Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yeah, but this is old news. Just try to reach the forums when it is server maintenance day, and you will see that they cannot handle the number of people that are bored and want to check the forums.
So, it is no surprise that their forums are slashdot'ed.
Sure, I've been there on maintenance day, and that's probably the worst it ever is.
/.... why not?
Still thought, I'm baffled that on some days it's just rotten (or Login Server Down) when there's no obvious excuse. The forums weren't working right today before
.sigs are for post^Hers.
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.
I know I'm on the forums often, and they've got problems often. Sometimes there's scheduled maintenance, often there's not.
For some unknown reason, Blizzard just does a poor job much of the time. If Blizzard were in the financial industry they'd be out of business already.
I can tell by the style of your post that you too miss posting on the WoW forums. I imagine it's hard to go more than an hour or two without an outlet for your "lern2play" and "crymorenoob" comments...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Atta boy. necro2607 1, big bad Blizzard 0
Whatever it takes to get you through the day. Ye gawds.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
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!
Haha. How can my previous (parent) post be offtopic when, at least when I wrote it, the Blizzard WoW Forums were unavailable, so the post referred to by the submission was not readable?
/sarcasm
Get real. +1 for the Blizzard fanboi who modded it offtopic.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Wow, $100 to put your job in serious jeopardy. And still no takers?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
It's been stated before that the ingame login server is the same as the forum login server. I think I've read before it's tied into the battlenet login servers too. I'm betting the problem is poor design from teh start, along with demanding too much from too few resources.