Well I will say this. The less the customer knows the less he can try to act like he knows and have any ground to stand on. Yes most of us are techies but I doubt very much more than.5% of the WoW user base knows enough about blizzards server set up to have a clue. I will admit MMORPG companies typically forget to have good meaningful interaction with their user base. But what is needed more is just assurance that they are doing all they can to fix the issue......even if that means them bringing online 20+ servers a week for 4 weeks. However, if I had a choice between information about future game developments and information about internal workings of their servers I can garuntee you I wouldn't give 2 shits about how their servers worked so long as they keep trying to optimize them.
Yes they have in rare instances imposed caps. The most at any one time way 7 servers with population caps. However, this isn't a built in function. If Bliz's servers can only handle 3k ppl on them then they should limit the total amount of accounts that can make a character on the server to 3k. If your account is inactive for 2 months your characters should be moved to a storage server and placed on a fresh server if you ever come back.
All the other bandwangon haters are ignorant. Blizzards problem is that they won't hard cap servers. When they do this the players bitch and cry about not being able to get their friends onto their servers or make new alts. However, these morons don't seem to understand that an MMORPG is built around and estimated player size on every server.
At the moment I would say the servers that have the largest simply are running at more than 100% capacity. Every MMORPG I have ever played when the population gets out of hand in either specific regions or game wide has huge issues.
I know the fan boys here of Eve-online will toute Eve as being greater than all because it is a single shard MMORPG, I to play Eve-online. However, just like WoW, AC2, FF Online, DDO, Liniage2, Planetside, etc.....if you get enough people in 1 area of the world the servers crash or start having major problems. I company isn't going to provide enough hardware for a server that the entire population can be congregated together. If they did it would be a huge waste of resources and probably force the game to cost $80 a month which I wouldn't pay. So, I accept the issues that can happen. The only thing I want WoW to do is to have more server transfers and lower a hardcap on servers so that when they reached it they wouldn't over populate and have huge queues.
Because it was a troll comment......Seriously commenting on doom and gloom just because one wants to be contradictory is exactly what trolling is. Bliz is not all controlling of the internet and I doubt this guy has 1/2 a clue as to what their internal workings are like. Even if he does he is probably just a disgruntled former employee that can only troll forums to get revenge, small tho it is.
Oh I would agree then. Some past games I could not imagine enjoying if they changed i.e. Mario. If they made it into not a side scroller I think it would make the game less fun. I suppose part of the fun of older games was simply that they were meant to entertain while not requiring to much tedium. I would compare new games sort of to new books......today's books tend to have massive amounts of filler crap to try to distinguish themselves from older books simply because most of the ideas have been used before. Games are like that also. The ideas being used have been mostly used before so the add in stupid junk to try to make their game "unique" but quite often it just adds in boring stuff when just modernising and old game would have been the better choice. Who wouldn't buy a modern version of contra?
An idea is just an idea and has no protection. As soon as it is implemented it becomes valuable and can be viewed as property. What qualifies as property to you then? Would seem to me that you have to protect what people create. That includes books, movies, computer programs etc if you are to have a capitalistic society. If you are talking socialism then there is no need to protect intelectual property because it is already the property of the whole. However, I don't think you should be able to patent idea's only the way in which you are implementing them along with that if you patent something you should either be obligated to implement it or it should become open and free for all to use.
You are absolutely correct. This was a win win situation for both companies. Dell needed to aquire a brand that was "hip" and Alienware needed capital. Dell now has a company contributing to its profits that everyone recognizes is top notch and bleeding edge without having to spend the marketing money or any development time on it. I would think Dell would keep fairly hands off the computer making part of Alienware's business, however, they will probably come up with some colaborative projects to help boost Dell's nerd appeal.
I think most people fall into the thought process of "The good old days". Well in the Old days games were so minimal and repetative that they were maddening. Yes there are some good old games but give them better graphics improve some of their weak aspects and add some depth to them and they would be viable today. I bet you have a lower expectation from an old game than a modern one.
There is a difference between puzzle games and games that benefit from graphics. An RPG can be great even with minimal graphics but if both games have the same quality or play and one has good graphics I know which one I would play.
There are major flaws in your logic. I.P. as it is discussed in most cases envolves companys that spend millions of dollars developing something. Lets just say a major motion picture. They cost ~$50mil to make. So, who owns what was created? Should it be free to own but $50mil to make? These are the questions you have to answer when looking at Intellectual property.
Personally I think IP is fine in some situations. From my example above copyrights on a movie are fine in so much as they make sure people pay to watch it the first time. After someone has seen the movie once that person effectively owns a copy. Our problem is that people think they are entitled to everything especially if it is easy to steal it. On the other hand major corporations think they are entitled to produce shit and force people to purchase it. If people would stop trying to steal the utter crap and paid for quality then maybe this wouldn't be an issue.
Oh and if you are to poor to purchase something it doesn't give you the right to steal it.
You are right it all comes down to the money. If morons would try to steal other peoples stuff there would be no point to DRM/DMCA. People always want to be able to have everything. It isn't good enough that they have 2k songs they want 4k. Well my suggestion is to educate the consumer's to not purchase and not DESIRE goods that are protected with DRM.
In a capitalistic society money is the final word on any decision regarding business. That means that DRM is increasing their business. And no it is not anyones right to download any movie/mp3/book/etc for free. We just need to have people stop stealing "I.P." and just stop buying the crap they put their rediculously malicious DRM's on.
Makes no difference if it is a "proper bot". If he wanted to avoid a ban he could have just paid attention to his chat box every 15-20min. He could have turned off all chat except tells and it wouldn't have scrolled off his screen. Hell he could have downloaded a mod to keep track of the last people that sent him a tell and what it said. Fact is the guy didn't and got banned for it. Its shitty but thats life.
Clearly you did not understand from TFA what he got banned for. They did no scan his programs to see if he ran a bot. I will 100% garuntee you that he was reported and a GM tried to contact him repeatedly. His failure to pay attention to his game while gaining skill is against TOS. One of those TOS things means you can't ignore blizzard tells in game.
He sealed his own fate by admiting he was grinding skill and leaving his character unattended. It's not like the guy you keep trying to flame is saying bot dude is the spawn of satan. I mean all the guy would have had to do was install a mod that had a bell sound every time someone messaged him and turned all sounds except that one off and guess what? He would have been present when a GM tried to contact him.
Maybe you don't understand that Blizzard can't just say "grinding weapon skill with a bot is ok but not rep". Anyways, maybe that clears up your misunderstanding of blizzards rules. You may not like them, I don't like some of them, but thems the rules and blizzard upheld them.
I clearly don't think the fellow deserved a ban here. However, I know exactly why he did. Undoubtedly someone ran across him and filed a petition. Then a good GM sent the guy a tell while he was watching his movie leaving his character "unattended" and just pressed buttons. That is really all it takes. If a GM sends you a message in game and you are not responding yet are still taking action in the game you will get the boot. I have reported botters before farming rep in AV. And to be honest if I was a lvl 28 in thousandneedles and some guy appeared to be afk while fighting I would probably report it.
Its shitty but you have to pay attention to the game at least enough to respond to Bliz tells.
Just from my childhood which was in the 80's and early 90's at least 70% of the kids had nintendo's and played "violent" games i.e. mortal combat, contra....etc. So I would expect that 67% of kids who commit crimes play video games. But that is because 67% or more probably play video games.
Lol the problem is lots of these TelCo's were awarded exclusive tax status or contracts in the areas the operate to get into the market. Now that they have the market part of these contracts state that the local governments can't give the same incentives to people moving in. So, what you end up having is a government sponsered regional monopolies. So, these companies should be forced to play fair.
What it seems to me is that the VoIP's latched onto an idea and new business model before the old TelCo's and now the TelCo's want to hijack the business model. Hey I am all for making every website charge more for network use if that is what it will take to keep the internet growing. But as it is the internet is going to be a Utility probably in under 30 years. It would be like saying oh you can have water but unless you pay an extra $50 a month your water is a little underpressured.
There is no correlation. It is the same thing as saying murders drink water thus prooving a correlation between drinking water and murder. They have no evidence that kids that don't play video games are any less likely to commit violent crimes.
Also, I would go so far as to say it is more the reduction of power those in Authority have over discipline have over youth. As it is when kids scuffle a little bit people get all bent out of shape. If a school could just up and squash a kid for being a total dick to his fellow students it would probably prevent the kids getting bullied from totally losing it and shooting a bunch of people.
Ok he is smoking something and lets just do a little math for you simply because bliz doesn't release hard numbers. Although I think I remember them saying something like 10k is a fairly heavy load on a server. There are currently 6 million players of WoW. Lets just say that at any given time 15% of their subscribers are playing. That is 900k users and at least 300 completely full servers by your count. I would guess that during peak play there is closer to 1.2-1.5 million on at the same time with makes the required servers something more along the lines of 600+ servers world wide. I would therefore have to assume that each server can handle 6-7k easily and under stress over 10k.
It is an ok desire but an unworkable plan. Much of the MMO experience is economy also. If I could choose the least populated server at any time and move what I found there to a centralized server "trade server" my goods would be worth much less. The idea being you don't want to have such a wildly fluxuating economy and it would be a pita to buy goods because everyone would decide on a primary trading server and you can garuntee that.
The real solution is server splits. I hope they start doing this because my server has a 600 queue after 7:30 Eastern every night.
Dude you are such a tard. I love EVE as much as the next guy, I was in beta and all, but EVE is different than WOW. If EVE's population was a dense as WoW's they could just create a few more solar systems, populated it with some ores and call it good. WoW has a very much more static world size that can only allow so many people. Its sort of like living on Planet Earth here. You can't just create more land. That is really the beauty of EVE imho they have such a huge world it can hold lots of people and not be crowded, unless you are a carebear, and they can also grow their world fairly easily. They don't have to create new landmasses, towns, npc's quests, because EVE is really a PvP game where players control the content.
Ok you must be smoking something. I would guess Blizzards servers are handling between 10-20k people at a time. The server I am on crashed 3 times during the AQ event but then again there were well over 5k people all standing within my videocard viewing range.
I pity you....If you get discouraged by 300 people be prepared to be extremely unhappy before they fix your queue length. I play on Hellscream and every night of the week by 8:00 EST there is a queue. Friday through Sunday that Q reaches 600 and takes 45min to 90min to get through. The server has already had 2 server transfers and several major guilds have left. However, all of our transfer servers are now having the exact same problem we have now 500 person Queues they have this problem because they allow 3 major servers to transfer at the same time to the same server.
You have a similar opinion to mine but the problem is when they open a new server to alieviate some crowding all they do is take like 3 massively over populated servers and open up transfers to a low population server. So instead of a server split you just get a 4th server with a massive Queue. They really just need to just split a vast majority of the servers. I don't think there are more than 2-3 low population servers left.
Slashdot Mirror
Type in Blue Tracker in Google and check up on all the latest blue posts. And yes the have been talking about server issues.
Well I will say this. The less the customer knows the less he can try to act like he knows and have any ground to stand on. Yes most of us are techies but I doubt very much more than .5% of the WoW user base knows enough about blizzards server set up to have a clue. I will admit MMORPG companies typically forget to have good meaningful interaction with their user base. But what is needed more is just assurance that they are doing all they can to fix the issue......even if that means them bringing online 20+ servers a week for 4 weeks. However, if I had a choice between information about future game developments and information about internal workings of their servers I can garuntee you I wouldn't give 2 shits about how their servers worked so long as they keep trying to optimize them.
Yes they have in rare instances imposed caps. The most at any one time way 7 servers with population caps. However, this isn't a built in function. If Bliz's servers can only handle 3k ppl on them then they should limit the total amount of accounts that can make a character on the server to 3k. If your account is inactive for 2 months your characters should be moved to a storage server and placed on a fresh server if you ever come back.
All the other bandwangon haters are ignorant. Blizzards problem is that they won't hard cap servers. When they do this the players bitch and cry about not being able to get their friends onto their servers or make new alts. However, these morons don't seem to understand that an MMORPG is built around and estimated player size on every server.
At the moment I would say the servers that have the largest simply are running at more than 100% capacity. Every MMORPG I have ever played when the population gets out of hand in either specific regions or game wide has huge issues.
I know the fan boys here of Eve-online will toute Eve as being greater than all because it is a single shard MMORPG, I to play Eve-online. However, just like WoW, AC2, FF Online, DDO, Liniage2, Planetside, etc.....if you get enough people in 1 area of the world the servers crash or start having major problems. I company isn't going to provide enough hardware for a server that the entire population can be congregated together. If they did it would be a huge waste of resources and probably force the game to cost $80 a month which I wouldn't pay. So, I accept the issues that can happen. The only thing I want WoW to do is to have more server transfers and lower a hardcap on servers so that when they reached it they wouldn't over populate and have huge queues.
Because it was a troll comment......Seriously commenting on doom and gloom just because one wants to be contradictory is exactly what trolling is. Bliz is not all controlling of the internet and I doubt this guy has 1/2 a clue as to what their internal workings are like. Even if he does he is probably just a disgruntled former employee that can only troll forums to get revenge, small tho it is.
Oh I would agree then. Some past games I could not imagine enjoying if they changed i.e. Mario. If they made it into not a side scroller I think it would make the game less fun. I suppose part of the fun of older games was simply that they were meant to entertain while not requiring to much tedium. I would compare new games sort of to new books......today's books tend to have massive amounts of filler crap to try to distinguish themselves from older books simply because most of the ideas have been used before. Games are like that also. The ideas being used have been mostly used before so the add in stupid junk to try to make their game "unique" but quite often it just adds in boring stuff when just modernising and old game would have been the better choice. Who wouldn't buy a modern version of contra?
An idea is just an idea and has no protection. As soon as it is implemented it becomes valuable and can be viewed as property. What qualifies as property to you then? Would seem to me that you have to protect what people create. That includes books, movies, computer programs etc if you are to have a capitalistic society. If you are talking socialism then there is no need to protect intelectual property because it is already the property of the whole. However, I don't think you should be able to patent idea's only the way in which you are implementing them along with that if you patent something you should either be obligated to implement it or it should become open and free for all to use.
You are absolutely correct. This was a win win situation for both companies. Dell needed to aquire a brand that was "hip" and Alienware needed capital. Dell now has a company contributing to its profits that everyone recognizes is top notch and bleeding edge without having to spend the marketing money or any development time on it. I would think Dell would keep fairly hands off the computer making part of Alienware's business, however, they will probably come up with some colaborative projects to help boost Dell's nerd appeal.
I think most people fall into the thought process of "The good old days". Well in the Old days games were so minimal and repetative that they were maddening. Yes there are some good old games but give them better graphics improve some of their weak aspects and add some depth to them and they would be viable today. I bet you have a lower expectation from an old game than a modern one.
There is a difference between puzzle games and games that benefit from graphics. An RPG can be great even with minimal graphics but if both games have the same quality or play and one has good graphics I know which one I would play.
There are major flaws in your logic. I.P. as it is discussed in most cases envolves companys that spend millions of dollars developing something. Lets just say a major motion picture. They cost ~$50mil to make. So, who owns what was created? Should it be free to own but $50mil to make? These are the questions you have to answer when looking at Intellectual property.
Personally I think IP is fine in some situations. From my example above copyrights on a movie are fine in so much as they make sure people pay to watch it the first time. After someone has seen the movie once that person effectively owns a copy. Our problem is that people think they are entitled to everything especially if it is easy to steal it. On the other hand major corporations think they are entitled to produce shit and force people to purchase it. If people would stop trying to steal the utter crap and paid for quality then maybe this wouldn't be an issue.
Oh and if you are to poor to purchase something it doesn't give you the right to steal it.
You are right it all comes down to the money. If morons would try to steal other peoples stuff there would be no point to DRM/DMCA. People always want to be able to have everything. It isn't good enough that they have 2k songs they want 4k. Well my suggestion is to educate the consumer's to not purchase and not DESIRE goods that are protected with DRM.
In a capitalistic society money is the final word on any decision regarding business. That means that DRM is increasing their business. And no it is not anyones right to download any movie/mp3/book/etc for free. We just need to have people stop stealing "I.P." and just stop buying the crap they put their rediculously malicious DRM's on.
Makes no difference if it is a "proper bot". If he wanted to avoid a ban he could have just paid attention to his chat box every 15-20min. He could have turned off all chat except tells and it wouldn't have scrolled off his screen. Hell he could have downloaded a mod to keep track of the last people that sent him a tell and what it said. Fact is the guy didn't and got banned for it. Its shitty but thats life.
Clearly you did not understand from TFA what he got banned for. They did no scan his programs to see if he ran a bot. I will 100% garuntee you that he was reported and a GM tried to contact him repeatedly. His failure to pay attention to his game while gaining skill is against TOS. One of those TOS things means you can't ignore blizzard tells in game.
He sealed his own fate by admiting he was grinding skill and leaving his character unattended. It's not like the guy you keep trying to flame is saying bot dude is the spawn of satan. I mean all the guy would have had to do was install a mod that had a bell sound every time someone messaged him and turned all sounds except that one off and guess what? He would have been present when a GM tried to contact him.
Maybe you don't understand that Blizzard can't just say "grinding weapon skill with a bot is ok but not rep". Anyways, maybe that clears up your misunderstanding of blizzards rules. You may not like them, I don't like some of them, but thems the rules and blizzard upheld them.
I clearly don't think the fellow deserved a ban here. However, I know exactly why he did. Undoubtedly someone ran across him and filed a petition. Then a good GM sent the guy a tell while he was watching his movie leaving his character "unattended" and just pressed buttons. That is really all it takes. If a GM sends you a message in game and you are not responding yet are still taking action in the game you will get the boot. I have reported botters before farming rep in AV. And to be honest if I was a lvl 28 in thousandneedles and some guy appeared to be afk while fighting I would probably report it.
Its shitty but you have to pay attention to the game at least enough to respond to Bliz tells.
Just from my childhood which was in the 80's and early 90's at least 70% of the kids had nintendo's and played "violent" games i.e. mortal combat, contra....etc. So I would expect that 67% of kids who commit crimes play video games. But that is because 67% or more probably play video games.
Lol the problem is lots of these TelCo's were awarded exclusive tax status or contracts in the areas the operate to get into the market. Now that they have the market part of these contracts state that the local governments can't give the same incentives to people moving in. So, what you end up having is a government sponsered regional monopolies. So, these companies should be forced to play fair.
What it seems to me is that the VoIP's latched onto an idea and new business model before the old TelCo's and now the TelCo's want to hijack the business model. Hey I am all for making every website charge more for network use if that is what it will take to keep the internet growing. But as it is the internet is going to be a Utility probably in under 30 years. It would be like saying oh you can have water but unless you pay an extra $50 a month your water is a little underpressured.
There is no correlation. It is the same thing as saying murders drink water thus prooving a correlation between drinking water and murder. They have no evidence that kids that don't play video games are any less likely to commit violent crimes.
Also, I would go so far as to say it is more the reduction of power those in Authority have over discipline have over youth. As it is when kids scuffle a little bit people get all bent out of shape. If a school could just up and squash a kid for being a total dick to his fellow students it would probably prevent the kids getting bullied from totally losing it and shooting a bunch of people.
Ok he is smoking something and lets just do a little math for you simply because bliz doesn't release hard numbers. Although I think I remember them saying something like 10k is a fairly heavy load on a server. There are currently 6 million players of WoW. Lets just say that at any given time 15% of their subscribers are playing. That is 900k users and at least 300 completely full servers by your count. I would guess that during peak play there is closer to 1.2-1.5 million on at the same time with makes the required servers something more along the lines of 600+ servers world wide. I would therefore have to assume that each server can handle 6-7k easily and under stress over 10k.
Yeah I hear that. Hellscream used to have that issue now we just have a Queue and once you are in everything is fairly lag free except IF, SW.
It is an ok desire but an unworkable plan. Much of the MMO experience is economy also. If I could choose the least populated server at any time and move what I found there to a centralized server "trade server" my goods would be worth much less. The idea being you don't want to have such a wildly fluxuating economy and it would be a pita to buy goods because everyone would decide on a primary trading server and you can garuntee that.
The real solution is server splits. I hope they start doing this because my server has a 600 queue after 7:30 Eastern every night.
Dude you are such a tard. I love EVE as much as the next guy, I was in beta and all, but EVE is different than WOW. If EVE's population was a dense as WoW's they could just create a few more solar systems, populated it with some ores and call it good. WoW has a very much more static world size that can only allow so many people. Its sort of like living on Planet Earth here. You can't just create more land. That is really the beauty of EVE imho they have such a huge world it can hold lots of people and not be crowded, unless you are a carebear, and they can also grow their world fairly easily. They don't have to create new landmasses, towns, npc's quests, because EVE is really a PvP game where players control the content.
Ok you must be smoking something. I would guess Blizzards servers are handling between 10-20k people at a time. The server I am on crashed 3 times during the AQ event but then again there were well over 5k people all standing within my videocard viewing range.
I pity you....If you get discouraged by 300 people be prepared to be extremely unhappy before they fix your queue length. I play on Hellscream and every night of the week by 8:00 EST there is a queue. Friday through Sunday that Q reaches 600 and takes 45min to 90min to get through. The server has already had 2 server transfers and several major guilds have left. However, all of our transfer servers are now having the exact same problem we have now 500 person Queues they have this problem because they allow 3 major servers to transfer at the same time to the same server.
You have a similar opinion to mine but the problem is when they open a new server to alieviate some crowding all they do is take like 3 massively over populated servers and open up transfers to a low population server. So instead of a server split you just get a 4th server with a massive Queue. They really just need to just split a vast majority of the servers. I don't think there are more than 2-3 low population servers left.