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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.
...so THAT'S how Blizzard is combatting server lag.
.. What's that come to again?
And _why_ are there any problems whatsoever?
Blizzard, I can guarantee this: if you spend $35 million per month on refactoring, hardware and bandwidth, all your problems go away. Guaranteed. I promise.
Every time I see these types of posts, I have to wonder if they're a victim of their own success. With something like 6 million subscribers, it can't be an easy job maintaining the service.
Then again, they're getting $15 a month from 6 million people, you'd think throwing some money at the problem could help, but it's never that simple.
Maybe it's the Blizzard guys' moms that come in and say "Enough of those stupid games already, go to bed!"? ;)
Or are they too cool to be running the servers out of their parents' basements like the rest of us?
"Well, at least I have chicken!"
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
I didnt know fourm trolls get their own cnet articles now. Whats next? an article on nerfing hunters in the new york times? Ive barely even seen any issues since patch 1.10. I think patch day the servers were down all day, but thats to be expected.
Seriously, if the game goes down for a few hours, you can do other things. What about cleaning your apartment? i bet it needs it.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job
The difference is that Blizzard sees itself as already having it's customer's money. Therefore, there's no reason to spend any more for service. Your boss needs the network up just to make money.
I tend to agree, today's net users are so spoiled. Back in 1993 AOL went down every Tuesday and Thursday at 11PM for six hours- at least. And AOL isn't even a recreational service as WoW is, it is vital things like email and stock tickers.
The above poster needs to learn to become tough like valient AOL users did, and who were also the tip of the spear that tamed the net for WoW players to come a decade later.
Those communists over at Blizzard want to use Edward Whitacre's pipes for free!
...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
Free, not Pay per month, and as long as I have played it, only 2 spots of down time in 6 months. I guess WoW has many things one upped on GW, but still.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
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.
Oh yeah, that monthly fee is totally going towards maintenance costs, just like they said. That much is apparent.
Seriously, I still can't believe how easily people took to paying monthly subscription fees to play games that already cost $60 and, without paying the fee, are completely useless. It's kinda like giving cold, hard cash to a charity. You have no idea where that money is going, and you sure as hell can't trust Blizzard's PR department to give you the whole truth.
I stand fast in my assertion that I will not pay a monthly subscription to play any game except under one of two circumstances: 1) the game must have an equally fun single player mode (and it better be damn good), or 2) the game itself is free, and the monthly subscription is the only cost.
Call me anal, but it's bad enough when I pissed half my college years away playing Diablo II online for free. I don't see the point in having to pay for the privilege to waste my time.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
No one except the 6 Million users that play the game.
I'm not a WoW player but if it's true that these systems regularly go dark for 8 hours at a time I have to wonder if they're not racing through some software patch. In other words, I don't know an architecture out there that can't be rebooted in 8 hours so a straight-up crash seems unlikely. I would assume they've taken care of scalability problems by now so system load / tablespace, etc, ought to not be an issue.
... and some succeed, requiring a quick patch to the code base? I wouldn't doubt that they have monitoring mechanisms in play which detect unreasonable changes in a character's level / gold, etc.
Could it be that WoW suffers constant attempts at subverting the framework of play
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Just like ISPs are and held to accounts for it. When I played WOW they were good about refunding for extended downtime. Yet at no time do any of these pay to play games make any guarantee of service availabilty.
As far as their continuing stability and growth issues.
STOP SELLING THE DAMN GAME.
Sheesh, how hard is that to understand? If you cannot provide a stable set of servers and servers where people can play WHENEVER they want to then stop selling new copies until otherwise.
Hopefully with the number of professionals playing the game one of them will get annoyed enough to sue them in court, either to force a change by ruling or just having their named dragged into the mud.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Our game had its server problems and we were in "learning mode" to deal with some major outages, major gameplay renovations, major strife from jerks, and major socio-legal issues behind the scenes such as player-to-player harassment and real-life stalking. EA/Origin's Ultima Online started later and had some of the same issues in an almost predictable order and timing. Then EverQuest repeated our mistakes, and so on.
I would think that as an industry, as a set of geeks, we MMORPG server managers would learn from each others' mistakes, but apparently, we do not. It is also a problem in that the management in *product* companies think it is easy to become a world-class *service* company, where the service is being sold to thousands to millions of *household* mass market customers.
[
Ngggggshhshseehahhad! I can't take it, I have to reply!
AOL vital? Email and stock tickers through AOL vital! Now, I do believe I've heard everything! It's one thing to celebrate the Mom and Pop ISP's that filled the dialup service needs for millions of people, but celebrating AOL users as valiant is comparable to celebrating underarm bacteria for helping drive home the hygeine issue.
I only WISH the AOL users back in the 90's were at the tip of the spear! A awl pike actually.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
The reason they're having so much trouble is because the integration with the AT&T to government monitoring station upgrades are taking too long.
AT&T: Keeping terrorists off WoW!
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
is that they Patch one thing, and something else ENTIRELY UNRELATED gets broken. In a recent patch, there were no changes detailed in patch notes regarding Onyxia, yet they managed to cause her deep breath to occur every 10 seconds or so. How the hell does this happen?
Sounds like WoW has a house of cards network with single point of failure architecture problems.
And that AT&T is exploiting them, marketing a new "premium service/support" contract by letting them go down.
I can't wait until WoW has to pay AT&T (and its handful of competitors, if they get rid of the SPF) the extra "premium tier" routing fees, once the telcos market their "nonneutral" Internet. Because a world of angry Warcraft players jonesing for their fix will be a nice gift for telco suits just trying to make it home from work.
--
make install -not war
It's hard for AT&T to cater to so many millions of users *AND* filter/direct all of their customer data illegally and directly to the NSA.
Looking at your history (http://slashdot.org/~j0nkatz) its obvious you have a way with words.
I wonder why you bother talking to us, you're way too cool to hang with nerds like us.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
As an example, I came home from holiday (I'm in the UK) on Sunday evening & I immediately noticed my ADSL connection was down. So I phoned my ISP to report the fault, only to be told that they knew about the problem - a faulty server had been down for 48 hours!!! And when the tech support person could not tell me when the service would be restored, she seemed totally bemused as to why I was angry about the duration of downtime & demanded to speak to her manager.
The manager was even worse... polite and courteous but did not have a clue as to the cause of the problem or when the ADSL service would be back up. He even admitted that they'd been making some network changes to accomodate a recent merger with another company and that they had no backup server to put in place to at least give some degree of restricted service.
I may pay (the equivalent of) $30 a month for my ADSL service but am I the only person who expects good service from any company I deal with, whether I spend £3 or £30,000 with that company? I accept that sometimes there are service outages, I'd even view an 8-hour outage a few days a year as being understandable. But 48 hours???
I've been in the telecoms/computer industry now for about 20 years now and I've seen the whole perception of what is and isn't good customer service change over that time - it seems now that customers are forced to accept worse service because every company has reduced the level of service they give.
And when it comes to poor Joe Public "peons" like ourselves, who only spend a small amount each month with these companies, we're expected to endure countless menu selections, long delays in call-centre queues and lengthy outages as a matter of course.
It would be good to see a lot more people complain more and cancel their services with some of these providers - I'm sure this is the only way that they will be forced to offer better service to us.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
I think there's a common failure of even technologically inclined individuals, including system administrators, to understand exactly what is required of the servers that allow us (usually) to play World of Warcraft. For every player connected to the server, the server has to recieve a packet explaining what the player's current attempted actions are, and send back relevant information regarding the actions of every other player and object in the immediate area. This is a constant process for each and every player!
The common system that is administered in a corporate environment does not have thousands of users connected at once all requiring huge amounts of bandwidth and processing time 24/7. That is not to say that systems with large wear and tear don't exist, or that systems with such huge numbers of users don't exist, or even both. What I am saying is that Blizzard has to administer two or more dozen server clusters being continually accessed 24/7 by resource intensive users (save for a usually brief repose on Tuesdays). Unless you work for Google (and even then) there's no comparison.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't raise our eyebrows at the pervasiveness of the problems WoW has. However, I keep seeing the same arguments thrown around about how Blizzard gets $15 x 6million every month (not entirely true because A) there are less pricey payment options and B) something around 1/3 of those players play in China on Asian servers whos subscription plans would hardly be purchasable were they $15 a month), how at 'my company' things work this way, etc. etc.
Blizzard should be called on to answer for why their servers haven't been made right as rain after a year or more after release, but it should be in the context of legitimate complaint and not any of this throwing around of overused and hardly consequential arguments.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
... and I don't plan on subscribing again until I can see evidence that they have fixed this. Like many people at the moment I have expressed my discontent in the only manner that Blizzard will hear and voted with my check book.
I know it is tough for Blizzard, but as a customer I have been the one paying the price for that so far, from now on that cost is Blizzards again. At least for the time being.
A large part of the problem is that Blizzard's communication with the player base sucks, to speak frankly. The login server for their forums seems to be one and the same as the login server for the game itself, so when that goes down the forums tend to shut down as well. There is a "Realm Status" page which purports to show the real-time status of the various servers, but which is frequently unreachable. There is a "Realm Status" forum which *might* contain some acknowledgement of a problem while the problem is still ongoing, but usually doesn't. When you start up the game client, Blizzard can stick up a 'News' window on your screen but, again, the appearance of any news often lags the problem, even severe problems, by a matter of hours. And, of course, Blizzard's chief form of communication with players is Community Managers on the forums, who themselves tend to be given dick in the way of information, are extremely controlled in what they can and cannot say, and who are (honestly, I'm not joking), tasked with yelling at users for stuff posting subject headers that contain excessive capitalization; what an obscene waste of resources.
Seriously, a little timely information goes a long way. Yes, I agree that the downtime they have is absurd; consider that *every Tuesday* the game goes offline for *six hours* of maintenance. That's *planned, scheduled* downtime, folks, so that *alone* means they aren't even attempting to have greater than 96.4% uptime, and I can't think of another commercial service for which you pay a monthly fee where that would be even remotely acceptable; if your cable or your phone just plain didn't work for 6 hours every Tuesday, heads would roll. Then things just get asinine when you factor in all the spontaneous, freewheeling, unplanned downtime as well.
But know what? I'd feel a lot better about it if, when something shits the bed, or goes tits-up, or whatever colorful metaphor you'd use to describe a server-killing technical problem, Blizzard would tell us, promptly, as they receive the information themselves:
1. We know there's a problem.
2. We know what the proglem is.
3. Here's what we're doing to fix it.
4. Here's when we expect it to be fixed.
5. Update as old information is obsolete.
They don't do this. A few hours after something happens, you might get some of the above information. Or you might not. Usually, it's the latter.
I don't play any online games but I thought the whole idea of them was that you subscribe to that service for it to be available just about 24x7 whenever you feel like jumping in. Sure, occasional outages are to be expected but if it gets to the stage where the game is frequently slow or unavailable, the common sense solution would be to cancel your subscription until Blizzard (or whomever) improves the service they deliver you. If enough people did this, they'd have to do something about it...
I'm sorry but I think far too many people have become "slaves" to marketing by truly believing that they simply cannot do without a lot of the products & services that they pay good money for - to the point where they "need" those items so much that they're afraid of complaining in case they're denied those things completely.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
WoW is hardly the first online service to be hit by network and server problems. Over the years, services like eBay, Amazon.com and E*Trade have all dealt with various forms of outages.
Yeah, but the difference with WoW is the money. When eBay, Amazon.com, and E*Trade have outages they are losing money. When WoW has an outage they don't lose a dime. Only thing they lose is the 1 or 2 players who get frustrated and abandon all the 'work' they put into their characters and cancel their accounts. Blizzard still collects your $15 every month, outage or not. No $$$ incentive for them to provide good service. I thought they were a good company, but my opinion of them is changing drastically. Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 are both Blizzard games you can play online for free, they are more stable then WoW. Something is wrong here!
WOW server downtime is saving my marriage.
tidokoro
what turns a man's karma neutral? lust for gold? power? or just a heart born full of neutrality?
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.
15min waiting in cue to log in? When I gave a freebee 14 day account a try I sometimes had 2-3 hour cues... Main reson I didn't stick around. But random downtime during any MMO raid really kills the fun of playing.
I've been playing since before release, and the issues that WoW is having aren't small nor acceptable.
Queues are there because each server has a maximum capacity of 3400 players. When there's that number on the server you get to wait in line to log in. This issue first came up in open beta, and back then they said it was a temporary thing. The fact is most servers have a queue at peak time, which can range from a few people to over a thousand per server waiting to play, sometimes for hours, every day, since more than a year and a half.
Constant lag is an issue that a few servers have to deal with and is indicative to network overload. Having everyone's speed take 10secs before casting in any instance means doing raids is impossible, and doing group quests is tricky at best, and the servers that have this issue cannot play in any decent manner for weeks at a time.
8 hours a week of schedule maintenance every Tuesday, sometimes more, and random crashes, is indicative to stability problems. Everquest has run for over 5 years and, while it may have extended downtimes during content patches, can run for months without a single second of downtime. There is no valid reason a server should be brought down for 8 hours after 7 days of running.
All 3 problems are relatively simple to solve with money, mainly by increasing network pipes, getting more redundancy, opening more new servers. And after over a year and a half of the same problems occuring, it isn't too much to ask Blizzard to get their act together.
Those are the 2
I was flamed in a previous post by people when I first mentioned this: But I have Karma to burn so flame me again!
This is the SAME Blizzard who couldn't manage the hacks / cheats / dupes / cross-realm bugged items in Diablo II. Sure, Diablo II was a free to play on Battle.net so you get what you pay for, but the mismanagment of the realms / game are now showing through on a service that ISN'T FREE.
Friends of mine are trying to get me to play WoW, and I refuse. I will _never_ buy or play another Blizzard managed game, due to my experiences with Diablo II.
Blizzard is good at one thing: Making games
They are not good at:
Managing reliable online play experiences.
Customer service (forums, call center, online chat).
Timely responses to anything.
And to even consider $15 a MONTH, for me, is stupid.
Flame suit firmly snugged up.
= Grow a brain...
I think that's the number one reason to halt all this illegal wiretapping!
Oh, and maybe the 4th amendment - it seems we're having time-out issues with that as well.
If these problem are really related to AT&T, then why do we Germans experience exact the same problem? Over here T-Online is the bad guy. To solve the problem, Blizzard even suggested to alter you MTU-rate for your dsl to 1400. I don't know how many people ever heard of a thing called MTU ever. (the common people, not the nerds here ;-) )
Blizzard should ask themself why the whole IT ifrastructure are haveing problems with there product and if it is really the isp's fault.
Why don't all of you complainers play a free MMO instead?
Yes, there are free MMO's, and they're much more stable than what you're describing.
Try out my favorite one here and discover a game that many people have been playing for years without any fees.
I finally left around the time of what I recall as The Great Queueing back after the Ahn'Quiraj patch.
There was a stretch of damn near a month after Christmas where there were queues on all the listed servers save for a single handful. I was so frustrated with waiting through a 1000 person queue on the couple month old server I'd moved to that I went through the entire list checking on whether they had queues. I believe there were three servers that didn't have a queue.
Even after we'd get in, either Kalimdor or the Eastern Kingdoms would be down, so if you were unlucky enough to have zoned out in the wrong area, sucks to be you.
I quit not long after for that and some other reasons (playing too much, not having as much fun while playing, and the ridiculously immature WoW "culture" to name a few). I went so far as to throw away the discs so I didn't spend more money on wondering whether things have gotten better, because I really do know the answer: Hell will freeze over before it gets any better.
There deal of "if you want your customers to connect to your service with a good connection..you as the content provider must pay us as well as the customers ISP..and the customers...Mwhuhahahaahah!" I tell ya prices for Online gaming are going to rise fast! You wanna play WoW, you gotta pay..Blizzard has to pay..your ISP has to pay! Soon only rich people like gates will have Internet access, as he will be the only one whom can still afford it! Thats why blizzard is having such connection and problems. Blizzard's servers are fine..it's AT&T causing all the problems! They want more money! =P Have a nice day! The Computer is your friend. Trust the Computer, or you will be terminated.
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.
I tolerated this for about three months. After three straight months of being unable to get past Vael, because Blizzard designed a bunch of highly ping-sensitive encounters for their content at the same time that their network couldn't handle the player load, I gave up and cancelled. It was hard to do, because I absolutely loved and adored this game. My wife even misses it, and she hardly ever played it. The other day she said, "I miss hearing about Blackwing Lair. You guys were going so well and you all got so excited about it." But I can't justify paying this money when, month in and month out, the game is unplayable. When it's not lag, it's constant server crashing. I tolerate a LOT of this. A TON. I NEVER complain about server instability. I know what it's like, and having one or two crashes now and then isn't that big of a deal to me. I'm an old MUD admin, my tolerance level is insanely high. But when I arrange my week around my raid schedule, order food, show up, and then sit around for 4 hours waiting for the server to come up, and I do this for 3 months with no end in sight, it's unacceptable. So I called it quits. I hated to do it, but I can't keep paying for nothing.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Here's my suggestion if WoW is sucking: vote with your damn dollars. City of Heroes never has these problems. If you haven't tried the game, give it a shot, 14 days no strings attached no cc needed:
1 145983133843,20060425123853
http://www.mmorpg.com/cov_trial.cfm?fp=1920,1200,
I tried WoW, but I'd rather fly (or leap, or superspeed) than walk or take a slow horse. And I'd rather fight and run missions than spend endless hours craftgrinding. And I like playing with my friends and being able to even when we're different levels - "sidekicking" is the best mmo feature EVAR.
But CoX has basically never had these issues. One or two minor hiccups in 2 years.
It's amusing to constantly see articles like this, because they've been having network/server issues since the game was released, back in November '04. After putting up with it for 4 months at that point, we canceled our accounts, waiting for the day when it wouldn't be a problem anymore. 6 months later, we reactivated, only to cancel 2 months later for the same reasons. It's honestly disgusting that this is still going on, but as many other people have said, the only way to let them know is to stop paying.
...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
I'm a Blizzard fanboy I'll tell you straight out, and yeah they've had poor uptime since release, at first from usual mmorpg release headaches... and then what?
I have a conspiracy theory though. I have always respected Blizzard and felt they were very receptive and communicative to their fanbase, and feel that has been somewhat demonstrated even facing the apparently overwhelming popularity 'problems' of WoW, and so them seemed somewhat tight lipped about things in general makes me think it part of their contracts.
Aren't they using IBM's database for WoW, for example? The DB backend is involved in every aspect of the game, and say there was an undocumented flaw or heck even documented flaw with their DB backend they are grappling with. I would imagine they way they are implementing things isn't exactly old hat either, we haven't had massively popular mmorpgs for aeons in the computer world. If IBM's DBAs and programmers are even having problems resolving the issues, Blizzard can't turn around and say 'Yeah we're doing all we can but our IBM DB sucks, buy IBM.' If it's instead a network issue with AT&T, again I'm sure part of their corporate contracts involve 'not talking about how much their internet sucks ass'
we cant blame AT&T, they have to hook up their networks to the NSA so we can be spied on..
its not their fault its the terrorists!
World of Warcraft could switch to another provider but then the terrorists would win! dont ya see? playing lag free World of Warcraft supports terrorism!
When you put a goldfish in a tank, what happens, provided you feed it enough and keep the environment healthy for it?
Well, it grows to the size of its tank.
When you put a few million people in a MMO, feed them with good content and gameplay, what happens?
The MMO goldfish grows to the size of its tank. Or in this case, network.
I promise you that Blizzard has already looked at the costs of increasing their network capacity versus the amount of estimated benefit (i.e. how many more subscribers they'll get) and found that it is prohibitive. So they are doing what any business would do. Trying to find a balance. They've done some things, like replace servers that aren't performing up to par, but that doesn't affect the network performance as a whole which plagues their entire infrastructure.
Simply put, WoW is gigantic. Too big for itself. Players who can handle it stay. Those who can't, leave. Myself, I have played since the release. I don't consider myself a hardcore player anymore, so it's easier for me to not get all pissed off when I can't login every damn day for hours on end. If it's not happening, I do other things IRL that are just as good, and often more healthy for me than sittin at a computer.
Right now WoW is in equilibrium with the oppositional forces of a over-crowded network and an abundant player base. I imagine this is how it will be for quite a while, and the expansion is only going to make this worse.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
While you're fed up with network troubles of your current game, now might be the opporunity to try some of the other MMORPGs. Yes, I *do* play WoW, but for those times when I'm sick of dealing with (fill in the blank), I have City of Heroes & Villains. And out in the last week: AutoAssault, which has satisfied my craving for a vehicles-with-mounted-weapons game.
Offtopic? Maybe! Proudly so. Come on over, it'd be cool to see some new capes & cars in both games.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
It strikes me as odd that we constantly compare MMOGs to other games or services regardless of the validity of the comparison.
MMOGs are Entertainment. There are very few other services that one may purchase for "only" $15 per month that will provide the volume and quality (yes, quality) of entertainment that a MMOG will.
One night at the movies - easily $20 for ~2 hours. A night out drinking/dancing >$40? for 4 hours? Any concert >$40 for a few hours. A date? (I know this is /. just trust me, they are expensive).
My point is that it's not a waste of time. It's entertainment. We choose to play them. We choose not to watch TV. MMOGs are actually social behavior (we chat and make friends). If you play MMOGs instead of watching cable/direcTV/TiVo you are paying considerably less per month and interacting with more people while you are doing it.
I consider myself a casual gamer (maybe an hour or two every-other day, more on the weekends) and per-hour I pay about 20 cents/hour to play WoW. If I was hard-core, it would be considerably less.
Relax, and let the silent majority have their fun.
-A
However, I get a little sick and tired of people treating certain companies as being almost "beyond criticism" on Slashdot - Apple seems to be one of those, Blizzard appears to be another. (BTW, I'm an avid player of Warcraft 2 & Starcraft so I actually rate those particular products, and therefore my personal experiences of Blizzard, very highly).
The fact is that if you don't feel you get value for money, whether it's from Apple, Microsoft, Blizzard, Dell, etc. etc. then *DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT* rather than just sitting back & accepting it. Maybe I'm just middle-aged & cynical but I don't consider *ANY* product or service as being that important to me that I wouldn't throw it straight back at whoever sold it to me if it didn't meet my expectations.
The problem is that clever marketing has made certain products "cool" and/or made some people fearful of making any criticisms just in case they "stand out from the rest of the crowd". What I'm saying is that *ALL* that matters is whether or not *YOU* feel you get value for money - if you do, then enjoy it & let those that feel they don't raise a stink about it.
There is *NO* such thing as a "nice" company or corporation - they *JUST* exist to make money from you and it's the quality of what they deliver to you that is the only important thing.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What does the President have to do with this topic? Is there oil for the taking in WoW?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
What other MMORPGS are there for Mac users? My wife and I both play WoW, and I'd be interested in looking at other options.
We have G5's so bootcamp and then Windows isn't an option for us.
WoW should be able to handle it. I play FFXI. Even on the 25th when everyone got the new expansion and were installing like mad and EVERYONE and their mule was boarding the ferry to Aht Urghan Whitegate and doing the same new quests and fighting for the same new items, it was bareable. No one was unexpectedly kicked off. No unplanned maintenance. There was lag, but the devout players scoffed in it's presence! If SE can do it.. Blizzard should be able to too.. WoW players should boycott!
last month, I cancelled my WOW account before the new patch hit and went back to City of Villains/Heroes, and I'm glad I did. Sounds like the same old stuff over there.
WOW was just a grind fest to me. in COH/V it's kill anything that looks like you can kill it. You don't have to worry about 10 things to grind once you kill something. COH/V doesn't have the WOW storyline depth, but it's just more fun to me.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I disagree and agree with you on this point. I agree in that having a 6hour+ scheduled window for maintenance is not acceptable, but I disagree that all maintenance is unacceptable. Rather, it's how they go about it that's the problem.
With a large window 1 day a week, Blizzard interrupts practically everyone no matter the time zone to do the work, and when they run over it's after the service has already been offline for 1/4 of a day. The problem here is that a large irregular window tends to cause problems because the player base only has to put up with it one day a week, and are already irate when it runs over.
The solution is that Blizzard needs to move to more regular maintenance windows broken up over smaller chunks of time, like other MMOs do. The first thing that pops in to my mind with this kind of system is EVE Online, which has 1 hour window every day of the week, where it often doesn't even take the full hour.
By using such a schedule, the EVE player base is accustomed to the server going down at the same time every day, and naturally plan their daily schedules around it, so that they don't have to do anything any different on any given day. Along the same lines, when the server does take a little longer to come up, while additional minutes are as a percentage much higher against a 1 hour window than a 6 hour window(a 1 hour delay is 100% of the former, 16% of the latter), it also means that when an operation goes terribly wrong and takes twice as long as planned it has only consumed another hour, and not an entire extended gaming session for the player base.
Of course, this means that the overall uptime of the system is lower(95.8%), but a daily schedule still reaps more benefits in the end both through social engineering of the player base, and through the technical benefits of getting to do maintenance every single day of the week instead of holding it off.
But Blizzard are happy to rake in $15/month (or whatever the subscription charge is) from each player nonetheless...
Thats like saying McDonalds only expects 500 people a day to order some food.
McDonald's sells "food"??? Since when???
But seriously, that's a different analogy anyway. McDonalds doesn't always guarantee to be able to provide you with food - it just guarantees that at the point you hand over money, you will get some food. And if that food doesn't meet your expectations, then you can take it back and get another one or your money back.
Other than that, until McDonalds hands over burgers that look like the ones in the adverts, they're just another lying corporation anyhow... just like Blizzard selling the "illusion" of fast, always available servers but not delivering on that.
I think it shows a lack of backbone and hardware foresight on Blizzards part more than anything.
Possibly true but totally irrelevant. They are not delivering (for many people) what they said they would deliver. That's the problem.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I bet the real reason the servers are down is because all those blizzard employees refused to have an RFID chip implanted and now they can't get in the data center :/
....network was ganked? hawhawhawhawhawhawhaw
Oh well.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
When the next big MMORPG comes out with game play on par with WoW, the only factor to consider will be server stability. When Company X comes out with a good MMORPG and offers server stability like Blizzard never has, Blizzard will have their collective asses handed to them on a silver platter.
It won't matter whose fault it is for the server outages, Blizzard will be the ones losing money. Watch how quickly they clean up their act. Mark my words.
THIS is why competition is a good thing.
What do you think that samophlange is doing? Digging for oranges?
Hello all:
I have a solution to your WoW server problems. It's call, "Guild Wars". Size, that's WoW's server woes. The more popular something is, the more traffic it generates, and the more traffic related problems it has. There are two approaches to solve traffic related problems. 1) you wait until the engineers at Blizzard to fix these problems, or 2) you lessen the traffics. Now, looking at real life, it seems that WoW traffic problems are being created faster than the engineers can fix them. So, we should pick the second option: play something else while server is down to lessen the traffics. Eventually, there will be an equilibrium between server problems generated by inflow of people, to outflow of people leaving (temporary) to play out Guild Wars. When this equilibrium is achieved, the software engineers at Blizzard can start to resolve server issues without being flooded by new ones.
I suggested Guild Wars because it's a pretty good game, without monthly cost.
As a side note, I think Blizzard realizes that the market for their MMORG is so big, that they can start another MMORG (say, World of Starcraft) in another network and charge two subscriptions instead of one. When players have problem logging into one MMORG, they can just play the other... This way, Blizzard gets paid both ways.
Cheers.
B. Pascal.
What a useless thread. The OP is just another doom-saying Troll. This thread should not have ever gotten onto these fine forums.
"My crack pipe...My crack pipe!....suck...suck....It's not working right!"
Here you go... troll. http://www.blizzard.com/press/060228.shtml
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
Maybe Blizzard's servers are slow because they have to redirect all their traffic to the NSA.
I currently play on Dalaran. Up until recently, we had the same problems everyone else did - lag, disconnects, servers down, etc.
I say recently, because shortly after the release of the 1.10 patch, the server was migrated to new hardware. After a day of hiccups, it started running smoothly... and has been ever since.
I am on one of the original realms, with a full population, that saw queues of 100+ on a regular basis. Now... no queues, no lag, no loot lag, no AH lag, no Mail lag, etc. Zones load pretty damn fast (as they should on my gaming PC), and I no longer have issues disconnecting in instances.
The CAN fix their issues. They HAVE done it for at least one server. I am guessing it's just a matter of time to get all the servers onto new hardware, and better maintenance to prevent issues from re-occurring.
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!
I think my favorite outage was the "emergency downtime" to fix the authentication system to prevent "service-outtages" due to the auth-system failing.
Before that downtime, I never had a problem. Then they were down most of the day because of that issue. And then after that the authentication system has sucked ass. Long timeouts, sometimes repeatedly long timeouts resulting in authentications - just checking an effing username and password - taking 15-30 minutes. Several players in my guild have been on TS but not in game because they can't log in, and have finally given up. Even with our "show up to raids early" policy, people are just barely making it due to the auth system sporadically fritzing out.
THAT is AWFUL!
(Kind of playing devil's advocate here.)
... "
"I've been in the telecoms/computer industry now for about 20 years now and I've seen the whole perception of what is and isn't good customer service change over that time
Of course, we've also seen the price schedule change drastically over that time, too. It used to be that a dedicated data pipe to the 'net cost you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month. Now it costs less than cable TV in many places.
This is not a fair, apples to apples comparison, of course. The technology has changed drastically, and with the explosion of consumer high-speed Internet, we're getting economies of scale like never before. And most of all, all big telcos appear to be both evil and technically incompetent (but not incompetent at being evil, alas).
But even with all those caveats, I can't help but wonder if there isn't some of the "You get what you pay for" principle at work here. With radically reduced rates, perhaps a corresponding reduction in service shouldn't be totally surprising.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The geek in me marvels at the problems the programmers at Blizzard have had to solve. It must be some of the most interesting programming work ever done.
ATT is the exact reason I left my cable provider. Our local cable loop was provided by ATT and was the shittiest experience I have ever had with latency issues due to a ISP. You can read about the fiasco on the DSLReports.com forums the fact that ATT ignored the problem for 8 months before fixing it and even publically said our area was on the shitlist for repairs.
ATT can lick my nuts, they are a shitty bandwidth provider.
Why are people still have WoW installed?
"So what are you gonna do tonight Joe?"
"Oh, I'm leaving work early so I can spend all night not playing World of Warcraft"
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Really, I think Blizzard's downfall is they have a billion dollar product, as the article says, yet they still treat it like its some fly-by-night operation with cheap, unqualified testers.
I went to BlizzCon because I am a self-professed WoW-addict. I am, however, also a QA Manager. Out of morbid curiosity, I went and talked to their reps who were telling guests about "How you join the Blizzard team."
Their testers? Pretty much low $10's range for QA. I inquired about QA management. I was told: "Oh, we don't hire from the outside. Pretty much if you do a good job, then we promote our QA managers from within."
Ahh, so you pay horrible wages to people and then hire a QA manager out of those people, instead of realizing that someone with 5-10 years experience might actually be MORE useful than someone who has 0 management experience, but happened to have more games testing experience.
Is it really any wonder that they are having these issues?
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
WoW is almost as bad of a time burglar as slashdot. and a million billion percent less free. It can ruin your life. By estranging you from real, meaningful interraction with real people. As evidence, I point to a recent episode of one of the wife-swap programs. One of the moms was a MMORPG player (by happenstance it was WoW, but the issues are genrewide). Instead of dealing with the family, she tried to hole up in the immersive simulated enviroment. Fortunately, the family's lack of broadband prevented her from being able to install a year's worth of updates and she was forced to go outside. They tried to take her to museums, parks, various activies around the town, but all she could think of was getting back to that damnable game.
She couldn't even take a couple weeks off from the addiction to pretend to be normal while she costarred in a creepily invasive game show.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Let me put it in perspective for you...I have a new baby....her schedule is her own...I can only squeeze in time to play when she's sleeping (generally on Friday or Saturday nite). Well, its been a little better as of late, but for months I would get on during the only time I could play and it would be unplayable. Now it may be convienent for you to log in at a different times to play, but some of us have predetermined play times. Needless to say, I cancelled my account. I had paid up three months already, so I'm waiting for it to expire still...(hence how I know its gotten a little better)
I am a sysadmin, so of course I understand that things happen you don't expect, especially during a new rollout....but a Friday or Saturday nite is NOT a special condition. If I told one of my paying customers that during weekends and high traffic times they would just have to accept downtime I would have no customers. It sucks having to plan for peak times and have lots of extra equipment that may sit idle most of the day...but welcome to the real world...(why do you think companies are trying to go to the 30 year old idea of virtual servers...IBM figured this out years ago....virtualizing is the only way to cut down on some of the idle hardware)
too bad more of you don't use your money power....they would have fixed this months ago...
Onto WoW, I am with Spud Stud on this, I would LOVE to see what is behind the scenes! I can't imagine having to maintain the farms and farms of servers, and its not just the realm servers, I mean each piece of the realm (instances, continents, battlegrounds) are all managed by a server so to speak. By this design they can take down something without effecting other environments. Also unlike other games, WoW has very limited loading. You can cross all of Kalimdor and not see one load screen, where as in FFXI, the continents are broken up into individual zones the require a load each time the border is crossed.
The other thing they had mentioned was the customer base, hey I am sure they are well aware at how many people will get pissed off if a server goes down. And they are also aware that out of the 6 million subscribers, that server may carry a couple thousand players. That is a very small fraction of the subscribers, you can't please everybody! But in my time of playing WoW on multiple realms, I am happy with the experience. Yeah it sucks not being able to get on sometimes but hey, read a book or dust off an old console game, or pay attention to you wife/husband/significant other.
I think the negatives will never out-weigh the positives of this game. It is fun for the hardcore gamer as well as the casual player. I love running through the burning steppes and firing an aimed shot on some pesky Alliance who thinks they will get my rich thorium vein!! But the game is all good fun and I think thats why it will always win out over the other MMORPGs out there. So take the problems with a grain a salt, it can be worse. I play RF Online and the game is really not all that exciting to play, its a grind but that is how the Korean market is. But its not even a fun grind.
And if you get fed up, you can always go fishing :D
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
Perhaps this isn't really the proper place, but I feel this needs to be said. Blizzard is actually hiring people to run the realms. Go to http://www.blizzard.com/jobopp/ and see what is there. They have had a senior Oracle guru post up there for over a year. Maybe someone looking at these forums can get a job there and help them suck less.
One of the interesting decisions Blizzard made in developing WoW was to do away with the concept of "zoning", which is prevalent in a lot of other MMOGs. This implicitly limited their scalability as games with "zones" typically split the zones over separate physical machines to balance the load to a manageable level. It also allows a degree of network scalability as you can route different zones along different network paths.
In making the entire world effectively zoneless, Blizzard made their scalability a lot more difficult as you no longer have the "neat" option of just tossing a few more machines into the rack, giving them their own dedicated bandwidth and migrating zones from overloaded boxes onto the new ones.
Also, I have to say that catering for the million or so US players (forget how their demographics break down) should have given them a heads up on the need for a whole slew of heavy duty data centers. Like it or not, that's the price you have to pay for a wildly successful game.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
For programmers, networking is a nightmare. Forget the difficult part of making a complex game. Networking is a nightmare all by itself. There are simply game design limitations attributed to that.
Being aware of these limitations, Blizzard should have known better. On my webpage criticizing World of Warcraft, http://www.redrival.com/hateown/ I postulated that Blizzard's design team is to blame for network instability. In a graph on that website I've shown my view of Blizzard's design team constantly increasing massive interaction throughout their worlds. I suspect this is the sole reason why they are unable to cope with volume of customers. As more and more people fight a single super-monster, the networking takes a beating. If the monster hits someone in a particular dungeon (aka instance), aside from the obvious the server has to:
- cycle through 40 players to see if anyone else got hit by splash damage
- notify each of the 40 players that someone or more people got hit
furthermore, when a single player whacks at the monster with their sword (or what have you), the server has to notify every other client about it.
In their design, Blizzard made use of a synchronized clock "aka tick" that is used for synchronizing actions. Good thinking, but it has a breaking point. I believe they are now reaching that point by causing more and more and more players to "chunk". Now, they are dumping the task of making everything better on network admins and scapegoating network issues as opposed to content design issues. It is too late now to take back multiple instances added through patches.
See website for more complaints or to add your 2c:
http://www.redrival.com/hateown/
With proper pipelining, you CAN get one baby after an initial nine-month delay, then a baby a month of throughput until your cache is depleted.
Want things to change, cancel your subscriptions.
You know you won't, as does Blizzard, so what's the point in even bringing up service issues.
Yes, but this is precisely my point. It isn't satisfactory to accept something purely because it's "on a par" with everything else. The *only* criteria is whether or not you personally feel you get value for money.
Perhaps the uber hard core crowd who plays over 12 hours a day regularly, and who treats missing a raid like the end of the world, have valid complaints from their point of view. Perhaps they want the service to be absolutely available 24/7 at all times.
It simply isn't for me to judge whether playing 12 hours a day or not is right or wrong - but you can be sure that on the back of "Warcraft 3" boxes, Blizzard didn't put on the proviso that "the service given by our online servers may at times be slow or unavailable". Therefore, those who play long hours have every right to feel aggrieved if they feel they were sold a 24x7 service and are not getting that.
but never seem to cancel their accounts. It seems to me that if it was really that bad, they'd cancel.
This I agree with - my attitude is that anyone who whines is being a hypocrite if they don't also take direct action.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
City of Heroes/Villains has TERRIBLE mapserver disconnects... it was far worse than any problems I ever had with WoW. I'm talking being disconnected every 20-30 minutes for seemingly no reason, though I suspect the game didn't like my ping (I've heard cable modems have comparably high latency). The most stable game I've played has been FFXI. Honestly though, and this is coming from someone who played WoW about 5-6 months ago, I didn't really have much trouble with it. Sure, there were a few times, but (for me) the vast majority of the time was smooth sailing. Maybe it's because I was in a low-population server or I didn't play at the right times, but WoW didn't give me problems.
... who has no complaints for Blizzard and WoW. (No, I don't work for WoW).
I think it might be that I only play 5 hours or less per week. I imagine if I played more, I would actually complain more.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
and afaict there is nothing the ISPs can do about it. BT puts no service level agreement on ADSL lines and can take a long time to fix stuff if theier engineers are busy with something else. and BT won't talk to dsl customers directly
i guess if you are lucky enough to live in a part of the uk with both dsl and cable and are currently on cable you could threaten the cableco with switching to DSL but like BT theese big companies probablly won't take much notice.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't see the point in having to pay for the privilege to waste my time.
I pay the $15 a month. I'm no longer a starving student, but $15 is less than what I used to pay for beer and a pizza on any given evening. This covers my gaming for an entire month. It would be nice if the initial cost of the software was free, but it's ~$40 and they include the first month. If the alternative is a contract (think cell phones), I far prefer this model. That aside, $15 is nothing when most players break it down into their hourly gaming rate and the software price is neglible, at best, over the span of a year or more. If I buy a couple DVDs a month and watch them once or twice, I'm nowhere near that return.
As for it being a waste of your time, it's only a waste if you're not enjoying it. If you're not enjoying something, but you still participate, well... hey, that's on you.
I love how you get moderated "flamebait" and "overrated". Some serious Blizzard fanboys out there.
I played WoW from April of 05 to about Feb 06. During the course of that time I saw the performance (at least on my server) get worse. Last December saw the return of login queues sometimes lasting an hour or more. Given that I have only 2 or 3 hours on most nights to play, I really didn't enjoy the wait. Not to mention that I couldn't play something else while in queue because the WoW login screen was using my 3D card. I had a lvl 60 character, a 43 and a couple near 30. I was in a good guild with great people. Ultimately though I didn't care to revolve my gaming time around end game raids and found there was hardly anything worth doing at level 60 except for those raids. PVP at level 60 was a joke due to epic itemization. Bascially forget about it unless you have time to be in a core group. Spending an hour to log in and then waiting another hour to get into a battleground was hardly appealing either.
In December I took a break to play City of Villains. My WoW account was still open (3 month play plan) but I found myself logging in less and less.
About two months ago I started playing EQ2 after trying out the trial. SOE has made a lot of big changes to the game since launch and I'm really enjoying it. In some areas it is way ahead of WoW (i.e. guild system, player housing, crafting). There is a ton of content and the although the player base is smaller there certainly are less dicks, griefers and ego-bloated epenis wavers.
I noticed that a few replies were the typical "that's because no one plays EQ2" response. Well, before WoW's millions, a couple hundred thousand players was considered a respectable amount for a MMO. Keep in mind that you are also talking about 150+ servers for WoW and something like 10 for EQ2. No it's not as populated as WoW. You won't see a scene like prime time at the Iron Forge AH in EQ2.
I'm not trying to say "everyone quit and play EQ2" - what I am trying to say is that if you are no longer having fun in WoW - take a look at some other games. There are a lot of great games out and most have some sort of free trial to check them out. I just got sick of being frustrated when I wanted to be entertained and moved on from WoW.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
The fact is: the Google never has problems like this. ;-)
Maybe time for Blizzard to ask Google to provide internet?
Then Blizzard should not have distributed 6 million copies of the game. They've brought this upon themselves.
I realize it's difficult to talk about these games without fanboyism creaping in, but it doesn't make any sense to claim that Blizzard was blindsided. They ordered, and paid for, millions of copies of the game. When those ran low, they printed more. They knew exactly what they were doing.
If they didn't know how big a mistake they had made with their DB and server cluster setup, they definately found out during "open" beta (which they quickly renamed "stress test 2" to explain the abismal performance).
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
Whether you're not satisfied with the state of Hollywood movies, the price of CDs, DRM or online gaming, the best way to display that dissatisfaction is to not hand over your money so quickly - if lots of people do that, someone's share prices are going to be affected and they'll need to take some positive action to turn things around and start the money coming in again.
Unfortunately, you're taking this somewhat personally and not allowing yourself to see my true argument - personally, if it makes you happy, I really don't care how long you play whatever online game you want and if you find no problem with the state of WoW then so be it; go off and enjoy it.
But *PLEASE* don't think that just sitting there moaning about it will change anything because it won't. Blizzard (or any other company/corporation you may think of) is just interested in crowbarring as much money from you as possible and as long as you continue handing over the cash, they've no reason to give a toss about what you think about their service or even to make it better.
Fifteen years ago, I was a fanatical "pen and paper" roleplayer (AD&D, Call Of Cthulhu, etc.) and whilst online MMORPG gaming has no appeal to me personally, the people that do play MMORPGs enjoy precisely the same escapism that I used to with squared paper and 20-sided dice - so I can understand why they enjoy playing those games, even to the point of fanatical playing, and therefore have no reason to look down on them for enjoying a "similar" hobby to one I used to enjoy.
But please stop being a "fanboy" and be a realist - Blizzard (and any other entertainment provider) is there *purely* to serve you by giving you something that you're prepared to pay for rather than you being so glossy-eyed over a "brand name" that you let them treat you like mindless cattle because they've achieved a "cool factor" in your opinion.
And with regards to your opinions on moderation - take that up with Slashdot because I'm just voicing what I truly believe to be the case - that far too many people are all "gooey-eyed" over certain brand names to the point where they lose all sense of rationalisation and choice.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I thought it was common knowledge that Blizzard and AT&T are under attack from blackmailers using a DDOS.
Netcraft has been tracking some of World of Warcraft's recent network problems, and has a performance chart that shows the recent problems.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Just a few weeks ago. The technical issues that affect game play were part of it. And also partly it was that the gameplay was hollow and not worth repeating with another character. Also having real life friends playing on separate servers was a pain cause no one wanted to make new characters on the same server to play together when they'd invested so much time getting their main character to 60.
I had a think and put the whole thing in perspective.
The time that I'd sunk into my main lvl 60 character was a bit over 20 days.
I then figured out how much time I spent playing a d&d campaign with friends almost every weekend for about 8 hours a session, and that was over 2 years, before we got burned out and lost enthusiasm. It was approximately 800 hours, give or take. So that would be maybe 33 days. I dont care about the pieces of paper that was my character nor the phat loot that he acquired in all his adventures. It was fun time spent with friends that mattered to me.
After thinking about it like that, when it came to cancelling my account and deleting my characters from WoW, it was a lot easier for me, and some what cathartic as well.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
"City of Heroes/Villains has TERRIBLE mapserver disconnects..."
At launch and after the first big patch that was true with CoH. Not true for CoV or CoH now for me. So you see just as with WoW there are a certain degree of these problems that are caused by the route between your computer and the server over the Internet. I consider CoH to be one of the stablest and most bug free MMOs I've played and encountered very few problems with lag (I'm also on a cable modem). But I don't doubt that you had problems that I didn't.
I had quite a bit of problems with lag in WoW although bugs, server crashes/slowdown were more common issues for me than connectivity.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
However, I get a little sick and tired of people treating certain companies as being almost "beyond criticism" on Slashdot - Apple seems to be one of those, Blizzard appears to be another.
I agree completely. Somehow people get so caught up with something they like that they take any criticism as some sort of personal insult.
I like a lot of Blizzard's games and enjoyed WoW quite a bit. I quit WoW because of the very real issues (both technical and game play) that it has and that Blizzard has not been able to fix.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
That sum is sufficient (I'd say that what I've described would cost them a burn rate of about
$3M or so, give or take, per month)- but then you don't factor in that the bean counters are
the one that made that decision, not the engineers. I can guarantee you they saw something
that worked in a similar manner, would probably not fail them (whereas this would be nearly
as fault tolerant as the phone system...) and cost them a HELL of a lot less.
Also keep in mind that they did NOT expect to rake in $35M/month in revenues off of this service-
something more along the lines of $4-8M/month is what I would have bet on and planned for. If that
was the case, $3M just ate a hell of a lot of my profits for redundancy that "wasn't needed".
That, my friend, is why they didn't do it. >:-D
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Unfortunately, this is just the theoretical maximum thoughput. .000001 babies per month. There seems to be a problem with the supply of sufficient resources to keep the women fully productive. The problems with cache depletion rarely affect real life output, this is a phallacy (lol).
In real life examples, we have found that it maxes out at around
Also the heat generated through lack of insulation is a serious consideration. Cash has been found to be a great insulator. Likewise, many times the failure comes through lack of planning. Cash and regular back-rubs are rarely provided in sufficient quantities to keep the production line running smoothly.
TQA requires that thorough pre-flight testing be done and though there are many volunteers for this type of testing, though once again planning is the major hurdle. Quality assurance can only achieved if guidelines are diligently followed.
Correct insertion procedures and lack of follow-through are also seen as major hurdles before we can see real-life throughput in any way approaching the wildest dreams of nerds everywhere.
When you say it like that, and think about the fact that it's roughly 0.1% of the world's population then I think people will start to get the picture.
And here I thought it was a game that you are *paying* for to have available 24/7. Silly me.
I can't understand how someone can excuse the lack of service and waste of money that it is to pay for a game that is not available when the person paying needs it by saying that it's "only a game" and that there are other things to do if it's offline. What does it matter if it's a game or not? Could be a massage service for all it matters. It's a *service" that one is *paying* for and not having is return in the form of availability.
In any other situation, it would be a case of lawsuits or people would quit en masse. In this case, people just bear with it... strange world this is. Smacks of addiction, it does, people who would otherwise not pay a dime or protest loudly if they had to spend money on anything pay through the nose every month not to be able to play or play in bad conditions.
---- COH rant mode on -------
I know, I've been there myself with City of Heroes. In my case it wasnt the server problems (though we've had some, but never this bad, no problems getting in, just lag for a while), it was the constant nerfs to make the game "balanced", effectively destroying the fun out of it by downgrading everyone to the same level. They haven't been able to balance everyone out of course, but they managed to ruin a lot of builds.
Scrappers are too powerful, look like they can handle anything? Nerf them. Tanks look like they can handle aggro from lots of foes? Nerf them. Controllers have too many pets? Nerf them. Two or three powers can be made permanent by exclusive use of recharge enhancements? Cut down on *all* enhancements. That way no perma-anything anymore. Of course, less damage for everyone, everyone gets tired quicker, less accuracy, less defense, less resistance... but hey, I cannot perma-haste now, cool for me.
I don't get it why, instead of raising everyone to a level, they lower the powers, take away damage and defense and everything, change permanent powers to toggles, for what? What does it accomplish? Does it satisfy the players? Are we happy about it? Was I happy when my scrapper lost her Instant Healing power, which became a toggle instead, forcing me to respec the char because I just couldn't play like I used to and liked? Was it that hard to find a solution that could maintain it as a perma, raising it's endurance cost if it was too poweful a power, for instance? Was there a need to cut on the aggro of the tank so that it can only aggro 5 foes at a time? When playing on a team of 8 we face groups of 10-15 foes at a time, not counting the ones aggroed from afar by AOEs, and the tank is in the middle watching everyone die helplessly because he can handle damage from 30 but can't aggro more than 5, and the other 5-10 are happily killing of the team. What is a tank good for then? No wonder I don't see any tanks anymore, what's the point?
Are we paying to have our chars nerfed? Do the devs even listen to what the player base is saying? (believe me, if you look through the coh bulletin boards, you'll see what I mean)... Are the players having fun after all? Are we super-heroes? Or is Paragon City suffering from a strange alien attack that is reducing everyone's powers?
As a matter of fact, I'm seeing less and less heroes around, especially after the last "update". Where I had to fend off the blind invites and tells and you couldn't search for teammates without getting 1000+ lists, now you're lucky if you get 40 hits. While peeps would send tells to heroes on their level in search of teams, now I, as lvl 48, am getting tells from peeps lvl 30, desperately seeking anyone to team with them. And I have to say no because my team as everyone sidekicked already, because while some are 48, others are 39 and lower on any given day.
Does this not ring alarm bells somewhere in that remote tower where the Cryptic people are? Don't they notice how there's less diversity? How people are fed up with getting nerfs every other month? Don't they play the game?
Strange...
-------- COH rant mode off ----------
shana
Do what I'm doing, this Saturday - WoW is quitting me.
....
I'm nowhere as addictive to Wow as it is to me
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Cancelled my account due to the fact whenever I did log on (I only had one main character, a rogue, that took me approximately 8 months to level to 60), there were queues, random crashes and disconnects
;)
--
The final straw came when I was running UBRS with the guildmates, got a really cool blue drop (boots - the boots would have finally given me a full set of blue, with one purple dagger), I got disconnected while looting - when I had reconnected the item was not in my bag, and the corpse no longer had the item
Filed a complaint to no avail - For a super casual player like me, it really pissed me off since I only put in a few hours during the whole week...
Anyhoo - it was fun while it lasted I suppose - Now I've had more time to finish a few books instead
Just a thought: -?GuildWars?-
:))
You dont have to wait EVER. You will go straight to the killing being PvE or PvP.
I would guess that being able to play a game WHENEVER you like should be a given and not a wish.
I do not want to start a game comparison flamewar BUT....why wait? (well you can play GW at least while you wait in queue
when was the last time you ran a system with 6 million people? many of whom need a continous connection 5-16 hours per day?
Which is a lot different then a web site that gets 6 million hits.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are you f***ing serious? A billion-dollar game and they're not multihomed?