I'm currently (as I've said) on a project, but depending on the size and timeline of your project I could possibly fit you in. I do quality work and am good at communicating my needs to implement your project in a non-local environment.
I'm currently on a freelance project for a small consulting firm. My NDA prohibits me from getting any more into it, but I thought I would share my experience and philosophy on the whole shebang.
My biggest problem so far is that I don't have any sort of structured documentation to work from. If I had been given a business requirements doc, or an SRS (lord halleleujah), I could have knocked it out no problem. Quite the opposite, he is relinquishing a lot of control and decision making to me, and I have to continually remind my client that the terms of completion, and what constitutes the deliverable, are determine by him. He's already given me a broad framework for the project, and one of my biggest challenges is eliciting requirements out of him.
Anyway, my view of freelance is that a developer is there to make implementation decisions based on the requirements that the project sponsor has decided upon. Having a formal SRS means you have a laundry list of what is and is-not done at the end of the project.
BTW, if anyone is looking for a freelance developer for small to medium sized projects, please drop me a line. I've got 7 years of experience in an enterprise level of environment (ongoing) and 3 years of freelance experience.
Most of the leaders of the American Revolution were the land-owning wealthy. They were the businessmen, the owners of means in the colonies.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.......Wrong
They didn't "own" anything, they merely managed it by leave of the King, who really was the one who owned everything in the British Empire. So they were doing exactly what the previous poster outlined in his comment.
Well, that's good for you guys, but I would like to seriously re-iterate my previous suggestion of a new Frequency/Amplitude game on a platform with online capabilities. I think there is a huge market for you guys for paid content for those games for just new songs every month. They were one of only maybe a handful of games I can ever remember playing different difficulty levels on, and without a doubt the only games where I played *all* of them.
BTW,
qualityOfFrequencyAndAmplitude *= (1 hojillion) ^ (1 hojillion);
when you hook your PS2 up to an LCD projector and a really good sound system. Plus your neighbors that you never liked really learn to hate your guts.
Don't think of it as a sequel, think of it as more levels for the first one. It was definitely a game where I could have done with about 99 levels.
On another note, who the hell dropped the ball at Harmonix (I think) with Amplitude and Frequency. I think everyone I've ever talked to has basically agreed that a cheap paid subscription (~$5/month) that nets you 2 songs a month to download for one of those games would be something than we would easily pay.
Wow... just, wow. We'll leave the really low hanging fruit alone here, since you need to go pick up a text book on economics and then pick up a few books about how it works in the real world, but let's take a look at the argument that's being that things will get cheaper. Well, who gives a rat's a** if things are getting cheaper if unemployment is so high that nobody can afford them anyway. The only way out of this slump is investing domestically, and that just isn't going to happen by the idiots in this country.
Sorry, but as soon as you started comparing MySQL to Oracle, your argument went out the door. I don't know exactly what we pay here for our Oracle licenses, but it is in the $100k's/year. They serve different application spaces. It's just not really a comparison that was even worth making. It's like trying to compare the speed of a bicycle to the speed of a porche (or whatever). They just don't exist in the same space together.
People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service? If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.
Well, you're wrong. It happens to everyone. Get used to it.
Saturns demise has been mostly attributed to the difficulty in developing titles for it. Sega did not release a set of libraries aimed at getting games out. They preferred to let 3rd party developers work directly with the hardware from the get-go. That means the timeline on developing a game went way out. Sony on the other hand shipped PS1 with a set of libraries that let a 3rd party developer get in to development fast, and get the games shipped. Eventually Sony released libraries aimed more at squeezing all the power out of the system they could, and you saw games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy 7 coming out.
Still, the Saturn was an awesome system. I bought one brand new at a K-Mart in the middle of no-where for $30, which I paid for in quarters, in 1999. I got the little memory thing that also let me play import games for $5 and the import of Marvel vs. Streetfighter. Got the awesome analog arcade stick for $3 new (it's heavy duty aluminum), and got Nights with the 3D controller for like $5 new. It was an awesome value.
A browse through McConnell's "Code Complete" gives a fairly good synopsis of why a lot of projects fail, and it usually has to do with upstream work. Business requirements, system requirements, architecture. These things all have huge impacts further down the line, especially when they have problems. The cost analysis in the book is enough to scare any managers with an ounce of sense into putting some more work in at the front of the project.
On another note, I'm curious how to get into the embedded development field. I have a degree in CS and a lot of work experience writing software systems, just not in that area.
I certainly understand the point, but instead of setting a hard and fast long term date, a set of iterative releases (internally) with soft dates would seem to allow the project to accrete into something that they could manage all aspects of as they reach the iteration where that aspect becomes relevant. Aggregating and analyzing the information from these iterations should allow them to estimate a final release date window. This elimates some of the problems I talked about above, including the floating-requirements issue, because you can have smaller subsets of requirements for each iteration which can be solidified until you have 80% - 90% hard requirements with the other 10% - 20% being volatile with the expectation that if it is too volatile or not understood well enough, it can be rolled into the next iteration.
It also seems that doing some prototyping before the project kicks into full swing of the basic game elements would allow the team to evaluate the "fun" factor, to a greater or lesser extent based on the type of game. A rad-based prototype of Katamari Damacy for instance would easily be able to show off the games fun factor, while one for WoW would probably only give you the most bare sense of the final product.
One of the biggest problems in the software industry, speaking as someone who's been here for a modest amount of time (6 years, since my sophomore year of college, full-time), is that management sets unrealistic timelines. If more upstream design was done (sorry, reading Code Complete for the 2nd time) then they could develop more realistic schedules. Enough with the 90% floating requirements, enough late-schedule additions. Engineer for quality from inception, and they could come out with better games on realistic schedules with happy, healthy employees who will be a value added in the sheer amount of innovation they can bring to the table when all aspects of their lives are balanced (for some, this is an impossibility, and businesses take advantage of this neurotic behavior, which I think is unethical).
Actually, if those things are necessary to live (and I do think that they have "become" necessary, at least electricity and water/sewer infrastructure) why are we paying power companies to provide them. Power companies that are only interested in maximizing profits, btw. The government is *not* providing these services. If they were, we would see a significant reduction in the cost of those services (water/sewer is mostly provided by local municipalities, this is really more towards power, telco). FDR put a cap on how much utility companies could profit off the sale of electricity, which worked great for the people buying the power, aka "us". Then Reagan deregulated power, and we get Enron. There are things the government should provide, and things they shouldn't. The problem is when they aren't providing things they should and instead making laws giving up their own power to a private corporation. That's insane, really really insane.
"Rotten businesses go out of business, but rotten government programs just eat more tax money."
If that were true, your post would hold more water, but since there are plenty of poorly run business out there who are still doing well because of government money going to them instead of to necessary services, your gripes fall apart.
Sure, Wi-Fi service isn't something necessary, but it's a city project, which is paid for by taxpayers of that city, who have far more control of policy than if it were a federally funded program. If the people don't want it, it won't happen. I personally think it's a good idea. There are plenty of "necessaries" that the government doesn't supply. Power for instance. Face it, people need power to live. You can't just "go without it" if you don't think the pricing is fair. It's not a morning coffee. So instead of dumping money into supporting poor businesses, why not set up a wireless network to allow anyone to use at a substantially reduced fee. It will create jobs in the process to replace those that are lost by the telco, and the city should see a revenue boost from it. Eventually they could put in their own VoIP network and start to turn the city into a business itself, supplementing tax income with service fees at a rate less than the telcos for these services.
Seems like the problem here isn't with Steam the distribution system, but Steam the authentication system.
I have no problem with Valve distributing games via Steam. That's there prerogative. I do have a problem with having to reconnect to steam, unless I want to pull my network cable (offline mode has not worked for me unless I do that), every time I want to play.
As so many people have mentioned, some of us like to come back to games we've played in 5 or 10 years and just give it another go-round. Steam the authentication system has the potential to make that impossible.
The biggest argument I see against other forms of economic systems is that "the best will have no incentive to do their best".
Bull. Top researchers earn jack, yet produce some of the most important innovations, research, knowledge, etc. simply because they feel it is their calling to do it. They don't do it for the money. Maybe some want the fame, but you look at someone helping to cure cancer, I'm sure a large part of their motivation is the desire to help their fellow man. Arguments against socialist/communist systems invariably fall to "businessmen won't be encouraged to do their best", but I ask, who cares? The important stuff would still go on, because of those who would do it for the sake of doing it. Most of the crap in our lives is just fluff anyway.
I'm not advocating a socialist/communist state, because human greed inherently ruins the conceptual notions that their founded upon, but get a new argument.
Actually, yes I have done stress testing. I spent some time on the performance and automation teams as part of my role as software engineer. I've written automation scripts for doing exactly what I laid out. Blizzard has it even easier than I did. They know every aspect of their system. They don't rely on 3rd party applications as part of their system. Not to mention the fact that Blizzard had half a million people as part of their beta, and your defense of that is ridiculous in and of itself. If we had that many people in our betas, we wouldn't worry about performance testing ourselves, because we would have an army to do it for us.
I'm really sick of people acting like they know what they're talking about, because you obviously don't. I've spent enough time working with software systems, systems programming, and enterprise system development to confidently come back and smack you down after such a ridiculous comment. Do yourself a favor and include yourself in that 99% of the population, because you either don't know what you're talking about with regard to stress testing, or you really are stupid.
Blizzard should have put hard caps on server population. Plain and simple. Their server maintenance schedules are ridiculously willy-nilly. Even in the open beta, servers were arranged by location. This meant that they could easily come up with maintenance windows that were conducive to affecting as few people as possible for a given server in a given region (east coast servers could go down for maintenance between 2am and 5am EST, west coast 2am and 5am PST). They apparently did away with that for the production release.
I don't discount your statement that there are people with:
slow internet connections
slow machines
people playing during maintenance hours (although if the servers are in a maintenance window, why are they even in service)
and I'm sure those people are complaining. But when I can't get on at 10pm EST unless I want to wait an hour and a half, that is bullshit plain and simple. Blizzard is not providing the service that people are paying for. And before anyone holds up the EULA that says "You may not be able to play whenever you want" yada yada yada, a friend and fellow player who just completed his 2L at Harvard has laid out to me explicitly how that can be ripped apart in court (I'm not threatening legal action, as it's overreacting. People have though, and a class action against Blizzard is not out of the question apparently). I'm just saying they can't use that to cover their ass in the face of overwhelming lack of service.
I could forgive any provider who says "We have a set schedule, for server maintenance, to impact customers geographically as minimally as possible, but please understand that we may have overage on the downtime". That is just responsible. I would have no problem with hard server population caps, but before that cap has already been exceeded. If you can't get on to a specific server to play with friends because the limit has been reached, well, then your friends will just have to create a character on your server.
Blizzard lost a lot of their excusability when they performed an Open Beta for stress testing where they had to close registration because 500,000 people registered for it. There were similar problems at that time too, but I honestly don't remember them being as bad as it currently is. They had an idea of how many people would register. They should have been able to run automated stress tests on the servers to the point of breaking numerous times, and have had a wealth of statistical data by the time it launched.
They created a great game, but dropped the ball on the infrastructure needed to support that game. Plain and simple.
I was in the open beta when they capped the registrations at 500,000. That was supposed to be their stress test. Now I've seen a number saying there was 600,000 sales of the game, and then they stopped producing it. There were not these types of problems in open beta. Occasionally you would see a queue, or there would be downtime, but from reading the WoW forums, it seems like this is a huge issue.
And then there are the people with the gaul to suggest that it's the players fault. That they should just "switch to a low pop server". Well, when I first logged into Cenarius last thursday, it was a low pop server. 5 days later I'm standing in a 700 person queue. Blizzard then, in one of the stupidest moves I have yet to see, decided they would put limits on the number of characters that could be on a server, after that population limit had already been reached on the server. I'm having trouble coming up with an analogy for something that stupid. It's like showing apartments to people, renting them out, and then afterwards find out that you rented apartments to more people than there were apartments, so you only let a portion of those people in at a time.
And then there are the people out there who say that it's not Blizzards fault. Whose fault, I ask, is it then? I've been a software engineer for 6 years. At my current job, we are required by some of our contracts to maintain a 99% uptime. When a server is down, our web-infrastructure team is called in, from home, or wherever, to fix it. Our builds are very tightly controlled to minimize downtime. Blizzard has it even easier, in that they do not allow server jumping. They know how many people are linked to each server. They could easily just stop allowing new players on loaded servers. It's that easy. Really.
This is my first MMO game, and if this is what people have to go through everytime a new one launches, I don't understand how they survive. Oh wait, yeah, they make you pay for a client that could be cheaply distributed via some kind of peer-to-peer technology. Like bittorrent. You know, that thing they used to distribute the beta.
Some of this is knee-jerk, some of it isn't. I'm not cancelling my account or anything. I've experienced exactly 2 queues during the released version. Not terrible, but when I've got an 80 minute wait on one, it does make my desire to play whither on the vine, so to speak. And Blizzard seems to only be providing half-assed remedies for the problem, which just compounds all the negativity people are feeling toward them right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Addendum:
I'm currently (as I've said) on a project, but depending on the size and timeline of your project I could possibly fit you in. I do quality work and am good at communicating my needs to implement your project in a non-local environment.
I'm currently on a freelance project for a small consulting firm. My NDA prohibits me from getting any more into it, but I thought I would share my experience and philosophy on the whole shebang. My biggest problem so far is that I don't have any sort of structured documentation to work from. If I had been given a business requirements doc, or an SRS (lord halleleujah), I could have knocked it out no problem. Quite the opposite, he is relinquishing a lot of control and decision making to me, and I have to continually remind my client that the terms of completion, and what constitutes the deliverable, are determine by him. He's already given me a broad framework for the project, and one of my biggest challenges is eliciting requirements out of him. Anyway, my view of freelance is that a developer is there to make implementation decisions based on the requirements that the project sponsor has decided upon. Having a formal SRS means you have a laundry list of what is and is-not done at the end of the project. BTW, if anyone is looking for a freelance developer for small to medium sized projects, please drop me a line. I've got 7 years of experience in an enterprise level of environment (ongoing) and 3 years of freelance experience.
Most of the leaders of the American Revolution were the land-owning wealthy. They were the businessmen, the owners of means in the colonies.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.......Wrong
They didn't "own" anything, they merely managed it by leave of the King, who really was the one who owned everything in the British Empire. So they were doing exactly what the previous poster outlined in his comment.
Well, that's good for you guys, but I would like to seriously re-iterate my previous suggestion of a new Frequency/Amplitude game on a platform with online capabilities. I think there is a huge market for you guys for paid content for those games for just new songs every month. They were one of only maybe a handful of games I can ever remember playing different difficulty levels on, and without a doubt the only games where I played *all* of them. BTW, qualityOfFrequencyAndAmplitude *= (1 hojillion) ^ (1 hojillion); when you hook your PS2 up to an LCD projector and a really good sound system. Plus your neighbors that you never liked really learn to hate your guts.
Was Karaoke revolution really that popular?
I remember playing both Frequency and Amplitude with groups of 10 - 12 people for 6 - 8 hour blocks. Those games were the most addictive things ever.
Don't think of it as a sequel, think of it as more levels for the first one. It was definitely a game where I could have done with about 99 levels. On another note, who the hell dropped the ball at Harmonix (I think) with Amplitude and Frequency. I think everyone I've ever talked to has basically agreed that a cheap paid subscription (~$5/month) that nets you 2 songs a month to download for one of those games would be something than we would easily pay.
BNF = Backus-Nauer Form?
/Paid attention in CS classes
Guess karma's a real bitch...
Wow... just, wow. We'll leave the really low hanging fruit alone here, since you need to go pick up a text book on economics and then pick up a few books about how it works in the real world, but let's take a look at the argument that's being that things will get cheaper. Well, who gives a rat's a** if things are getting cheaper if unemployment is so high that nobody can afford them anyway. The only way out of this slump is investing domestically, and that just isn't going to happen by the idiots in this country.
Sorry, but as soon as you started comparing MySQL to Oracle, your argument went out the door. I don't know exactly what we pay here for our Oracle licenses, but it is in the $100k's/year. They serve different application spaces. It's just not really a comparison that was even worth making. It's like trying to compare the speed of a bicycle to the speed of a porche (or whatever). They just don't exist in the same space together.
People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service? If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.
Well, you're wrong. It happens to everyone. Get used to it.
Saturns demise has been mostly attributed to the difficulty in developing titles for it. Sega did not release a set of libraries aimed at getting games out. They preferred to let 3rd party developers work directly with the hardware from the get-go. That means the timeline on developing a game went way out. Sony on the other hand shipped PS1 with a set of libraries that let a 3rd party developer get in to development fast, and get the games shipped. Eventually Sony released libraries aimed more at squeezing all the power out of the system they could, and you saw games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy 7 coming out. Still, the Saturn was an awesome system. I bought one brand new at a K-Mart in the middle of no-where for $30, which I paid for in quarters, in 1999. I got the little memory thing that also let me play import games for $5 and the import of Marvel vs. Streetfighter. Got the awesome analog arcade stick for $3 new (it's heavy duty aluminum), and got Nights with the 3D controller for like $5 new. It was an awesome value.
A browse through McConnell's "Code Complete" gives a fairly good synopsis of why a lot of projects fail, and it usually has to do with upstream work. Business requirements, system requirements, architecture. These things all have huge impacts further down the line, especially when they have problems. The cost analysis in the book is enough to scare any managers with an ounce of sense into putting some more work in at the front of the project. On another note, I'm curious how to get into the embedded development field. I have a degree in CS and a lot of work experience writing software systems, just not in that area.
...that the little puff of "wind" in the lower right hand corner doesn't help their case either.
I certainly understand the point, but instead of setting a hard and fast long term date, a set of iterative releases (internally) with soft dates would seem to allow the project to accrete into something that they could manage all aspects of as they reach the iteration where that aspect becomes relevant. Aggregating and analyzing the information from these iterations should allow them to estimate a final release date window. This elimates some of the problems I talked about above, including the floating-requirements issue, because you can have smaller subsets of requirements for each iteration which can be solidified until you have 80% - 90% hard requirements with the other 10% - 20% being volatile with the expectation that if it is too volatile or not understood well enough, it can be rolled into the next iteration.
It also seems that doing some prototyping before the project kicks into full swing of the basic game elements would allow the team to evaluate the "fun" factor, to a greater or lesser extent based on the type of game. A rad-based prototype of Katamari Damacy for instance would easily be able to show off the games fun factor, while one for WoW would probably only give you the most bare sense of the final product.
But another appeals judge on the panel questioned whether consumers can challenge the FCC's rules in the courtroom.
Exactly who was the FCC created for if not the consumers. At one point do the people who prop up the government get pushed to the side?
One of the biggest problems in the software industry, speaking as someone who's been here for a modest amount of time (6 years, since my sophomore year of college, full-time), is that management sets unrealistic timelines. If more upstream design was done (sorry, reading Code Complete for the 2nd time) then they could develop more realistic schedules. Enough with the 90% floating requirements, enough late-schedule additions. Engineer for quality from inception, and they could come out with better games on realistic schedules with happy, healthy employees who will be a value added in the sheer amount of innovation they can bring to the table when all aspects of their lives are balanced (for some, this is an impossibility, and businesses take advantage of this neurotic behavior, which I think is unethical).
Actually, if those things are necessary to live (and I do think that they have "become" necessary, at least electricity and water/sewer infrastructure) why are we paying power companies to provide them. Power companies that are only interested in maximizing profits, btw. The government is *not* providing these services. If they were, we would see a significant reduction in the cost of those services (water/sewer is mostly provided by local municipalities, this is really more towards power, telco). FDR put a cap on how much utility companies could profit off the sale of electricity, which worked great for the people buying the power, aka "us". Then Reagan deregulated power, and we get Enron. There are things the government should provide, and things they shouldn't. The problem is when they aren't providing things they should and instead making laws giving up their own power to a private corporation. That's insane, really really insane.
WTF is up with that!?!?!
The guy gave away legislative powers of the state to a private company. That is disgusting.
"Rotten businesses go out of business, but rotten government programs just eat more tax money."
If that were true, your post would hold more water, but since there are plenty of poorly run business out there who are still doing well because of government money going to them instead of to necessary services, your gripes fall apart.
Sure, Wi-Fi service isn't something necessary, but it's a city project, which is paid for by taxpayers of that city, who have far more control of policy than if it were a federally funded program. If the people don't want it, it won't happen. I personally think it's a good idea. There are plenty of "necessaries" that the government doesn't supply. Power for instance. Face it, people need power to live. You can't just "go without it" if you don't think the pricing is fair. It's not a morning coffee. So instead of dumping money into supporting poor businesses, why not set up a wireless network to allow anyone to use at a substantially reduced fee. It will create jobs in the process to replace those that are lost by the telco, and the city should see a revenue boost from it. Eventually they could put in their own VoIP network and start to turn the city into a business itself, supplementing tax income with service fees at a rate less than the telcos for these services.
Seems like the problem here isn't with Steam the distribution system, but Steam the authentication system.
I have no problem with Valve distributing games via Steam. That's there prerogative. I do have a problem with having to reconnect to steam, unless I want to pull my network cable (offline mode has not worked for me unless I do that), every time I want to play.
As so many people have mentioned, some of us like to come back to games we've played in 5 or 10 years and just give it another go-round. Steam the authentication system has the potential to make that impossible.
The biggest argument I see against other forms of economic systems is that "the best will have no incentive to do their best". Bull. Top researchers earn jack, yet produce some of the most important innovations, research, knowledge, etc. simply because they feel it is their calling to do it. They don't do it for the money. Maybe some want the fame, but you look at someone helping to cure cancer, I'm sure a large part of their motivation is the desire to help their fellow man. Arguments against socialist/communist systems invariably fall to "businessmen won't be encouraged to do their best", but I ask, who cares? The important stuff would still go on, because of those who would do it for the sake of doing it. Most of the crap in our lives is just fluff anyway. I'm not advocating a socialist/communist state, because human greed inherently ruins the conceptual notions that their founded upon, but get a new argument.
Actually, yes I have done stress testing. I spent some time on the performance and automation teams as part of my role as software engineer. I've written automation scripts for doing exactly what I laid out. Blizzard has it even easier than I did. They know every aspect of their system. They don't rely on 3rd party applications as part of their system. Not to mention the fact that Blizzard had half a million people as part of their beta, and your defense of that is ridiculous in and of itself. If we had that many people in our betas, we wouldn't worry about performance testing ourselves, because we would have an army to do it for us.
I'm really sick of people acting like they know what they're talking about, because you obviously don't. I've spent enough time working with software systems, systems programming, and enterprise system development to confidently come back and smack you down after such a ridiculous comment. Do yourself a favor and include yourself in that 99% of the population, because you either don't know what you're talking about with regard to stress testing, or you really are stupid.
Blizzard should have put hard caps on server population. Plain and simple. Their server maintenance schedules are ridiculously willy-nilly. Even in the open beta, servers were arranged by location. This meant that they could easily come up with maintenance windows that were conducive to affecting as few people as possible for a given server in a given region (east coast servers could go down for maintenance between 2am and 5am EST, west coast 2am and 5am PST). They apparently did away with that for the production release.
I don't discount your statement that there are people with:
and I'm sure those people are complaining. But when I can't get on at 10pm EST unless I want to wait an hour and a half, that is bullshit plain and simple. Blizzard is not providing the service that people are paying for. And before anyone holds up the EULA that says "You may not be able to play whenever you want" yada yada yada, a friend and fellow player who just completed his 2L at Harvard has laid out to me explicitly how that can be ripped apart in court (I'm not threatening legal action, as it's overreacting. People have though, and a class action against Blizzard is not out of the question apparently). I'm just saying they can't use that to cover their ass in the face of overwhelming lack of service.
I could forgive any provider who says "We have a set schedule, for server maintenance, to impact customers geographically as minimally as possible, but please understand that we may have overage on the downtime". That is just responsible. I would have no problem with hard server population caps, but before that cap has already been exceeded. If you can't get on to a specific server to play with friends because the limit has been reached, well, then your friends will just have to create a character on your server.
Blizzard lost a lot of their excusability when they performed an Open Beta for stress testing where they had to close registration because 500,000 people registered for it. There were similar problems at that time too, but I honestly don't remember them being as bad as it currently is. They had an idea of how many people would register. They should have been able to run automated stress tests on the servers to the point of breaking numerous times, and have had a wealth of statistical data by the time it launched.
They created a great game, but dropped the ball on the infrastructure needed to support that game. Plain and simple.
I was in the open beta when they capped the registrations at 500,000. That was supposed to be their stress test. Now I've seen a number saying there was 600,000 sales of the game, and then they stopped producing it. There were not these types of problems in open beta. Occasionally you would see a queue, or there would be downtime, but from reading the WoW forums, it seems like this is a huge issue.
And then there are the people with the gaul to suggest that it's the players fault. That they should just "switch to a low pop server". Well, when I first logged into Cenarius last thursday, it was a low pop server. 5 days later I'm standing in a 700 person queue. Blizzard then, in one of the stupidest moves I have yet to see, decided they would put limits on the number of characters that could be on a server, after that population limit had already been reached on the server. I'm having trouble coming up with an analogy for something that stupid. It's like showing apartments to people, renting them out, and then afterwards find out that you rented apartments to more people than there were apartments, so you only let a portion of those people in at a time.
And then there are the people out there who say that it's not Blizzards fault. Whose fault, I ask, is it then? I've been a software engineer for 6 years. At my current job, we are required by some of our contracts to maintain a 99% uptime. When a server is down, our web-infrastructure team is called in, from home, or wherever, to fix it. Our builds are very tightly controlled to minimize downtime. Blizzard has it even easier, in that they do not allow server jumping. They know how many people are linked to each server. They could easily just stop allowing new players on loaded servers. It's that easy. Really.
This is my first MMO game, and if this is what people have to go through everytime a new one launches, I don't understand how they survive. Oh wait, yeah, they make you pay for a client that could be cheaply distributed via some kind of peer-to-peer technology. Like bittorrent. You know, that thing they used to distribute the beta.
Some of this is knee-jerk, some of it isn't. I'm not cancelling my account or anything. I've experienced exactly 2 queues during the released version. Not terrible, but when I've got an 80 minute wait on one, it does make my desire to play whither on the vine, so to speak. And Blizzard seems to only be providing half-assed remedies for the problem, which just compounds all the negativity people are feeling toward them right now.