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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.
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.
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
Wrong queue. Often times (specifically Alterac Valley) there just aren't enough people at the same level playing those areas (10 level 20s from both Horde and Alliance, for example). So, yes, a 30 hour wait is tantamount to an infinite wait. Those aren't Blizzard's problems, the online community needs to get together and schedule specific times to play PvP.
At least during those queues, you can stay in line, but run around and quest/farm/auction/chat/etc. The issue here is the queues just to get ON the server.
Over Christmas, Blizzard also limited character creation on certain realms. Good, glad to know that new players would be forced to newer realms. Unfortunatley, that unleashed a flood onto the "open" servers. And the queue for my realm increased drastically.
Blizzard has said authorized certain specific realms to transfer to other specific realms in the past (say, if you were on realm A then everyone could transfer to realm B... but only those on A could go only to B). They have hinted in the past at opening that up a bit... such that any one on any realm could transfer a character to a new realm. Might be useful. There's also been hinting at "pay to transfer" schemes. That would help limit the hopscotching, as well as put money into the infrastructure and upkeep.