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. "

Comments

Great, Fantastic Irony

[blunte]

Try to go to the forums and see the post and you're met with a blank, empty forum.

Of course this is because WoW forums have had problems all day, even before the /. post. I know because I'm fairly active there.

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.