 3 friends on bloodscalp and 15 on eldre-thalas tonight), what's the problem?
Since the worlds are all identical (ie the Alliance/Horde ownership of Tarren mill doesn't change), what would be the problem. I know I would ALWAYS try to choose the least busy server with reasonable pingtimes that I could.
-Styopa
The countryside is instanced, so you don't run into other players out just exploring unless you've grouped with them (but, really, how useful is that ANYWAY?).
Anyone for Diablo 2?
Just don't create a file called -rf.
You would think with the money they are generating from the game ( 6 million customers at 15.99 a month = $3,198,000 a day ) they could upgrade/manage the lag/queue problem better. Sure my figure is a little off because id you pay more up front you per monthly cost is lower but still thats a lotta money coming it with little frustration being reduced to the gamers.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
hey, here's an idea -- if you're on a server that routinely has a queue, and you want to play at 7 pm, why not log in at 6:30 and go do something else in the interim?
if you get logged in, just tap a key every now and then so you're not AFK
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
All MMORPGs have had and still have queue problems. Do as someone else suggested log in before you're ready to play, or stay logged in all the time, open a fucking shop or something.
Or just deal with it, you'll get in at some point. People are out of their mind, it's a game not your life you fucking losers.
I was gone from WOW for a few months. I'm a casual gamer, only play 10hours a week or so, but still find it fun. Imagine my surprise when I logged on for the first time in months to play, only to be hit with a 20+minute queue to login to the server! Needless to say, I logged right out, cancelled my membership. It was so quick, they didn't even have time to charge me. And if they did, I'd have disputed it with my CC company. That is rediculous.
My wife, on the other hand, just contributes to the issues that make it worse. She logs on as soon as she gets home from work, and logs my char on too in case I want to play.
Sometimes I want to, sometimes I don't. It helps that we have multiple machines at home. My wife likes the game way more than I do, and plays my high level priest on occasion. But anytime I've gotten kicked off and couldn't log in fast enough to avoid the queue, I just shut down and walk away. One of these days my wife is going to become too frustrated and quit too, and we will cancel our accounts. I suspect alot of people will, and until the time it starts affecting the subscriber base, nothing serious will be done about it.
Some people want to play on low-pop servers. These people don't have much of a problem. Some people want to play on high-pop servers. So they go start a character on a high-pop server, raising the population higher in doing so and drawing the queue up even farther. Several people want to play on medium-pop servers to get the best of both worlds, but you can only have so many people join a med-pop server before it become high-pop, and by that point the server's reputation gets to the point that even more people want to join in. Basically, population gain works exponentially - the bigger you are, the faster it gets worse.
More servers just isn't going to cut it, not unless you can convince people on larger servers to cull themselves into new servers with smaller populations. There are plenty of servers out there that don't have queue lines, but queues just aren't enough justification for people to reroll. Ideally, Blizzard would set limits on population to cut off before queues become a problem in the first place. But then you run the risk of pissing off people who want to play on the same server as their friend does. There is no justice in this matter.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
because I fear blizzard (mostly kidding).
Want a nice, simple solution? Set up your own bloody server emulator.
I was hesitant about the idea at first... What, me and a few buddies playing together? Booooring.
Wrong. It's actually more interesting, because instead of a world full of "mighty kick ass adventurer types", it's just myself and a few adventuring friends trying to save the realm. More like believable fantasy.
Anyhow, the setup isn't that hard if you're persistant (read: search for the info). And it's suprisingly easy to customize your server by using various databases and tinkering with settings.
Tired of queues? Then don't stand in line... open your own amusement park, Cartman.
The countryside is instanced, so you don't run into other players out just exploring unless you've grouped with them (but, really, how useful is that ANYWAY?).
Don't misunderstand, Guild War is a great game, but it is not a MMORG. There is no "massive", except in chat. Diablo II would be a more accurate match, not World of Warcraft.
I just purchased WoW on Monday and was stunned when I tried to create a character and was denied on every server. I had just dropped 50 bucks on my new game and signed up for a $14/month fee and couldn't even play! I wasn't very impressed starting out...
Which MMORPG has the biggest world population? That is, which seamless online 3D world has the most people, without "shards" or "instances" to divide up the world?
It was like a 60 minute wait. The second thunderfury to be crafted on draenor was about to happen. My computer crashed. I went to log on and I was 766 in queue.
i could not think of anything clever.
We never miss someone's article/review/rant when it's time to whine, but rarely hear about when an online game shines. The 6 million mark was a little extra piece, but hey- the gates of Ahn'Qiraj were opened on my server! *crickets* they've announced some cool improvements to priest talents! *crickets* Paladins and Shamans will be able to carry something useful in their ranged slot! *crickets* "zomg, teh Q to git in iz 40 min! Qwik, blog n link 2 /. !!!" Light forbid there's anything to do in front of a computer but stare at the screen and watch the numbers tick down.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
I played a lot of games (FFXI, Evercrack, UO, Lin) before trying out WoW. In beta I wasnt very impressed with the game so when I decided to buy it later I kept my FFXI account. Needless to say while fun (though easy to the point of boring at some points) soon it became imposible for me to play. Weekends where one thing (and I tended to not play weekends anyway because those where when I had major events in FFXI) but when it became a wednesday and I had to wait 2 hours to get in I got fed up and canciled my subscription (sadly after it had already paid up to July) I couldnt beleive how bad it became logging in, I played through FFXI throughout its DDoS attacks and even though it was tough to log in, I still could get in 10 minutes after or so. 2 hours? thats just BS. and IMHO not worth it when most people only play for 1-2 hours at most.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I call Shinanigans! Since the last patch, I can count on one finger the amount of times I had to wait in queue for my server. Previous to the patch, there was a nightly queue of 800+ users with sometimes over an hour wait. And the one time I had to wait, I was 400th+ in queue and only waited 7 minutes to get in, compared to 30+ minutes when I was stuck in similar queues before. So Blizzard is tackling the problem and has done some tweaking and fixing to reduce/eliminate queues.
I also love this little nugget of bull droppings "and forcing large "guilds" of players to carefully stagger their schedules each week so as to not cause horrible lag for each other.".
How exactly are you going to force guilds to stagger their raiding schedules? If you're talking Molten Core, BWL or 40 man AQ, those don't just take an hour to run through. They take several hours. Then take into consideration that most people work for a living or go to school, so most raid nights end up being on the weekend. Then take into consideration that people are in different timezones, and most guilds have their raid start times in accordance. Start a raid at 10pm server time (US servers)? That leaves out the east coast folks. The day Blizzard restricts when my guild can raid is the day I quit WoW (and I don't mean the current time restrictions when you're saved to an instance). Forcing, heck even asking guilds to do this is totally unacceptable. And considering instances are usually run on different servers than the 'open air' part of the game, having guilds raiding has little affect outside of instances. (Proof: I've seen many a server crashes where people in instances weren't kicked out, they kept on playing, while everyone not in an instance got kicked out of the game).
It's better to burn out than to fade away
blizzard is already planning to implement battlegrounds where people from different servers will fight against eachother. this is for the same reason that faction balance isn't occuring on alot of servers. as a result one faction will have instant queues while the other may wait hours for a battleground match.
EVE Online (http://www.eve-online.com/) probably has the largest consistent world. It's not as BIG player-wise as WoW, but we like it that way anyway. And it's in space, not fantasy. But aside from that, there's lots of fun things to do, even though the game does have a bit of a learning curve.
Players can give out unlimited free 2-week trials to other people too, so if anyone wants one, drop a note to ja!de@cris==tal @t gmail.com. (remove non-letter characters to get a valid address)
I am surprised at the comments in this thread. No Blizzard shills! But then here I come. I just picked up the game a few weeks ago because Target had it for 29.99. Seemed like a fair price to me. I've been playing on Kirin Tor (an RP server) and haven't had any problems thus far. The realm went down for about an hour the other night which was weird.
One thing that might help me is that I'm in California playing on a Central Time server, so I have generally 2-3 hours behind everyone else. Consider this as a method of avoiding queues. I have only hit a queue once or twice, and it was the usual Saturday-night crunch, but my wait was only about 7-10 minutes iirc.
"But what about my raids?! BWL/MC/AQ/BBQ!!!". You can still do this on the weekends, which is the best time in my opinion. And if you're on the west coast rocking an East coast server, you won't be up nearly as late. Raiding from 6-9PM here is 9-midnight on the east coast. You could still go out and grab a few pints after scoring some phat lewt! Is there anyone out there that actually runs these things nightly?? If so, there is a reason gamers have a rep for being smelly and single. You have to put time into other aspects of your life! Yeah, i've put 3 days play time into a char and he's only level 25. So what?
It really depends on the server, actually, and when you like to play.
Reading around a bit, I'm convinced that I'm on the the worst WOW server, Kel'Thuzad. Queue'Thuzad is almost always queued from 4pm-midnight, and at peak times the queue can reach 650-800. Lag'Thuzad has also been down for "emergency maintenence" more times than I can possibly remember.
The odd thing is, Kel'Thuzad was crap at first (like it is now), became decent 2-3 months after the game shipped, and then regressed now. The only explaination that I can come up with is that WOW has increased so greatly in size that it has overwhelmed the servers.
While I can sympathize with some of what the writer is saying (if you're going to design an event for your mmorpg that is so cool that everybody on the server is going to want to see it, hadn't you better make sure your servers can actually handle everybody seeing it?) the c atchphrase he uses at the end is just plain silly.
"If there's an absolutely excellent game, but no one can get online to play it, is it still excellent?"
Right, just because you have to wait in a queue to get in must mean that nobody can get in at all. It's not because there are already a few thousand people playing on that server or anything.
But, to each his own. My point was that WoW could easily use the same type of server system instead of rigidly forcing players to stay on a particular server forever with no ability to simply play with their friends or form guilds that transcend a single realm. Considering that they charge people $14 a month just to play (in addition to the $50 they had to pay up front for the game), it's the least they could do.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I log into Blackhand to play my 46 Hunter, there's a queue of 301 to get in. So I find a PvP server with a low population, and log in to start a new character. Play about ten minutes, and get to level nine. Log out for lunch, and come back again. And there is queue for 147 for my "Low" population server. I bought time to play this game. I did not buy time to sit and stare at a queue line.
There are no gods but ourselves.
Blizzard has poor server architecture. Monolithic servers. Sharding continents rather than zones was a bad idea, but easy to implement and find talent (ex-EQ devs) to develop/support. From a financial standpoint, it was a good risk. There were 2 outcomes:
A. Shards dont get overloaded - they made a prudent choice.
B. Shards got overloaded - they would have millions of subscribers.
B happened. They dont regret it.
Scaling is their current problem. You can't throw hardware at a bad architecture. It's worked because ppl are pissed and jumping to new servers, but that's not gonna last forever. Look forward to server closures in a year. If each zone, entity, and abstract engine (like the AH) were run as concurrent processes, they would be able to scale 10 to 100 times larger with much more fault tolerance. As with most games, they learn by doing and will improve in future games.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Isn't the PvP in Guild Wars done in arenas?
No, WoW really can't use the same type of system that guild wars uses. Guild Wars content is 100% instanced, it is very easy to just throw a new server up when one of theirs gets full, it is just a new instance. WoWs content is about 10% instanced, the 90% non-instanced content is what takes such huge amounts of horsepower and what makes it a real MMO.
Q.
> Anyone have any hellacious queue stories?
:( To those who don't know, that's an incredibly good dagger which is the best a rogue can get in the game until the new 40-man Ahn'Qiraj area. Wasn't terribly happy about that. But I recovered and now decided to stay a sword rogue, and we very soon got another one (which is very very lucky) which I let another rogue have (I got the Bloodfang pants instead, woot).
When we were attempting Ragnaros (who we had yet to kill) I was disconnected for unknown reasons. And thanks to the reconnection problems I not only missed out on my group's first Ragnaros kill, but missed what would have been guaranteed to be my Perdition's Blade.
....and blizzard is laughing all the way to the bank.
The servers in GW work almost exlcusively in the non-instanced cities. They're not needed much for the instanced areas unless you have a large group.
WoWs content is about 10% instanced, the 90% non-instanced content is what takes such huge amounts of horsepower and what makes it a real MMO.
EVE Online and Second Life are 100% non-instanced and *they* don't have to divide people up into segregated servers. WoW is, in fact, the only MMORPG or online game I've ever played that does this, and it's damned annoying. How am I supposed to invite my friends to play when I can't even join them, anyway? Hell, I can even do *that* on Halo 2.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Can someone explain why our characters can't go from Realm to Realm? Do our characters really have to stay on a particular server only?
If a server is full, why can't I take my char to another Realm?
And for those that fear of players moving from realm to realm to farm items, just simply place a cool-down timer of when you can move to another realm. Say 30 minutes to an hour to enter a realm after leaving another.
I play Diablo 2: LoD, Starcraft, and occasionally Warcraft III. The lag on Bnet is deadly. They have a lot more traffic then bandwidth, and even pay-to-play games, such as WoW, are starting to be affected. They need to find a quicker solution, especially if they plan on their expansion pack. Adding more servers is costly, but you could make money by lowering the transfer rate a little. Then, those hard-earned 60s can go to a different server, problem solved.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Yep, it's true.
I'm on Kirin Tor; I live in California; and I work. I don't have a huge amount of time to play each night. I am in the top Horde guild on the server, and most of the time, the three hour time difference means I miss the weekday raids. It's really frustrating.
Blizzard didn't tell me, when I bought the game in October and created my first character, that there were "time zone" servers. EQ didn't have 'em.
Turns out all the PST RP servers are totally full and lag cities. I went to some of their server forums and asked how things were with the server, and to a one, they complained about horrible lag, bad queues, and horrible BG disconnections.
I haven't played WoW in weeks now. Very little to do at 60 I haven't done a hundred times over anyway.
If it took you this long to get tired of WoW's queues, consider yourself getting off easy.
How many folks were stuck on the original "Terrible 20" servers? Those servers that were constantly crashing, constantly lagging, and constantly down. I played almost exclusively on Uther. There were days that our server was down for more than 12hrs, if I remember correctly. Remember then refusing to offer us the ability to transfer servers to a new one being brought online, saying we would unbalance it? I don't think they allowed a server transfer from the "Terrible 20" until about 3-4 months after lanuch. By that time, things were semi-stable.
I swear that I got so much free blue XP from all their server downtime that I was in the blue from lvl 20 through lvl 40. I ended up with more than 2 free weeks of playtime due to all their server outtages.
Remember "loot lag"??? When you would go to loot a corpse, and have your toon effectively locked up? Remember how they would finally fix it on their end, and the next patch would bring it back even worse than before?
Remember the boats being bugged, and people either having their toons locked up, or getting dumped into the water so far away from land that you died? And the GMs wouldn't compensate you for lost gold for repairs and the like?
Remember one whole continent being down, while the other was up? Trying to use your Hearthstone or a boat and crashing the client because the other continent wasn't available? Unable to log into the game because one half of the game world was down? Remember it taking a half hour or longer for them to figure out that one whole continent (approximately 50% of all non-instanced game zones) was offline, with both the General and Realm specific forum flooded with messages? Remember them fixing it, and having it go down again in less than 24hrs?
I loved playing WoW, when I could. It really was a great game. My wife found it the MMO she has probably liked the most of all that we have played together. When my rogue and her druid hit 60, all the fun went out of the game. The queues were back, and we had both levelled our favorite class to 60. We tried playing alts for about 2 months before giving up. I couldn't see waiting anywhere from 15-45 minutes to play a toon that wasn't as fun as our originals. Needless to say, we stopped playing, and finally cancelled our account after almost 3 months of no activity. Yes, 3 months. That's how long we held out hope for it to improve. It got worse.
Blizzard knew it had problems prior to starting this latest "event". They went ahead, anyways, without preparing for what was going to happen. The writing was on the wall, but they didn't lock people out of creating toons on the server that was going to complete the "pre-war effort" first, and that server crashed repeatedly due to all the people logging in to create lvl 1 toons and try to run them over to where the event was going to happen.
I remember when Penny Arcade took back their "Game of the Year" award, due to the problems with the servers shortly after awarding it. Sure, Blizzard is facing nearly unprecedented success, but they have failed to meet the server uptime needs of their players consistently.
No, if it took you a year to realize this, consider yourself lucky. If you still haven't realized it, consider yourself blessed.
Great game, crappy server implementation. And as long as their subscription numbers keep going up, and people keep accepting mediocre server stability, why would Blizzard fix it?
It is a bit like a schoolplay where the script comes with extra scenes and characters to fit the class size just so that every kid can have a part and not feel left out.
This one hero who can change the world idea of WoW is going to go as well as me playing quake in the ISP's server room. God the abuse I got just for having a ping less then zero. Same for the poor sap who is the one who rings the bell while everyone is still waiting in a que.
It works for single player games but not in the massive games. People ain't that nice that they feel happy someone else got to do the cool bit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One solution would be to break the connection of a character to a single world. Let the player pick a character to play, then pick a world to play on for this gaming session. Of course, this creates issues with the auction hHouse, mail system and such, but not impossible to solve problems. You could even move the friends list out the login page, and see which of your friends are online, and what server they are currently playing on.
Just a thought.
I used to think people were smarter than this, but obviously people ARE getting dumber. I mean honestly, how could you pay a monthly subscription to a company that can't even provide enough servers for all of their subscribers? I applaud Blizzard for playing on the stupidity of the mass public. You deserve to sit in a queue. Every single one of you.
Do they at least give you an estimate of how long you'll wait in the queue, or do you have to sit their and busy wait? Can you make a reservation?
That said, I don't think there is any particular reward for the guild/guy who opened the gates, other than pride and satisfaction (although these two are most certainly considered of great importance to some players). I have memories of MMORPGS (*cough*RO*cough*) where some one time events landed the lucky bastard a reward that would take someone else forever to get. It's even worse on private servers.
___
*insert sig here*
Blizzard really needs to get some more servers. Those ones they bought from Russia after the breakup of the USSR just aren't cutting it, you know? Not to mention, the server techies have to got be sick of seeing the Hammer & Sickle on the boxes.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
Guild wars, unfortunately, can get old fast. It's fairly easy/quick to reach the max level (20). At that point, you have a few options.
1) Finish the storyline.
2) Work on unlocking new skills / skill capturing / unlocking runes, etc.
3) Farming for items / gold
4) Working on a new character class / combo
5) Switching to PVP
At least they are coming out with their Factions sequel soon, to give us a little more content.
Recently their paradigm for putting up a new server has been to announce the new server and freeze character creation for 48 hours. During that 48 hour window, you're allowed to transfer a character over from 4 overcrowded servers of the same type (PVE, PVP, RP, RP-PVP). For example, when Hexxar opened up my currently overcrowded Draenor server lost people. Only problem is social networks, which for a lot of folks are more diffuse than just the guild tag, make it a very difficult decision to leave. Its like moving with your office to a new city -- sure, most of the folks you work with came with but you miss the crowd at the bar and that little old lady at the pizza shop who always had a kind word for you. On the other hand, if you're primarily in the game for a solo experience (and anecdotally lots of WoWers are) its a no-brainer -- take any server transfer offered.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well, over at Blizzhackers, right before Blizz shut them down with the all to common chilling effect of DMCA claims, there were several groups that were posting screenies, and promising any day to release server code compatible with the retail release.. Unfortunately, BH was the ONLY community working on such code, and unlike BNETD, nobody has made a PVPGN-alike that I can find anywhere for the WOW code.. The problem was that nobody could legally reverse engineer the code that agreed to the EULA, and nobody went after any possible loopholes to attack the problem legally.. It is really a shame, because I was looking forward to modding the retail compatible code so that I could host modded servers..
Anyway, if anyone knows where retail compatible WoW server code can be found, please feel free to PM me through here..
Blizzard needs to get with the program and release at least a binary sans content so that people could release original content servers for modders..
-taosk8r
I realize the games are rather different in style, and the instanced nature of Guild Wars might change server logistics, but seriously, how come GW, which hit 1,000,000 players I believe, doesn't appear to have more than one server? On top of that, there is no such thing as a queue. It seems to me that WoW, the "ultimate" MMORPG as proclaimed by some players, should be able to match this feat.
First let me say that I don't play WoW. I played some of the earlier MMORPGs (Meridian 59, The Realm, UO, EQ, Asheron's Call, Lineage, etc..) in Alpha/Beta testing stages, but haven't really put time into newer ones. My roommate however plays WoW so I see how it works.
Anyway, let me get this straight, a game that has ~6 million subscribers paying $14.99/month (I know there are multi-month passes, but i'm sure that's not everyone) has an income of approximately 90,000,000 (That's 90 Million) per month. They probably got $25 of the 'box' cost from everyone, which would have been $150,000,000 from everyone for their intial boxes. Per year they are bringing in ~$1,080,000,000 (That's over a billion dollars folks) from MMORPG subscriptions.
A billion dollars is a lot of money. I know they have costs (bandwidth, programmers, servers, help-desks, etc), but they should at least be able to figure out a way to either increase the number of max players per server, split servers, allow movement between servers, etc with that type of money. It's not like they aren't probably going to get ANOTHER billion next year. You can make SEVERAL feature films for this cost. LoTR (all three films) cost around $300 million to make.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Gamespot spammed me repeatedly despite requests that they stop. They can't even manage a mailing list. Blizzard has provided a game which I have been playing for a couple of months with fairly small login queues except during the peak of prime-time. I've probably spent a TOTAL of two hours in queues, since mid-December 2005.
So, uhm. I think I am uninclined to believe that Gamespot's either competent or reliable, and I don't think I trust them to fairly evaluate the situation.
Yeah, the queues are bad. Simplistic analysis of how much money Blizzard ought to have doesn't tell us what resources they really have. Furthermore, it's not obvious which of the many proposed "solutions" would work. More servers? Lag is a question of bandwidth, so more servers might not help. Let more people log in? More overloads and crashes. There are many possible options, but I'm not sure they'd help a whole lot. Furthermore, if the database servers are shared, it's pretty hard to grow database servers effectively; you can't just throw more hardware at it.
I dunno. I'm okay with things pretty much as is; ongoing attempts to optimize the back-end database may matter more. So maybe we should let the people who built WoW run it, rather than some people at gamespot who haven't done anything of the sort?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I think that the problem is in the stats!
Here's the deal. Decisions on bandwidth, server purchases, upgrades and so on are made on the basis of projections about revenue. WOW has busted all those predictions, and so it's relatively underfunded as a result.
Why? Because WOW has tapped into a market that MMORPG's of the past has not hit, and that market has told all it's friends what a cool game this is, and they told all there friends... Basically this is a network effect gone mad.
Eventually the network will run out and the growth will stabalise, then we will see how stable the new crowd is, and how streched Blizzards revenue reserves get if, for example 2/3rd of the WOW pop cancel their accounts between now and Xmas...
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Now think about melding the Single server stile and the multiple stile on an existing MMORPG. Lets say Elune is Queuing 4 hours a week. So the Admins split Elune onto Elune01 and Elune02. Now players can come into either. If most of the people want on Elune01 and at some point it would be Queueing only allow people to log onto Elune02. Now when a friends want to play they can both still play on Elune02.
In this way you have doubled your population. And this is scalable. Now share databases for auctions, chatting and some other functions and you have a set of world-servers that are actually one bigger world.
Now there is no more queueing. You can reduce population limits and thus reduce server lag. There are problems,
Q.
-- $SIGNATURE
Considering the server problems they've been having - http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/ 1519225 - I don't think World of Queuecraft could handle the millions of Xbox 360 players.