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World of Warcraft Server Problems
vjmurphy writes "Connectivity to the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft servers and web site appears to have had some difficulties over the past week. Their hosting is provided by AT&T." That includes my raid's dying twice in MC due to 4000 latency, and also a soft reset of MC. Good work, AT&T.
Note: the following post has been graciously hosted by AT&T.
This [Connecting...] is [Authenticating... ] absurd. I [Authenticating... ] demand that all of [Authenticating... ] these false [Authenticating... ] allegations be stopped. There [Retrieving character list... ] is no way [Retrieving character list... ] in hell [Retrieving character list... ] that anyone [Retrieving character list... ] has ever [Retrieving character list... ] suffered [Retrieving character list... ] from any kind of [Loading... ] lag [Loading... ] while playing [Loading... ] World of Warcraft. The [Loading... ] hosting has been [Loading... ] meticulously [Loading... ] perfect and infallible. ["Ok, I'm in game, why don't I see anyone in Org?"]
When will you learn that if a company takes your money, they are providing a service that cannot fail? [/console reloadui]
My work here is dung.
Well, at least Netcraft confirms it.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
Try living on the EU servers - its been like this for a year.
P.
Beer Coat: The invisible but warm coat worn when walking home after a booze cruise at 3 in the morning.
Haven't been terribly impressed at the technical capabilities of SBC....
Maybe AT&T has decided to start throttling the bandwidth based on destination and who's paid them their protecti... er... double tax.. er... rightful usage fees.
My karma is in a nose dive
And will World of Warcraft subscribers be compensated for their lost gameplay time? Time they paid good money for?
May the Maths Be with you!
This feature is working as intended
We almost beat razorgore this last week DUE TO the lag. Seems mind controlling him and destroying the eggs was good and the mobs that were supposed to be attacking him weren't. They'd just stand next to him, I suppose hoping the disapproving stares would cause him to stop destroying eggs. On the other hand, Blizzard has not been above doling out a free day here or there when server issues erupted into full scale cratacularness. I also strongly suspect AT&T beta/piloting it's "Wouldn't it be a pity if something nasty happened to your precious data?" scalable bandwidth usage plan.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I warned you against buying that Adaptec shit. Get a decent RAID controller that isn't so touchy with latency issues.
Oh, I'm as peeved about crappy connectivity as every other WoW addict, but couldn't it also be the result of one or more Distributed Denial of Service attacks against Blizzard's servers? I'd be quite surprised if this hasn't been attempted already.
Well this, and the fact that it completely took over every aspect of my life.
-William Brendel
WoW has had "issues" since hour one when it went public. Right now their troubles may indeed be their "provider" (just one? they have that much money riding on just one provider?), but in the past they've had plenty of issues of their own creation.
If we could see inside Blizzard I think we'd find a company that knows how to make good games, but one that doesn't have a good record at making good management decisions on how to run them.
There's little point in me going into great detail about the many mistakes and poor decisions they've made, but I can say that if they were a financial institution we wouldn't be discussing this. Finance seems to have this understanding that time is money. Somehow Blizzard hasn't quite caught on that 5.5 million subscribers might eventually go away, especially if they get frustrated enough with the downtime/lag. Sure, there's not much place for those gamers to go, but this may not be true in 1-3 years.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
The problem is with Blizzard's servers. I play on Kargath, and we have experienced intermittent "character retrieving" issues for the past 3 months, ever since the 1.9x patch. There were times when the server would just crash, even a day after the "weekly scheduled maintenance" on Tuesdays. The problem does not lie with the ISP. Blizzard needs to fix their servers. They are taking a lot of people's money and they have taken forever to make the game experience enjoyable.
The past week has actually not been that bad as it has been in a long time, but last night we had the "retrieving character" take about 23 minutes minumum to show up (no queue, just saying "retrieving character list" for 23 minutes), and due to that we couldn't finish Vael due to people getting dropped by Blizzard.
It's been really irritating. Blizzard has promised to fix the issues for the past 2 months, and has done nothing. Hopefully with the new patch, their promised "new hardware" will arrive, but I'm not holding my breath.
Did they port the server code from Europe?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I may have bashed MMORPGs in the past however I never had major technical issues when playing WoW. The worst when playing WoW, iTunes and having Firefox, Opera and Outlook open at the same time caused my sucky onboard sound to flake out (high proc).
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
Back when I was playing Ultima Online, the Sprint routers between me and my favorite server would flake out for several hours at least a couple of times a month. It doesn't seem like Sprint's quality has improved over the years either. The other backbone providers may be bad, but no one can come anywhere near the suckitude that is Sprint. I'm pretty sure they get their routers by sending in box tops from Post Toasties.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
when working at a small isp (few thousand customers), even we had two backbones from different providers. providers will have issues or worst, go down, and you need a back up provider. don't blame at&t, blame blizzard for not having a back up plan...
Spoken like a true Crackhead defending his dealer with his last breath.
WoW doesn't have the same level of availability and connection quality of even the LEAST of it's competitors. They've had more than sufficient time to correct the issue.
"Not guaranteed 24/7" isn't a good enough disclaimer when the reality is "not available as often as our compettitors... and did we meention the QUEUES?"
And no, I'm not playing anymore.
When SoE's level of service and Customer relations compares favorably to your company's you have a problem, and Blizzard has a big one.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I'm a World of Warcraft player, and it always pisses me off to hear about things like this. I simply accept that lag and outages are a part of playing an MMORPG.
There are large differences from game to game. Three games I have tried:
-Project Entropia (maybe 2 years ago): High lag, would be inacceptable for a real shooter.
-Neocron: somewhat better, but still too much lag for the FPS-like combat. Really goes downhill when many chars meet in one zone. Account canceled, partly because of this.
-Auto Assault Beta: Quite good so far, cannot complain. Still has some client issues, but networking and server stability is ready for release (assuming it stays that way with more players online).
So I don't agree that lag and outages are a necessary evil in MMORPGs. Of course, as long as players accept it and keep paying, the company making the game has no reason to fix things.
C - the footgun of programming languages
You know, this argument is often perported but really holds little credibility.
Sure, it's a game, and sure the rewards appear to be entirely virtual and owned by Blizzard. However, this is not completely the case. While it is just a game, millions of people are putting a lot of effort into it. The rewards they reap aren't just items, reputation, and experience. They are also getting personal satisfaction and developing relationships with distant friends and guildies. The amount of effort put into this game by an average player still deserves respect. When their efforts result in nothing, it would be akin to working at a real job and your employer suddenly saying they won't pay you for your last 6 or 8 hours of work. I'd rather be kicked in the jimmy. >_> <_<
To think about the argument from the other side of the street, what would you say if your job decided to heap three times your normal workload on you and not give you any extra compensation? It's only a job, right? You only do it for 8.. 10... maybe even 12 hours a day, and in the end you still get paid, right? You've still got the rest of the day to do what you need to or want to. Why should you be upset? (Before you start answering with reasons to be upset, realize that this specific argument is designed to be fallacy.)
Inevitably, someone will argue that a job gives real rewards (money) as opposed to programming code that is technically not owned by the player, but I would argue we need personal satisfaction and relationships at least as much as we need money or we stop being human.
Several months back there was a similar rash of instabilities and sever restarts. There were a bunch of rumors that gold farmers were using something to de-stabalize the servers. It used to be that zoning into instance under high lag was used to dupe items, never confirmed it actaully worked but that was the rumor.
I mention it because perhaps something similar is going on here. The servers are getting destabilized and forced to restart. And you can use a server restart(and the small rollback that usually hits because of it) to dupe items or gold(this works, I've seen it done).
In the end its just a random collection of rumors that fits the facts. So take with whatever amount of seasoning you need.
Even though its 15 months out from the launch, the game is still in a growth phase. No other MMORPG has grown as far and as quickly and WoW has. At some point the population growth will peak and the hardware will catch up to that.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
I expect my broadband internet to be at LEAST 95% reliable, and I don't pay much more for that than I do for my WoW subscription.
I expect Google and Slashdot to be 100% reliable, and I pay NOTHING for them.
Why should I hold Blizzard to lower standards?
Well let's see. First, you're reading the game off a physical optical disc and not just a ROM bank on a chip in a board. Second, the PS is emulating so you're gonna lose performance to the overhead, not to mention the PS was designed and optimized for 3D.
Insert Sig Here
We were using AT&T a few years back for our business connectivity in Florida and they were always having problems, going up and down like a yo-yo. It sounds like their reliability hasn't changed at all. I'm glad we don't use them anymore.
The way I see it is I really like WoW, so I'm willing to put up with a few things to play it. Bad lag, queue, etc are tolerable due to the quality of the game.
However, that doesn't mean its justifiable for blizzard to have this many lapses in service. Yes WoW is ver popular and I'm sure its difficult to keep things running with the ammount of traffic they have. But thats why I pay a monthly fee, so that this stuff gets handled. So blizzard need to get this situation resolved as even a big fan like myself has a limited ammount of patience.
You can say "it's just a game" but it's a game people are paying for. The very least I expect with a service I'm paying for is that it work. Several servers in WoW have had connectivity and lag issues since day one, and the way in which Blizzard appears to have been caught with their pants down is embarrassing. I came from everquest where transferring your character from one server to another was a relatively simple procedure, but Blizzard had no facility for doing this, and when they finally (months later) got around to allowing transfers at all, it was only from server A to server B. All in all Blizzard's response to these issues - many of which are caused by overcrowded servers and backend issues on their end - has been horrendous. After a while I got sick of it and cancelled my WoW account in August '05. It was a great game destroyed by technical failings that lesser games solved 5-6 years ago.
I played on Doomhammer btw.
rooooar
Don't like it? I don't see anyone forcing you to play.
Yeah, thats why I cancelled my subscription last week after just three months. This is not 1997 when MMOs like Ultima Online could get away with horrible connection issues and claim "well thats what happens when your the first one out."
Aside from the lag that's been creeping in.. You know the one, the lag-o-meter says 134ms and is green, but you're lagging. so you can't even log out. The meter acutally goes down in readings (albet after alot of people are kicked). But my big point is this dam queue setup on login. I'll login and it says 'you are 33rd in queue" and "wait time of 3 mins"... then something happens where I'll get all the way up to 500+ in line with a 30 min or greater wait time. How does this happen, if you're in a queue, it should be a FIFO queue. he'll I've been 5th in line and gotten bumped to 200+ in line. That makes no sense, if I'm already in the queue, how can I be bumped ??!!!!
All the other bandwangon haters are ignorant. Blizzards problem is that they won't hard cap servers. When they do this the players bitch and cry about not being able to get their friends onto their servers or make new alts. However, these morons don't seem to understand that an MMORPG is built around and estimated player size on every server.
At the moment I would say the servers that have the largest simply are running at more than 100% capacity. Every MMORPG I have ever played when the population gets out of hand in either specific regions or game wide has huge issues.
I know the fan boys here of Eve-online will toute Eve as being greater than all because it is a single shard MMORPG, I to play Eve-online. However, just like WoW, AC2, FF Online, DDO, Liniage2, Planetside, etc.....if you get enough people in 1 area of the world the servers crash or start having major problems. I company isn't going to provide enough hardware for a server that the entire population can be congregated together. If they did it would be a huge waste of resources and probably force the game to cost $80 a month which I wouldn't pay. So, I accept the issues that can happen. The only thing I want WoW to do is to have more server transfers and lower a hardcap on servers so that when they reached it they wouldn't over populate and have huge queues.
This is the weirdest thing ever ... people are actually paying MONTHLY for a game they can hardly play when they want.
If you went to a store and bought a game ... would you expect to be able to play it once you got home??
When you get to the point of getting more excited by seeing the Character List than actually killing Nef ... something's wrong.
Can I reply to the message "Can't logging to World of Warcraft right now" with "Can't pay my monthly fees right now?" ... i guess we all can. ;) Stopped playing for a month now, not because i don't like the game ... just cause i can't possibly pay for something that unstable, it just seem wrong.
Oh ... and btw they should change the Tips on the Loading Screen to like :
TIP : This bar isn't actually acurate.
TIP : Call your grandma ... this is going to take a while.
TIP : You are still retriving character, this is a fake screen.
Has anyone thought about the amount of money they're bringing in with this single game?! It's phenomenal! Let's do some quick rough math to see what the numbers look like. They report over 6,000,000 currently paying subscribers. At $15USD/mth, that's about $90,000,000 / month! (Yes, indeed, that'd be over $1,000,000,000 (billion!) a year!!)
:)
:) (Well, not currently .. taking a break. Will be back though) I remember at the beginning, the population grew so fast (unexpectedly to them) that they had to stop taking new subscribers. I thought that was very honest of them to admit they can't handle it and hold new subscribers so as to not ruin the game for everyone else. If they still can't handle the load, why aren't they doing that again? (Or maybe a couple of million subscribers ago?)
That's just plain crazy.
Anyways, my point? Well, with all that money, you think they'd be able to do something about it. Perhaps they're too busy swimming in said pile of cash.
Anyways, I'm not totally bashing them, afterall, I *AM* a paying subscriber as well
Anyways, just my observations.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
People should just leave if they don't like the service? That's a horrible stance to take, especially since many people enjoy the game and are only griping about the servers' performance. I play WoW, and I expect there to be lag and I expect there to be issues with the game, but mostly because I don't expect too much from the blizz team handling WoW. By no means am I "fine" with it. Rolling over and saying, "oh well, it's an MMO!" doesn't even begin to help solve anything.
Even beyond the frustration of trying to play the game when it's lagging, there is a real issue when you reach the higher levels and start doing 40-mans. My friend has a 4g repair bill every time he dies with his warrior and he's not even an off-tank for our guild's raids (meaning there are people with better, more expensive gear). He doesn't even have any gear from BWL or AQ20/40. Lag in a raid leads to deaths and that leads to repair bills. I guess everyone should just suck it up and be okay with dying multiple times and then having to grind for gold during their non-raiding time?
I understand you're sick of hearing people whine, but generally they have valid complaints. Large queues in combination with lag that makes the game unplayable is not acceptable.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
I have a theory.
I played at times where I was aware of a queue (from guildies reporting this upon log in) and then I got DC'ed on a zone crash, and was able to log in again right away. It's as if the server sensed the DC at their end and gave me priority in the queue, which is right and proper IMO.
But that's just a theory.
-[joke removed for your safety]-
The lag has been unbearable for weeks. I can only hope that rumours of upcoming hardware upgrades are true. The three drakes in BWL have been miserably difficult for us to do lately because of the way the lag is affecting the timing of their attacks. Example: offtanks successfully taunt off the winged buffet and get bounced back, but the MT eats the attack anyways-- manageable once or twice, but a huge pain if it happens eight or ten times during the encounter. Or Firemaw, flies off after a punted offtank and gets stuck in the way back.
At 15$ to 12$ a month from six million subscribers I am very disapointed in how long it has taken Blizzard to react to the absolutely inevitable server issues they are currently having.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
I'd go along with that, except most of the time I've been queued, was after getting DC'd. sad part is if you look at realm status, both website, and login client, I've been queued on a server with LOW population, but not queued on servers with FULL population. This could be people jumping and such, but never know. With the amount of subscribers that Blizzard has, I'm sure that they would want to kick some of that cash back into upgrading the PIPE or PIPES they use to feed their datacenter, and also look at changing their infrastructure to not have these issues. Does the overload reflect the design of the client-server communications model, or some other factor. I know EA has no clue how to properly write a network client-server model, hense the huge overhead required for their servers and limiting number of clients in privately hosted servers (~~ 4 to 6 on cable/DSL). Maybe I'm just ranting.. but
A long time ago I used to run ISPs. All of our servers were on BBNPlanet, then one of our bean counters discovered that we could switch to AT&T, because AT&T was just BBN rebranded. Then once day somebody at AT&T thought it would be cool to run their own network. There was talk of this and then it happened and our service went to shit.
We used to be able to call BBNPlanet and an engineer would pick up the phone and their service was so good that they even fixed a connection problem for us that was our fault by connecting into our router directly and doing the dirty work, and doing the whole thing with a smile! The day we switch to AT&T I was lucky to even get somebody on the phone that spoke English, and this started to become a fairly common experience because their network was so bad that we were disconnected frequently and always had poor bandwidth.
Bottom line, AT&T's network sucks, it as always sucked, and until they actually start to give a shit about their customers it will continue to suck.
Perhaps this was AT&T giving us a preview of what's to come with the Tiered Internet?
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
The realm status page ALWAYS lists everything as a-OK. I dont think I've ever been able to get to it when the servers were not ok.
Based on your timing and skill at entering in your account information on the login page, the fight begins!
Connecting...
Authenticating...
Server casts Lag Spike on you for 10503 damage. You die.
Unable to connect.
If you do really well, you might get to STAGE 2: "Retrieving Character List"
In our area (DFW Metroplex, TX) it started about three weeks ago. We noticed our business internet having DNS issues. We contacted our (former) SBC data centers (quite the maze that is) but they reported no issues. Problems disappeared in two days with no explanation except the up-level DNS servers started responding again.
Two weeks ago our long distance lines went down for about an hour. Again contacting the support center resulted with "We're not seeing anything." Issue disappeared with no explanation.
I'm a WoW player. I've seen server side issues (December 2004-February 2005), and I've seen ISP issues (F*** YOU COMCA$T!!!! Thank you, Verizon FiOS.) I've seen a major influx of new players (December 2005), and I've seen login server issues. It never dawned on me that AT&T's network could be behind the recent issues with WoW. I take back any obscenities I or my wife may have directed towards Blizzard for the past week of login issues. Now I know who'll be burning in my version of hell.
You'd think a company as big and as old as AT&T would know better how to handle these types of things like acquisition and network transition.
Screw up my work connections, I get busy.
Screw up my liesure connection, I get really pissed.
First of all, I know for a fact that you can use the instance portals to dupe because I have had it accidently happen to me twice (i.e. trade food to a friend and I got kicked out with the items I traded). Second, the dup bug has never been really repaired. After all of that hooplah, I tripped across another dupe bug that can be done; albeit, it is very hard to reproduce and has very limited dupe options. To my knowledge, it still hasn't been repaired. If my suspicion about how their system works, it can never be repaired.
The truth is that the server and the client can both make decisions on trade/buy/sell of items. If you can get them out of sync far enough, both transactions will occur. Ultimately, the problem with items is that Blizzard trusts the client for item changes, and that is bad.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
You think WoW is bad? Try playing Diablo 2 on battle.net now. Blizzard doesn't give a rats ass about diablo anymore and you'll notice with insane lag spikes occuring every 10-15 minutes, as well as people getting temp bans due to their crap servers. Blizzard needs to stop being such money grabbing whores and use those 1200 new opterons they purchased and get more pipe for such a large scale game, I believe it's over 4 million maybe 5 now. I personally don't play WoW, and I would NEVER waste money monthly on sub-par servers. I prefer GuildWars because they CARE about their players.
"Somehow Blizzard hasn't quite caught on that 5.5 million subscribers might eventually go away, especially if they get frustrated enough with the downtime/lag. Sure, there's not much place for those gamers to go, but this may not be true in 1-3 years."
The final reason I quit was that since December the server queues were averaging 30-60 minutes on weekdays - non peak hours (late night Hawaii time). Given that I only have a couple of hours a night to play, having half of that wasted due to waiting in line sucked. Not to mention that since the login screen uses my 3D card I couldn't play anything else while waiting in the queue. Blizzard should take a hint from other MMOs and make the login 2D.
That and there being nothing interesting to do at level 60 excepted scheduled raids (debatable how interesting that is anyway).
As for there being nowhere to go, that really isn't true. Sure every MMO since WoW's release has been completely overshadowed but there are some great games out there. I played City of Villains for a few months and then moved on to Everquest 2 (sure flame all you want, but it has tons of great content and is much more friendly now than it was at launch). There are free trials available for a most of the other MMOs. Two things you won't find however, the truly massive player base of WoW and the associated server instability, queues and lag.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I gave up on it because of this, as well. This... and well, just the waiting queues. The backend on the servers has always pretty much sucked.
"I played on Doomhammer btw."
I played on Doomhammer from April '05 through the beginning of this year. The server earned it's nickname "Downhammer". Queues had never been a big problem for me, but since December I had been seeing queues of 30-60 minutes in off hours. Which is great when you try to log on 15 minutes before a scheduled raid - have to wait 45 and find out your spot has been given away.
Now Doomhammer is full of level 60s, and players with multiple level 60s. New character creation has been locked out for the server (unless you already have an existing toon on DH). I imagine I'm not the only one who has left. What happens when the expansion comes out and people reactivate their accounts?
Most of the people I know rolled alts on a new server to play when not doing end game raids on Doomhammer. I tried that and a month after the server had been out - whammo - queues on the new server. I guess I just don't have enough free gaming time to spend it sitting staring at a queue.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"Blizzards problem is that they won't hard cap servers."
They hard capped the server I was playing on (Doomhammer) a few months ago. Old players could still make new alts, but if you didn't have a toon already on Doomhammer you couldn't make a one. I don't know if they've opened it back up again as I quit playing.
They seem to have reduced the total number of players allowed to login at any given time as well. At least after the last patch queues became a nightly reality versus no queues pre-patch.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Authenticating. That's not my hand you're shaking; Pull the other one.
Athy, athier, athiest.
snuf23, please contact me at blunte@gmail.com. I've got some Hawaii questions :)
Thanks!
.sigs are for post^Hers.
There are some servers that suffer frequent downtime and many that do not (I'm on Draenor, which never has problems unless *every* server goes down), and its generally the same groups of servers (including Kargath). This leads me to believe that they have internal problems, or perhaps problems upstream, some but not all of their server clusters. Its also why WoW forums simultaneously hold a lot of "OMG this game sucks I get disconnected 12 times a minute" and "STFU rock solid here!"
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I wonder how much of the games revenue goes back into blizzard and wow versus the cut Vivendi Universal takes.
Hmmm... Pie...
The reason I don't play WoW is exactly that. I had a Diablo 2 account on Battle.Net that got locked out (not banned, I just simply couldn't get to my character list). I emailed Blizzard for a month trying to get help and get the problem solved. All I ever received were the same auto-replies over and over again. Soon enough, my account was gone, and so was I. I won't play another multiplayer blizzard game (which involves the "grind") until they smarten up their customer service. It was horrible with D2, and with all the news and articles I've been hearing since it's release, it doesn't seem to have changed.
I've been playing MMORPGs for about 7 years now, and never made a payment (UOX, Sphere, RunUO servers + Lineage 2 freeservers). The freeservers I've played have always had either amazing GM Run events/quests or 1000+ people online at any given time (comparable to alot of UO "shards" or WoW realms). I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay money now for a game with horrible service. But thats just my two cents.
Fractured Element