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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.) "
I didnt know fourm trolls get their own cnet articles now
Also, if forum trolls got their own articles, this one would be about the lead developer Furor, and how his guild was allowed to level up on an easymode pve server, and then that server was among the first to be allowed to transfer to a server with a pvp ruleset.
Then it could go into how furor was nothing but a forum troll in EQ, who used to rant about how he hated the paladin class, and that is why the WoW paladin is in such a sorry state and got boned during it's review.
Well since you dont play, im glad youve commented! thats what we need more of. Anyways to your point;
"you subscribe to that service for it to be available just about 24x7 whenever you feel like jumping in"
This is exactly, for the most part, by and large, what happens for everyone. What the parent is saying, correctly, is that the 1% of users who have problems make 99% of the noise. This is how the phrase "fourm troll" was coined and what it generally means. People who love complaining about the game and yet are completely dependant on it to a point where a day of downtime is some kind of crazy conspiracy. Basically, the only time that anything bad happens is either 1) around patch time 2) during peak server loads. And honestly, ALL computer systems are like that.
"they're afraid of complaining in case they're denied those things completely."
Well im not afraid of complaing, or some sort of apologist, but its really NOT THAT BAD. Personally, i would complain more about the horrible GM policies (name changing on TOTALLY legit names*1, bans for casual swearing, gms suspending your account for something you did 6 hours ago when your just about to down rag, etc). The hardware problems are the least of my problems with the game. Power tripping GMs and uneven enforcement of policy is so much worse than an hour or two of downtime.
*1 They actually changed my friends name because it was ntny (anthony with some letters missing) which they said was "random characters" which is a renameable offense. what words arent collections of random letters, i ask you.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Blizzard lost it LONG ago. I bought WC2 and found out that it wouldn't play in my computer beause I had a CD Burner and the copy "protection" wouldn't let it play. Their response, buy a new CD drive.
My response, gamecopyworld.com
Gamer: 1, Blizzard: 0
The same method worked on their next games, but I downloaded those. No reason not to wish for the bankruptcy of a company to whom my expenses obviously were irrelevant, despite being a direct result of their mistakes.
I can see the same attitude in WoW, honestly, an MMORPG that crashes that much when everyone raids in small (less than 500) player protected instances was programmed by a moron using VB. I've seen quake servers that offer a better MMORPG feeling. Their customer service takes this to the whole next level of blaming the customer, when they tell them anything.
Pah. They've simply got a more interesting game than EQ, but they don't have a clue about multiplayer (Look at StarCraft for proof, fun despite them, but buggy as hell even for an 8-player co-op game using sprites!) and they couldn't program a wet-paper bag to crumple if they used heavy rocks.