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World of Warcraft Suffers More Downtime

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jan 18, 2005 09:21 AM
from the downtime-is-the-opposite-of-uptime dept.
Role Playing (Games)
_xeno_ writes "World of Warcraft has received many awards for being one of the best games released in 2004. Unfortunately, the game is still suffering from downtime. Over this weekend, twenty different servers went offline several times - enough for Penny Arcade to revoke their 2004 Game of the Year status from the game. As Tycho puts it, "...we loved the game and had faith that any hitches in the experience would be ground down before release. This has not been borne out."" Relatedly, Voodoo Extreme is reporting that the Korean release of World of Warcraft should be happening today.
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  • A lot of people are playing this as their first MMORPG, and don't remember the launches of others. Star Wars has been out two years and is still unstable.

    Stability takes time. WoW is still one of the best MMORPG's out there today.

    • Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:4, Insightful)

      by k_187 (61692) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @09:37AM (#11394716) Homepage Journal
      yes, but from what I understand, things were more stable during the open and closed betas. Which is strange at best, inexcusable at worst, especially since now all those people are paying $15 a month. Of course, most of these problems are occurring on the top 12 or so servers. I picked a low population server, and we haven't seen as many problems. Its getting worse though, as people with broken servers, come to us. Hopefully something will change after today's maintenance.
      • I am getting ready to migrate to a new server. It really is getting bad. This last weekend my server went down around 7pm CST and saturday and sunday. Monday, there was 30-50 minute queues to get on. The only thing stopping me from making a new character on a new server is the hope that Blizzard will allow character transfers soon. There has been mention of it by GMs but nothing currently announced.

        • I have no idea what beta was like, but I doubt they had anything near the current number of accounts playing the game.

          I believe they capped it at 100,000 accounts, although it's unclear how many actually played. However, they only had something like 40 servers, whereas they now have 88 servers. So if we assume that all 100,000 people actually played during the beta and 300,000 people currently are playing (based on the MMOG chart figures), the server load now is higher than it was during the beta.

          An

          • The stress tests were capped at 100,000. They told us, when their beta registration server melted, that they accepted 500,000 open beta applicants. Of course, with their silly hacked BT client, some of those open betas probably only had 2-3 days to play.

            I didn't expect a perfect launch, but I do expect them to work hard at making problems go away. They released a patch right before christmas to fix some bugs, and introduced some new ones. And nothing has been fixed since. I personally am debating whether

          • Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:4, Interesting)

            by llefler (184847) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @11:53AM (#11396713)
            Loyal customers who pre-ordered and created their characters on launch day are on those servers. Blizzard didn't have enough servers to begin with, and didn't add more for two days. By that time, characters were created and guilds were started.

            Now here is the really moronic part... character names are available on each and every server, but guild names are unique for the entire WoW game. If you create your guild on server A, you cannot create it on server B (or even join it). I've seen frustrated players ask to move their guild to a less populated server, the request falls on deaf ears. What does it tell you when people are ready to abandon level 30 and 40 characters to move to a different server? Those same players then get blamed for staying on overloaded servers.

            BTW, I'm not on an overcrowded server, and I only have one character in a guild, with a bunch of people I don't know.
    • I've been very pleased with WoW. Yes, there have been a couple of downtimes, but nothing extreme. There was a 16 hour extended maintainance one day, but they awarded users 24 hours of compensation time and also alerted players to the scheduled outage in advance (and only the 20 servers were down - the other 68 were still up).

      Anyone who thinks this has been a released "plagued with problems" clearly never played Shadowbane or Anarchy Online at release. Those games were down for hours and days at a time and
      • Compared to every other release that I'm aware of, WoW was incredibly flawless and the only people bitching are those who play 24x7 and can't tolerate two seconds away from the game.

        Competitor products(CoH) didn't necessarily have these kinds of problems, and certainly not for two months after release with no end in sight. These companies are offering subscription(pay) service. A large part of their obligation is to make the service available all the time and to post scheduled downtimes for the playerba
    • Stability takes work and money. Blizzard has both.

      With City of Heroes, things have been pretty solid, including its launch.

      In 2005, with the amount of money being spent through subscriptions and technology, there should be no reason why servers should be down.
    • Vivendi is making the same mistake EA made: too many players per server. They've loosened the server caps and dropped their unpopular queues - and now their most popular servers are buckling.

      With the 'shard' design, where users per server is capped and they throw more servers at problems - there's very little justification for such overload.

      Too many people are forgetting that Dark Age of Camelot has had very very very very few stability problems. In comparison to the rest of the genre - they're downtime
      • WoW suffers from too many players per server, at least partly as a result of some backfiring of attempts to loadbalance.

        Firstly, they didn't release the entire list of server names that would be available on launch day ahead of time, only a subset. Then they are surprised that those servers are overloaded. People agreed with their friends which server they were going to play on, and obviously you can only agree to a server you know exists.

        Secondly, classifying the servers by timezone was a mistake. The mo
    • I have been playing SWG since launch and while the first day was terrible, the game became incredibly stable rather quickly. (Within two days of launch)

      There simply is no comparison between the stability of SWG and the stability of WoW. From what I have been reading WoW is like a rickety bailing wire and spit Wright Brother's airplane that can't stay off the ground for very long and crashes continually. Whereas SWG was, at launch, more like a WWII Bomber that needed very regular maintenance with a few

      • Re:SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by llefler (184847) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @12:09PM (#11396890)
        There simply is no comparison between the stability of SWG and the stability of WoW. From what I have been reading WoW is like a rickety bailing wire and spit Wright Brother's airplane that can't stay off the ground for very long and crashes continually.

        What you are reading on WoW is frustration. Small problems become big ones because Blizzard's customer service can't seem to communicate. Players have problems and they feel like they are speaking into a vacuum. So we continue to talk about problems that we don't feel are being addressed. Honestly, the game is pretty good, and other than lag (or being on one of the 'special' servers) it's pretty solid. But get one problem that gets under your skin, and Blizzard won't address it (they won't repond to messages in their tech support forum, instead they lock the messages or delete them. If you report them in game, they delete the petition), then you have a bunch of players running around telling everyone about their unresolved problem.
    • While true most MMORPG have problems, that shouldn't mean every future MMORPG should follow in their footsteps.

      Blizzard have had years of free publicity as people have praised them for the slow alpha and beta testing, waiting till "it's ready" rather than when the beancounters tell them to launch.

      Clearly it isn't ready. So people have the right to be annoyed at paying to sit in a queue. Especially if true that you can't post on the BB while waiting because you need to be logged into a server to post. Th

        • throwing hardware at it alone won't fix it, since the server code would need to be changed to be able to spread over multiple servers.

          Fair point, but don't you think the code should have been scalable in the first place? During the lifetime of a MMORPG there is no way of knowing how many or how few servers you will need. The code should be flexible enough to easily handle increases and decreases in cluster size.

          Noone would use Active Directory, or Google, if the underlying system fell over everytime ir


    • Stability takes time.

      Baloney.

      I expect to receive this game for my birthday in a month. It will be my first time on a MMORPG, but I've been toying with it since I finally gave up MU**ing three years ago. I'm really looking forward to an enjoyable experience based on the many reviews, but I also have the limited patience of an adult who now expects a service when I'm charged for it.

      I don't have any experience with the actual outages, but I can say this: if your PS2 failed to boot 4 times out of 5, would you take it back? If Blizzard expects me to be patient while they work out their issues, are they going to be similarly patient when they request payment from me?

      If they can't deliver, 99.99% of the time, on their promises, frankly they're in the wrong business. I don't have the time or the interest to fart around with waiting for them to get their act together, and I will either keep my wallet in my pocket or move to another game.

      • Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:4, Informative)

        by RocketScientist (15198) * on Tuesday January 18 2005, @03:26PM (#11399797)
        I've been playing for about a month now. I play on what's probably a medum high-pop server, but I've not seen a queue, even logging on at 7PM CT. If you don't pick one of the insanely high pop servers, you're probably not going to see problems.

        The biggest problems I've had:
        1. The auction house is very slow. The city the auction house is in is very slow. Some of the surrounding countryside around the city with the auction house is very slow. I had instant-cast spells take 8 seconds. If you roll a dwarf or gnome, get to level 5 and head to Stormwind to get away from the auction house. You can do all of the human quests for level 5-15 and it'll go a lot more smoothly. You can always return and mop up the lower level quests (if you want the positive faction reputation points) when they get the auction house fixed, which they're working on.

        2. The login servers, the servers that handle auth and character selection for startup, they suck. They're plagued with outages. Daily outages. Fortunately, they're usually resolved within a half hour or so. And, if you're already in-game, you don't even notice the login server outages. You need the login server to be up for about 30 seconds per day, so the odds are in your favor.

        The good news?

        If you pick a server with a medium to medium-high pop, you'll have very very few problems (you'll have more luck finding people to group with on servers with more people, but too many people on the server and you'll have queueing to get in). There is a site (www.wowcensus.com or something) that will feed you population statistics. Keep in mind those are voluntary reports, and may or may not be accurate. A better idea is to visit the forums at worlofwarcraft.com and see what realms get the most complaints :).

        Also, the higher your level, the more time you'll spend in less-populated areas. My lvl 36 warlock spends a lot of time out in the boonies running down quests, and I have no performance issues at all until I return to a big city to sell stuff. My level 11 priest is in one of the lowbie areas, and it's not bad, but it will occasionally act funny (3 second lag on body looting, for example). My theory is a lot of people are playing one character up to level 15 or so, deciding they don't like that class/race/faction, and are picking up new characters. Nothing wrong with that, I did it myself. But, that keeps a higher-than-normal pop in the newbie and lowbie areas.

        Finally, the game is a LOT of fun. Seriously. Very well thought out quests, neat items, I haven't had to farm monsters to get levels (almost all of my levelling has been from quests). Find a good guild on a good world and you'll have support structures to help you (higher level guildies pass down loot they can't use to lower level members, and you'll be expected to be generous when you get there).

        That said, have I had problems? Yeah, I was trying to play on a Saturday evening and it took about 30 minutes to log in. Given that I've played nearly every day for a little over a month, I'd say that's a pretty decent rate of failure. I had one time I was on and got a broadcast message that the server was going to be rebooted in 20 minutes. I finished up what I was doing in about 10 minutes, logged out, played with the dog for a half hour, and logged back in. Honestly, I'd rather have them reboot the server periodically than ignore problems. So my failure/outage rate with the game has probably been about 3 to 5%. If your PS2 had a, say, 1 in 25 chance that a game you put into it would require you to clean the lens of the DVD player, would you still play? Most likely. It's not a matter of 4 out of 5, it's more on the scale of 1 in 25 or so.

        Oh, and my warlock has a pointy hat. How cool is that? Blizzard gets bonus cool points for pointy hats. Now I just want a high-level crafting skill that lets me create self-propelled luggage with the attitude of a badly raised pit bull.

        Blizzard could do better. But they're doing pretty good overall. Good enough that when someone on the boards says "I've had enough of the outages and queues, I'm cancelling my account" most of the replies are "Bummer for you. Hey can I have your stuff?"

  • Hard to be at the top (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Squatchman (844798) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @09:31AM (#11394646)
    I couldn't imagine setting up a datacenter for a game like this. How much load should you plan your 100% to be? Could they even afford it? It's the new Warcraft game, so all the Blizzard fanboys were in. It's a new MMORPG, so most of the fans of that genre(usually warcraft fans as well) were on board. The word of mouth advertising alone had to be crazy.

    This is nothing new for most of the games like this though. Poor launches, crashing, lack of character balance, etc. Rarely do you see a launch as smooth as City of Heroes or Planetside.
    • They had plenty of time during the various stress testq they ran to evaluate the rupture point of their servers/bandwith. They even stated that if there was so much lag during the open beta, it was because they planned it to see the said limits.

      Now, we are after release, and the servers still can't handle the load. It does seem an expensive business indeed, so they could have limited the number of available boxes, earn a few bucks with the subscriptions and then open more servers with more routers to hand

      • There's been a lot of MMORPGs. Every single one of the major ones has been plauged with problems like this. Maybe it's just not an easy problem? If it were just Sony or something I could understand saying that they don't know what they're doing. I seriously doubt that every single successful MMO is run soley by clueless people who don't know how to do stress analysis.
      • Actually, most of the servers are handling the load just fine. The problem is that a very large portion of the players are trying to play on a relatively small portion of the servers. There isn't much Blizzard can really do about this, though I'm sure they're trying their darndest. Opening new servers doesn't help, because there are already plenty of perfectly usable servers with low to medium populations.

        Blizzard did stress test, and might have even used those products you mentioned. Nevertheless, servers
    • I have no idea what the launch was like for Final Fantasy XI (being in Japan and all) but I agree. Being the best is rough. We have SCHEDULED downtimes and very few other outages. Altogether a very enjoyable experience.
  • Fair enough. Although Id imagine theyll give the award back when the servers are unborked.

  • What downtime? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bruha (412869) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @09:36AM (#11394712) Journal
    Luckily I seem to be on a cluster that's not being intergrated with a new cluster.

    Unless you know anything about how adding new servers to the clusters and how flippin hard it is to do right then really just sit back and go do something else for a bit.

    Everyone runs around with their heads cut off like it's the end of the world becuase the 8 hours they set aside to play the game are totally interrupted and they're delayed from getting to level 60. Get up watch some news and get involved for a bit. Then go back and appreciate you can at least play a game like wow in this country.
    • I agree with you that everyone should find something else to do, but at the same time, when you are paying $15/mo. to play the game, if you set aside even one hour, let alone eight, to play the game, then you should be able to play. I'm sure Blizzard will continue to credit people for their downtime, but still, this isn't reflecting well upon them.
      • I agree with you that everyone should find something else to do, but at the same time, when you are paying $15/mo. to play the game, if you set aside even one hour, let alone eight, to play the game, then you should be able to play.

        What if $15 a month isn't enough to gaurantee that level of service? What if the level of hardware/support required to have five 9's uptime would require a $25 a month fee? Would you pay it? Would other customers pay it?

        Keeping a MMORPG up isn't the same as keeping a websi
        • What if $15 a month isn't enough to gaurantee that level of service?

          Xbox Live is much larger than WoW, supports dozens of games instead of just one, meshes with EA's network, and still costs less than $4/month (assuming you buy a year subscription at $40). Blizzard really has no excuse.

          • Xbox Live also has no MMO offerings. The problem of a non-mmo offering and an mmo-offering really isn't comparable.

          • Except for the fact that XBox Live is, for the most part, a match-making service. The games are hosted on one of the players XBox's. The architecture is nothing like an MMORPG.

    • Re:What downtime? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lpp (115405) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @09:41AM (#11394781) Journal
      I think you nailed the problem for many folks though.. they've already set aside the time to play the game, having already gotten up and watched some news and been involved for a bit. Now they want to blow off some steam, go level up for a bit, or just chat with some folks they only know through WoW. And now, having set aside this time, having cleared the slate and, moreover, having payed the money, they can't access the game.

  • Sadly Penny Arcade is right (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2005, @09:42AM (#11394787)
    This is great game in so many aspects.

    But, Blizzard just can't get the servers to stablize. In fact the situation is getting WORSE not better. I could understand during the first couple weeks, but we're getting close to two months now.

    If you have a PvP battle with more that 30 on each side. You'll probably bring down a whole continent, or alteast completely lag out everyone in the region (can't loot, can't cast spells, can't get quests).

    Even with no battles, if there's moderate amount of people in region everyone lags out.

    We reported this lag bug so many times in beta. We /suggested many times for blizzard to upgrade their hardware for the traffic. Yet their policy seems to be to wait for battlefields as if that will magically cure their problem.

    For the amount of money blizzard is making in subscription revenue, I'd suggest hiring fewer corrupt GMs (a gm disbanded a guild his guild was fighting with) and upgrade their server hardware. C'mon guys let's replace those PDP-11s.

    - James

    • Blizzard just can't get the servers to stablize. In fact the situation is getting WORSE not better.

      It has been getting worse up until yesterday when they finally capped all the problematic servers to 'Medium' load.

      Sure, waiting in a login queue for 45 minutes to get in sucks, but wasting 4 hours when the game is lagged to hell or crashing every hour with a 30 minute rollback sucks a whole lot more.

      I've never seen the game run so smoothly as it did last night. The only downside is if you crash out you h

  • time with the family instead (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dmauro (742353) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @09:52AM (#11394930)
    What was the number of units sold? About 600,00 (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/10 /2030244&tid=209&tid=98 [slashdot.org]). That's a lot of people to deal with. And this isn't affecting all servers either. I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server. Yes it's good to give Blizzard hell and light a fire under them so that they get more servers going, get the current ones stable, and allow people to move from high to low pop servers, but rescind your GotY award? That seems a brash and immature thing to do at this point. They put up with the rough release, and saw through the server problems to find a great game? Why take it back now when you've known this was going to take some time to get fully worked out. Especially when you have more and more people joining. I also think Blizzard should be applauded for not shipping new copies of the game until the servers are stabilized. If they are going to have to stabilize the servers before selling more copies, don't you think it's their number one priority too? Give them some time, start a alt on a better server, pick a Horde race, and enjoy the game.
    • "I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server."

      I'm on Dal and I've been seeing a slow but steady increase of lag in the major cities.

      "I also think Blizzard should be applauded for not shipping new copies of the game until the servers are stabilized."

      No they shouldn't. Not only have they not been shipping new copies they have been forcing retailers to sit on the copies they have. Also it's not their concern for their current customers - it's PR damage control.

  • The major problem is communication (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2005, @10:07AM (#11395177)
    I'm very glad this posted, I am a subscriber to WoW and I have to say that all things being equal I'm embarassed to be so.

    Why?

    I feel like an idiot for giving this company money for frequently crashing, laggy servers. I feel like an idiot for paying for a service where we are told absolutely nothing.

    These are the current problems with the game

    - HUGE queues

    Even at non peak times you can expect to wait 10m- 2 hours on a server. People argue that "you should have started on a low pop server". Well idiots all servers were low pop at the start. They don't offer a server transfer and of course they don't offer an australian server.

    - Server Issues and Lag

    Servers are not stable, full stop. Last week blizzard took our servers down for an extended 16 hour maintenance period. After this "FIX" the servers constantly crashed every few hours and on sunday night were down for another 3 hours. Now they are down for another 4 hours tonight for "maintenance". Every time they fix something, its more broken. Hmm..

    - Lack of Australian Server

    if we want to play with others we are forced to play on the WORST server on the network. We pay premium price just like the rest of the people only for some reason we have to wear pings of 300-600ms. This is an issue that blizzard absolutely do not comment on either.

    Communication

    As far as Blizzard are concerned, I don't deserve to know whats going on. Let me expand on this. Any time a server goes down, we are told basically nothing (one line of text suggesting they are down 30 minutes after the fact means absolutely nothing). We are not worthy of having updates. All we are told is "we appreciate your patience".

    If I have a technical issue and I post it in the forum. Most of the time it is ignored.

    If I post a genuine thread in the general forum, it is almost always ignored.

    Infact, the only time I can get a response is when I'm breaking the rules.

    Wake up blizzard, if you don't say anything then we can't exactly see that you're making changes because you're sure as hell not fixing the problems. Throw out the smoke and mirrors! Inspire some confidence.
    • Not trying to rag on you, but I have to add and correct to some of your statements...

      Huge - Waiting times? I have never experienced this on my Med and High pop servers. Maybe a few servers have this problem, but I have never seen it.

      Only half of the servers were brought down for the 14 hour patch, and it was on Thursday, which is supposed to be the least load day.

      Lack of server - Did Bliz actually release it for Australia? Or did you just import it? AFIK, only the US has been released to, which mea

      • Also...

        If I have a technical issue and I post it in the forum. Most of the time it is ignored.

        If I post a genuine thread in the general forum, it is almost always ignored...

        Blizzard has stated that, if you have a problem, posting it in the forums is not the best way to let them know. Email them. Call them. Or, even, page a GM in-game. I don't know, is that "breaking the rules"?

        Yes, there have been some issues, but they haven't seemed that godawful to me. It's still one of the best games e

  • Here too (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Taulin (569009) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @10:09AM (#11395206) Homepage Journal
    Out of all the MMORPG launches I played in (UO, AO, DAoC, SWG), WoW is by far the best, and could have almost been called perfect.

    However, looking at the big picture, there does seem to more problems now, than at launch, which is strange. Increased user base? Most likely the cause. I think Penny Arcade is just whining now since they are so spoiled with such a great game. Man, people are contacting ops over not being able to log into the forums they are looking so hard for things to complain about? I have been in many 50+ people raids with no network lag, and the graphics stayed pretty smooth also. Incredible times.

    My server was not one of the 14 hour down servers for some reason. Not sure why only half them had that long downtime last week. Wondering if they are going to spork the others this week.

  • Ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrZombie (817644) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @10:30AM (#11395485)
    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.
        • I try to play every night from around 8pm to 1am. And I've only encountered 1 queue that took about 3 minutes before I logged in. The fact that you don't like the reasons for the queues is not relevent at all because it is what it is.

          During stress test I didn't see nearly as many people around as I do now. The stress was not a good stress test or it was actually testing something else that users don't need to know about.

          "They should have been able to run automated stress tests on the servers to the poi
  • Playing four or five days a week since Thanksgiving, I don't think I've had problems connecting more than three maybe four times on my regular server (Gilneas).

    I don't know if this helps anyone, but I was having terrible lag when I first started the game, but noticed others were playing fine. It turned out that my five year old cable modem was the culprit. I bought a new one and haven't had lag or framerate issues since then.

    The biggest issue is large concentrations of PCs in one areas. I've been in th

  • I love this game (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nutcase (86887) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @10:58AM (#11395926) Homepage Journal
    I switched from FFXI. This game is better. I have never seen a queue. The downtime has all been scheduled, and thankfully at times that dont effect me. I have seen a few flaky things like rollbacks on player locations (disconnected, and reconnect where you were 3 minutes before you disconnected) etc..but I get that. Some movement is tracked on the client side, and if the server goes down you can still move a bit. It's annoying, but rare these days.

    The ONLY issue I see is that it gets very very laggy in areas where there are a TON of people all at once - like the Auction House in Ironforge. It's in a huge area, across from the bank, next to the inn, and right by the entrance - all this traffic mixes to form a great town square... at 3fps

    If they could solve that issue (and it must be a hard one to solve) then the game would be just about perfect.

    Course, it sounds like some of the other servers are having a rough go of it.

    Oh well... I intend to keep playing for a long time to come - maybe if all the people who are having a bad time leave the load will become managable, and all the servers will work just fine.

  • Job opportunity (Score:3, Funny)

    by aldridge (740912) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @11:53AM (#11396714)
    In totaly unrelated news Blizzard has a "Hot New Job - Network Operations Manager" [blizzard.com] as well as a few other positions including "Senior Server Programmer". [blizzard.com] If you wish to apply you can visit Blizzard.com [blizzard.com]

  • A note about battlegrounds (Score:3, Informative)

    by Slime-dogg (120473) on Tuesday January 18 2005, @01:45PM (#11398134) Journal

    For anyone who has followed the hype about the PvP battlegrounds system, I have no idea how they'll pull it off.

    My server, Thunderhorn, is really quite stable. I remember the login server having issues, and it messed up Thunderhorn for a bit, but that was early December. Since then, I have not had a problem logging in or playing.

    Last night, the alliance traded a few raids with the horde. The climax of it ended up with around 90 or 100 players fighting with each other, in the middle of the Barrens. There was so much lag, that I could run around and "hit" everyone on the horde side, yet by the time that my "swing" got to the server, the other player was on the other side of town. The only ones who had success in making contact in combat were the magic users.

    If battlegrounds is supposed to be the culmination of hundreds of players working in unison, all fighting it out, I would be afraid to go into it with anyone but a magic user. The lag would be horrendous.

    • Linking to PA makes perfect sense to me.

      It's like if they linked to Larry Flint's blog on a story about a porn star. Gabe and Tycho are fucking game pundits. Games are their thing, and they are a good source to go to when you have a story dealing with games, especially when it's a story they themselves have covered.

      • I was originally going to try and make a write-up of this story on my own, but then I saw that Tycho had posted a much better version that said basically exactly what I wanted to say. I figured that people would be more likely to respect what Gabe and Tycho have to say on the matter than some random Slashdotter. :)

        I really intended this as a counter-point to what appears to be the prevailing opinion that EverQuest 2's release was plagued with flaws and World of Warcraft's wasn't. Blizzard has been havi

      • I know people who work at EB and Futureshop here. They say the same thing - boxes full of games in the back which aren't allowed to go on the shelf. If customers call they tell them they will have some in "in about a month or two".

      • Re:WoW (Score:3, Informative)

        by achacha (139424)
        Have you ever flown a bird from the Cenarion Town to Thunder Bluff (level 10 druid quest for bear form)? It's about 15 minutes in the air, I went to make food and came back and was still flying over areas.

        Ever die in The Barrens?
        Ever die in the north part of Mulgore?
        Ever die by Razonfen Kraul?

        All those are at least 10 minute run.

        Let's try quests now. Lets try the quest for bearform, you have to kill a moonkin in barrens, so you run to thunder bluff to get the quest, then 15 minute run through mulgore i

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