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On World of Warcraft's Network Issues
alphaneutrino writes to mention a C|Net article discussing some of the recent problems the World of Warcraft playerbase has experienced. From the article: "'Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center,' said Evgeny Krevets, a sometimes-frustrated WoW player. 'I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job.' Blizzard blames some of the problems--such as the disconnection, for several hours on Friday, of players linked to several servers--on AT&T, its network provider. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.) "
Sunday: The day the server stood still
Monday: *gasp*, playable (until 11pm)
Tuesday: Weekly Maintenance Day. Nothing else EVER needs to be said about this day.
Wednesday: Playable (until 11pm), good chance maintenance aftermath.
Thursday: The 10 second instant-casts day for MC & BWL.
Yeah, it goes on. Our server reliably bites the dust around 11pm every night for 6 hours, not to mention the constant plague of login issues and 30-minute loading screens during peak hours. Funny how this is all on a low-medium population server.
...and migrated to EQ2. Little server lag, only a few instances of unplanned downtime, and stuff actually *works* (i.e. no year-long unfixed bugs). I'd highly recommend it to people who are bored/frustrated with WoW as I was.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
wow...And I thought SOE was bad at maintaing MMORPGs.... I'm sure glad I'm playing Saga of Ryzom. 6_6
I've noticed that since starting to play WoW last year around June that over time the performance issues and network performance have just gone in the toilet. Game patches result in difficulties too numerous to enumerate here. Login queue times have skyrocketed over the last four months, and I keep sending in complaints about how $150 a year should get me better performance than this. I'd love to see their setup and critique it.
The problem really is visible when you are adventuring in difficult to beat places. You depend on having your team perform to their best ability. It is then so frustrating to be constantly dealing with part of you team getting disconnected or being lagged to the point of ineffectiveness.
My guild is doing MC BWL, ZG and AQ20 right now. It is a regular occurence right now to wait 20 minutes to start a fight because of disconnected people, only to then lose that battle because you lost two priests to a disconnect during it.
The anger may not be at the threshold point yet Blizzard, but it most definitely building fast. The thing about angry customers is that there is a point of no return when they are forever lost. Blizzard has a lot of customers right now, but they would lose them fast if somebody else stepped up with a great game and more reliable game play.
Blizzard, you executed very very well on game content by effectively removing much of the grind that other games are plagued with, but you have failed with customer interaction. Some of your representatives treat your customers with borderline contempt (Tseric) and you fail miserably at explaining properly the multitude of changes you make to the game.
Blizzard, your six million customers are waiting; it's your move, take too much time and you could lose them. Start with being public about your server improvement plans, telling people what you're doing and why and how its going to make things better. Not knowing when things are going to get better is really making people angry.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
To be honest, what bothers me more than the lag itself is the distinct lack of interest their support staff give. Tickets submitted to the in-game helpers, Game Masters, result in them telling you to go post on the tech support forum. The tech support forum tell you first of all to uninstall all the addons and to phone your ISP, despite the fact that the problem is occuring to everyone on the server, and then they tell you to contact a Game Master on your server... An in-game friend of mine recently called Blizzard directly to speak to the tech support staff there. After informing him that we were currently in the middle of an Ahn'Qiraj raid where all forty of us were experiencing lag of over 800ms the friendly staff member told him that "Well it may be your ISP". Why yes, we have members located from Britain to Hungary to Russia but we are all having ISP problems at once. If they'd just admit that the servers are over-populated, open more servers and allow migration then this would help alleviate the problems. I'm on the EU-Arathor server which has 12k players, the highest in the EU, but has yet to be offered a migration option. It's a poor show.
IIRC, they did exactly this 1-2 months after launch. A couple of weeks later, they declared their problems solved.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
I don't have time to look up the post from the forums. But a while back one of the CM's let slip that Blizzard does not manage the WoW datacenter. They actually have contracted every bit of that out to a third party. I sincerely think this is a core part of the problem with connectivity. Of course Blizzard has a time lag between something going wrong and them finding out about it. First a tech at the third-party has to notice it. Then they forward to their superiors and so forth and so on until eventually someone at Blizzard might find out something went wrong. It also doesn't surprise me that the third party providing datacenter hosting is not multi-homed (isn't that the correct term?).
I think the largest lesson to learn here is that you shouldn't contract out the entire core aspect of your business model.
...while you're not an idiot, I can understand where they could end up with one supplier for bandwidth.
:-)
1) You need a SLA with each ISP you pull backbone level feed from. You can use InterNAP and hook into the peering points in the US and a few other places, but it's got it's own issues- and if you just use them, you're still with only one ISP; if they fail, you're still up a creek without a paddle.
2) You'd need to frame the servers into one massive data center with a HUGE honking data-pipe from each ISP with BGP routing on the inbound routers from the ISPs to your DMZ to establish one IP address range for the front-facing servers
OR
Come up with some sort of nasty DNS trick to hopefully make the server front-ends transparent to the clients and spread them across multiple IP blocks (Which is what epicRealm did to make their CDN actually completely transparent to client and customer- and to be able to handle dynamic HTTP content...)- but be prepared, because in order for this to work right, you either need to trust the client's state, share state across server pools on different IP blocks, be stateless, or somesuch like the previous.
There's a bunch more, but those above two and the first item will hopefully show you why someone (a bean counter, most likely...) will make the decision to just simply hold the ISP or Tier-1 host (Which is the most likely case here- they're very probably colocated at an AT&T Tier-1 facility...) to the SLA they promised- because it's cheaper and waaay simpler if everything goes right and they're "not to blame" if things go wrong. If you went an alternate route and had a mishap that wasn't server related, then you'd be to blame and have nobody to point fingers at when it all broke (And you just KNOW it will at some point- it always does...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Perhaps this problem is symptomatic of their lethargy in getting their systems together 17 months after launch. I quit for a while, yet came back a few months later to find things better. As you said, though, they quickly got worse and like you I may be ready to give it up for good.
I am, however, interested in seeing how D&D Online is as it's a Turbine game
It's awful. I'm not even sure why they called it D&D, 'cause it's not. Let's just break down some of the problems.
1st: Leveling is ridiculously slow. In actual D&D, you hit second level after 1000 xp. In Stormreach, it's 10,000xp. Then the discrepancy just grows. To offset this, they give you, basically, minilevels every 20% of the way through each one of your real levels. At each minilevel, you get an action point to spend on some ability that doesn't exist in D&D, arcade-like real-time fighting stuff like a 30% increase to attack speed 5 times a day. But you can only have 4 of these abilities at any given time, so the action points are mostly spent on shuffling around some pretty inconsequential abilities.
2nd: The slow leveling and inflated xp requirements would be okay, really, especially considering the level cap is only 10 (that, at least, is D&D-like; 10th level is supposed to be pretty powerful), except for the fact that there's no way to gain xp other than completing quests. So you do a quest. Then you repeat it. Then you repeat it some more. Then you repeat it. You do this until you level. Then you keep doing it. It's really quite awful; I can't even imagine what playing an alt would be like. In most MMORPGs, you get a bit bored with your main, you start an alt, and you're *not* sick of the beginning game. In this one, I'm already bored with my 2nd-level main, but the thought of starting an alt and going through the same dungeons over and over again makes me throw up a little in my mouth.
3rd: Real-time combat is ridiculous. I'm sorry, but D&D combat is planned, regimented, ruled by dice. Why spend all that money on getting a license, and then completely throw out the well-established and popular mechanics of the system? Attacks of opportunity, flanking, sneak attacks, deciding between full-move and other actions, all that wonderful tactical depth is out the window, replaced by mash-the-right-mouse-button-as-fast-as-you-can.
4th: Given that the importance of things like 'rounds' is out the window due to the above decision, it's silly to stick to them in other contexts, like when my 6-wisdom fighter got hit with a -6 wisdom debuff, and found himself unable to do *anything* until it wore off. Couldn't talk to NPCs. Couldn't open doors. Couldn't even swing his hammer. Yeah, waiting around for *30 minutes* of real-time before I can play the game again is brilliant.
5th: Spell points? Get the fuck out here with that shit. 1st-level wizards in D&D simply cannot cast 24 magic missiles before they have to rest. If you want wizards who can do that, fine, but then why insist on calling that D&D, when it's not?
On one hand, I'm curious as to how things play out at higher levels. On the other hand, I'm not curious enough to spend any more money or time to find out.
This is a trick that all service industries (Sat. Radio, directv, etc.) use for subscriber count. The subscriber count is the number of people, over the lifetime of the product, that have subscribed. Not the same as the current number of subscribers. Blizzard is *NOT* collection 6 million * $15 a month in subscription costs!