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Blizzard Talks About WoW Stability and Service
Via 1up, information from Producer Shane Dabiri on the future of the World of Warcraft service. He offers up details on the new server setups, new server sites, and the much-anticipated character transfer service. From the article: "Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player's will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag. We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented, so we'll share further details as soon as more information becomes available. "
Again... /sigh
within certain restrictions
I see that and immediately think: "bend over, here it comes..."
Yay, the topic's not showing.
They should upgrade their forum servers first and then if this works out, think about upgrading the game servers and doing al those nifty things they're talking about.
Pretty amazing that you can't read this because the forums are down.
It could mean that Blizzard is expecting a rather massive drop in player numbers and may need to reduce the number of servers. They will transfer characters to other servers at random and then need that feature to let people get back together with their guildmates. Of course, it needs not be Free Beer, but that's probably just my paranoia speaking.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Is that like that movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bloodsport?
They killed the Blizzard warcraft forums. They're all up in arms about their class talent review, which has had the trees posted over at ign or somewhere.
Mages, start your whineing...
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I love how this is posted after the forums at the official site have been down for several hours.
reeaallly encouraging
When the last battleplan was posted, the forums FILLED with people posting things along the lines of "Forget new content until you fix the servers!" When this one was posted, they filled with "What? That was all about the servers! No new content?"
I am very happy to see that I will soon be able to move my character from realm to realm and be able to play with my friends so that I am not just running around hack / slashing to pass time for people to come around. Yayness.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
"He offers up details on the new server setups, new server sites, and the much-anticipated character transfer service."
Sadly, the new server setups rated poorly during the Ziff Davis Slashdot benchmark.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Horde on Server A is outnumbered. Horde members on Server A get pissed. Horde members on Server A leave in drowes for server B.
Blizzard will disallow Horde Players on A to leave. Horde members get more grumpy, being outnumbered AND unable to leave. Blizzard will encourage Horders from other servers to move to server A to "balance" things.
Horde member on server C, suffering the same fate, sees the opportunity and jumps over to server A. Only to realize that he traded purgatory for hell. He gets grumpy and with a sigh decides to drop his old char.
Moves back to server A and makes an Alliance character...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Try to go to the forums and see the post and you're met with a blank, empty forum.
/. post. I know because I'm fairly active there.
Of course this is because WoW forums have had problems all day, even before the
It's unfathomable how Blizzard manages to NOT be able to support even their forums. Granted they have a good number of users of the forums, but it's a fraction of their playerbase (a fair bit of which is non-English anyway, and wouldn't be on the US forums.)
Point is, Blizzard needs, and has needed to for a long time, fire their business CIO. Whoever is the top of the chain responsible for network, server, and forum performance and stability needs to be replaced by someone with real large-scale internet-service experience.
I still offer to pay $100 for an off-the-record, name-never-to-be-published full detailing of Blizzard's network and operations systems. I'd like to know if it's simply a problem of demanding too much from too few resources, if it's ineptitude on the part of admins, or if it's full-blown poor architectural design.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
You are assuming that everyone posting is of the same mindset and with the same priorities.
1)Group one wanted more server fixing
2)Group two wanted more server content
When fixing 1) group 2) posts. Seems pretty simple to me.
When select realms (10 or more) are experiencing intermittent outages, database corruption, and other problems starting at about 01:50 AM and expected to be resolved sometime around 20:00 PDT tonight as of the last posting.
Preemptive PR, bad timing or sychronicity? All I can say is: "Way to go Blizz!"
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
"We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented"
Hmmm.. "We know that many player is are eager for this service to be implemented"?
I see... it makes perfect sense.
On a more serious note, you'd think a company as "big" as Blizzard would catch such an error...
How can you eat it? Now the inverse makes sense, you can't eat your cake and have it too, but you pretty much have to have the cake before you eat it.
Yes, I am a pedant, so what?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This'll probably cost me karma, but I feel like I need to say it anyway.
People are really willing to demonize Blizzard for things like server performance. Lots of claims about how I would just fix the code, or how I would buy more servers, or how I would do this or that.
The fact of the matter is that Blizzard is running one of the single largest scale applications in the world period. Their database requirements are way more than anyone reading Slashdot (who doesn't also work for Blizzard or Google) has ever had any experience with.
No matter how much experience you think you have, all the rules change when you cross certain thresholds, and even if you're a really good enterprise architect, unless you have a single data-drive heavily-transactional application with many millions of users, and many billions of records, you don't know what they're going through.
No matter how sinister you might think Blizzard is, they're still a for-profit company (actually, the more sinister you think Blizzard is, the more this applies). For-profit companies don't do things (like be lax about fixing their network problems) if they can help it, since they do lose customers for that sort of thing, and that obviously directly correlates to lost income.
I guarantee that there's tremendous pressure from on top to fix these issues, and if they're not fixed yet, then it's because your php website that supports 20 SIMULTANEOUS users(!!!) was a little easier to fix.
Consider things like common complaints, "Why don't they just throw more hardware at it," maybe their data centers have consumed their floor space, air conditioning capacity, or available power supply. They have 5 independant data centers in the U.S., and each data center can support up to 40 realms. That means, yes, data centers have limited capacity, and if you're full, you have no option to put another server in without begining to risk bringing the entire data center down. You can add more capacity when you physically enlarge the building, buy bigger air conditioners, and also get the power company to run bigger power lines, each of which can take many months to complete.
Not all things are easily fixed with brute force, and people's jobs are on the line here guaranteed, the guys who are in charge of this stuff are more interested in it working than you, since you can turn your computer off and go outside; they can't just ignore their jobs.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
"This means that player's will now be able to..."
"We know that many player's are eager for this..."
I note a common error here, and offer the following. It is intended to be a polite, adult comment, not offered as an insult or to denigrate anyone's intelligence.
"'s", as in "Bob's" or "player's" is used in reference to something belonging to or about Bob, or a single player. As it appears in the post, players should not have an apostrophe. Without a ', it then refers to multiple players, generic players, not 'a' player, but |some, all, many, the| players.
This is a remarkably common error, and your writing stands a greater chance for being taken seriously if you try to avoid this sort of thing. Some grammar/spelling/usage mistakes are much more easily overlooked, but things like the misplaced ' as above are SO common they become worthy of polite comment. The writer is submitting in a professional capacity, representing a company, and seeks to have his comments taken seriously. That's more likely to happen if he avoids most of the more basic mistakes, such as that one.
Again, I intend this as a polite, reasonable observation, with honest intent to help someone, not to cause ill-will. I apologize to anyone that feels offended, and ask that you re-read the above, while considering me smiling as I write it. Rather than feel offended, I'd rather you read the above and come away feeling empowered with new information.
My invisible friend can kick your invisible friend's arse.
That blizzard sucks?
That parent is stupid for being so short-sided?
That they hired retarded network people that aren't capable of doing jack?
That their network infrastructure was poorly designed?
In the end, you can replace "blizzard" with "your-most-frustrated-company" - and come up with a seemingly valid arguement the appears to pinpoint the exact problems and issues the company in question is dealing with. Honestly, why don't we replace Blizzard with
ATT
Sprint
Microsof
Google
Ford
Exxon
Perhaps you should go line by line to refute his wishful thinking post. Because, as far as I can tell, parent post describing the whiners out to demonize Blizzard making claims on how you could do a better job - well that seems to fit your profile down to the tee. You seem to know the answers on how to go about doing it - which would mean you already know the questions. Instead of copy pasting some generic trollbait material, why don't you post something of value?
Honestly, the only statement you seemed to have made was this:
5.5M users (or 6 or 6.5 or whatever they're up to now) pales in comparison to what many financial institutions support every day, or what payment processing companies support, or what trading and clearing companies support.
That statement says, "the major institution's dick is much bigger than blizzard's, and they seem to be able to handle the load- why can't blizzard with their tiny ass penis?" What's with the Chebacca defense? All you seem to do is mask your poor attack by by backing up some miscellaneous dick that seems to be bigger than Blizzards. That offers us nothing (other than a lot of dick waving).
I've just started playing WoW a week ago, and my main character reached level 14 this morning. (Male forsaken mage) It is an amazing game...by far the most mature MMORPG I've seen. Virtually none of what I considered flaws in Ultima Online in present here.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state as I have before that I do not consider Blizzard the evil company that many seem to make them out to be. Yes, they're strict, and yes, they come across as somewhat paranoid with regards to the rules, but given what I remember of the PKs in UO and the Diablo hackers on Battlenet, I believe that Blizzard have reason to feel threatened. The average teenage PK you'll encounter on an MMORPG can without exaggeration be described as completely sociopathic.
The other element of my perspective (and I realise that this one isn't going to go over well with those Slashdot readers who prefer to use Richard Stallman's brain in leiu of their own) is that Blizzard runs the service, and as such, they're completely entitled to set house rules. The user, as always, is likewise entitled to decide whether or not s/he finds said rules agreeable and thus hand over their money.
I also considered (and still consider) Blizzard to have been entirely within their rights to squelch bnetd. I also tend to strongly suspect that that particular project would have been started (and run) by the same type of reflexive Stallmanite fanatics as Andrew Tridgell. Namely people who find the concept of software ownership difficult to tolerate.
I'm also not interested in hearing about how the bnetd coders were contributing to Stallman's divinely sanctioned crusade to save the rest of humanity from the evil corporations. Yes, I do also hold the belief that *some* of said corporations are evil, but I'm definitely not waiting for the FSF attack bots to save me from them...primarily because I believe that the FSF itself has its' own agenda which (in some respects at least) is arguably just as unwholesome as that of said corporations. Stallman isn't any less authoritarian, or any more morally desirable, than anyone else in my opinion.
Why did the mods mod him a Troll? From his whining I'd say he sounds like an Alliance player.
please refrain from posting untill your head explodes!
It's spelt "asplodes"
There was a joke that went something like this: "One-shot case study: a study made on a single test subject, from which it is concluded that all clovers have four leaves."
/. care about that kinda ideologic crusades, but the vast majority of WoW players couldn't care less. We just care about playing the fucking game, that's all. Anything that lets me play the game is good, anything that keeps me tied (like a medieval serf) to a realm where queues run amok, isn't good. That's all.
Point in case: yeah, so your new character created on an empty server still has no problems. Whop-de-freakin'-do. Big surprise that. Mine had no problems after a week either.
Skip forward a month or two, and the server was already full to the brim. Yay for 30 minutes waiting in a queue. Well, ok, that still worked. Then it was occasionally 1 or 2 hours waiting in a fucking queue. Let me tell you, that had started to suck heap plenty, as my tribal shaman would say. And then some more.
Seeing that other new realms were still empty, didn't help the morale either. Sure, lemme move there, then. Nope, sorry, Blizzard didn't consider my server full enough yet to allow a transfer.
Skip some time forward and some RL friends join WoW too. They can't create their characters on the server I was on, because it's full. (And honestly, with the unholy time spent in the queue, I wouldn't have advised them to start there.) So they start somewhere else. And Blizzard _still_ doesn't allow me to copy my existing character there.
Apparently the server is still not full enough, their page would have me believe, as I play Solitaire and with Thottbot's talent planner, to pass the time while I wait in the queue.
OK, wth, then I'll kiss my existing characters and guild goodbye and start new ones on that server. Skip two months forward and it's full too. Watch me wait 30 minutes in a queue again.
Yes, it's a good game and all, but queues and stability issues _aren't_ fun. They're at best an annoying price we have to pay to get to the actual game. It does say something that people are willing to pay that price, but annoying it still is.
So generalizing that because your one-week-old character is still ok, then surely everyone else is just evil and demonizing Blizzard... heh. Get a clue. It's like saying that since a one-week old ballpoint pen still has ink, surely noone else ever ran out of ink for theirs. Surely all those "refills" are just a myth created by evil people demonizing the pen manufacturers.
As for the utterly irrelevant and incoherent rest of your rant... heh. I'm not even going to be polite about it. I don't know what kind of a psychiatric condition (ADHD maybe?) would cause one to run amok through irrelevant rants about UO PKers and all the way to rants about Stallman when starting at server stability. Unable to just follow a simple train of thought, or just desperate for straw men?
Trust me, virtually noone on WoW gives a shit about bnetd or Stallman, nor whether corporations are good and evil, and I certainly don't. Maybe those in the Linux section of
Or to put it otherwise, if, in your own words, you don't want to hear about bnetd coders and Stallman's crusades, then don't be the one starting about them. It's that simple, really.
So in a nutshell, that's the best straw-man you can pull to justify your "it's just evil people demonizing Blizzard!!!" troll rant, you're not even funny. You're preaching to the wrong group. If you're going to use a straw man, at least please do your research and pull a fitting one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There have been other games at the complexity of WOW. Yes WOW has the largest userbase but to claim that makes it an order of complexity higher then other MMORPGs is silly. The ex-Blizzard guys who left to from ArenaNET clearly took with them much of the talent that got Blizzard were it is today. Guild Wars runs a single server for the well over 1 million users they have. (I say users since they support this w/o resorting to subscription fees ;P ).
On top of supporting those counts and players from all over the world on a single server they also manage to do so while streaming game content to players and patching the game while the servers are running with zero downtime. No 2 hour maintance windows, no big fiasco of 12-15 hours down due to patches. Nope, you get a little message in chat 'A new build of Guild Wars is availiable. Please log off and update.' You don't even have to logout and update, you can keep playing normally without issue. Compare that to WOW which seems to be barely able to patch without 12 hours of downtime.
Ok I have been a long time reader of Slashdot... but I am seriously thinking the slogan should change to something like "News for us. Stuff that matters to us." Because everything that is WoW hits the game articles. A brand new game is released but does not get mentioned because it has a similar fan base. I have heard the 6 million users of WoW ya I am sure there are that many active players... well waiting players from what I have read. But there are over 1 million GuildWars players in North America and Europe, this does not include Korea, China and Japan. This was the last reported account. I guess Slashdot does not feel any of them might want to visit here. ArenaNet released GuildWars Factions a few days ago. But search for WoW you will see quite a few about anything that Blizzard does even coughing to loudly will get posted. What is up with biased filtering just because you love a game obviously to much. Are you just getting kick backs to filter out? Makes you wonder who is paying for your WOW accounts.