World of Warcraft Suffers More Downtime 205
_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.
Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:3, Informative)
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 when you were playing, the lag and framerate were absolutely not playable. We're talking 3fps the entire time - if you were lucky. And with Shadowbane, they went from the "let's have one massive universe" idea to "let's have seven or eight of them" to compensate for the troubles and spread the load.
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.
SWG Unstable? What galaxy are you from? (Score:2, Informative)
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 unforseen incidents here and there.
These days SWG has become a supercargo aircraft that can go and go and go for days and weeks without requiring any maintenance, even though it occasionally has some slow-downs due to heavy loads...
There simply is no comparison in regards to server stability.
Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:3, Informative)
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. They should have anticipated server capacity, people should be able to jump servers without loss of their character, it isn't just about planning a great game, it is about planning contingency should something unexpected cause things to go wrong.
They have sold 600,000 units. Assuming everyone is still playing - a safe assumption seeing as the novelty value will still be strong - then that means they are making over a quarter of a million dollars a day in subs.
With that kind of income, buying extra servers, hiring temps to manually transfer existing accounts to new servers (which should have been something the software should have been able to do automatically), and offering rebates shouldn't be too much to ask.
I haven't played yet, I'm waiting for the EU launch at the end of next month. Hopefully things will be better by then, this is the one time the regular US first, EU later policy on entertainment may see benefits!
Re:Hard to be at the top (Score:2, Informative)
Blizzard did stress test, and might have even used those products you mentioned. Nevertheless, servers can only handle so much, and when everyone piles on the same few, Blizzard's stuck.
A note about battlegrounds (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:4, Informative)
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?"
Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:2, Informative)
Because only about one server in 20 is flagged as a "roleplay" server.
People with MMORPG experience know that your chances of finding yourself in the company of grown-ups improve dramatically if you stick to the servers where roleplay is emphasized, so most guilds of people who like RPG (including mine) crammed themselves onto servers like Silverhand.
Re:Patience is a virtue (Score:2, Informative)
Ulamr:
This was a great debate/topic/opinions until dumbass trolls/Blizzard spoke-holes "RealBigNUKE" and "dragonsongcame" out. You guys couldnt make it anymore obvious.
Here are some good points in this topic, summarized.
*50 cents a day is still money, and if you dont think so, please send it to me, or make a donation to this website.
* EULA doesnt mean LAW. (Blizzard protects and give itself all rights of GOD, while consumer gets no rights.)
*Why we accept that WoW must have bugs, and we must be inconvinienced?
*Just because EQ and UO etc etc had.has problems why is it an excuse for every other MMO that came out. WoW has nothing revolutionary in game or graphics. With graphics being somewhat sub-par. And its been 2 1/2 years + and they still don't know how to make it right. That is just incompetence. 10 years from now, we will have another MMO, and we will still have the same lame excuses?
*People play MMO so they can play with a LOTS of other people, moving to a server which are "empty" defeats the whole point of why people bought this whole game in the first place.
*No one complains when their game makes great review or gets GOTY, but as soon it doesnt, they question the "motives" or talkes about "Credibility" of the source. For your info, Penny Arcade is one of the few places that hasn't whore itself out to big companies as most video game magazines due.
* WoW sales are mostly to great hype and reputation Blizz had.
* Software companies must be hold accountable for the products they make. Blizzard is no different.
*It costs a lot of money to run an on-line games. (You know if in 1999 it was 2-4 dollars out of 10 for band, 5 years later, the cost is cheaper actually, but great point)
*Penny Arcade gave very good reason on why WoW doesn't deserve GOTY. And it does mean something. Penny Arcade has more credibility then most game magazines.
*Blizz doing lots of LIP service.
*Lag is real, que's are real, problems which were talked about in BETA. There are no surprises, so what is going on is bad programming.
People pointed out that Blizzard was forced to put out the game before it was done. Care to prove it?
You want to give a message to Blizzard, don't continue to subscribe to the service. Unless you like to grab your ankles without any lube...then you deserve all the whining and moaning.
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endquote.
source: http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/
WoW (Score:2, Informative)
Lag happens during combat and when a lot of NPCs are involved (like pulling a room). The lag is about 7-10 seconds and I can just sit there and rotate my camera around waiting for the server to come back, if I am solo I will probably be dead, if grouped I will just stand around and get mauled.
I am liking this game less and less, I really had high hopes for it but there is no innovation, lots of borrowed ideas from Everquest and the ever looming "grind" everywhere I go.
The worst part of this game is: travel. Until level 40 you have to run (slowly) everywhere, if you don't have a flying transport between areas you need you will easily spend 30minutes real world time running. Heck some bird trips can take 15-20 minutes, essentially causing me to switch to a browser and read some news; not very immersive, just very annoying.
My WoW experience:
1. Spend 30 minutes running from town to where the quest is
2. Spend 30 minutes killing N enemies to get Y items or something similar
3. Spend 30 minutes more running back to quest giver
insert in there: If I lag during a fight spend 15 minutes running to corpse from graveyard.
If you enjoy mindless grind and can forgive lag and tedious travel, it may be the game for you.
Re:WoW (Score:2, Informative)
I've never spent more than 10 minutes running from A to B in World of Warcraft. I'm level 40 btw, so I'm not just talking about the low-level game.
Most quests in the game can be completed in less than 30 minutes (from start to finish).
Running from the graveyard to your body: dude, check your watch. The longest I ever spent running from the graveyard to my body was just over 4 minutes.
Bird trips also only take 3-4 minutes.
WOW --BS Maby a user boycot is needed. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WoW (Score:3, Informative)
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 into barrens, kill 1 thing, run back through mulgore, into thunder bluff. I timed it and the whole quest took me little under 30 minutes, all that to get a power I am supposed to get at level 10.
Another example: quest in Ratchet to get slithid eggs, the run from ratchet to stonetalon is about 20 minutes (running accross entire barrens, then halfway up stonetalon, then you kill a few spiders, loot some layed eggs and have to run another almost 30 minutes back to get the reward.
There are quests that can be done in under 10 minutes, like kill 10 of such and such which usually roam nearby, but anything involved is going to be a lot of running.
Now for yet another thing that is annoying, the dependence on fan info sites is growing.
Let me give you a few examples. You are fighting and you loot a sharp talon which is green, now you have no idea what it is used for, it happens to be used in weaponsmithing but I only found that out by searching thottbot.org.
I also get quests to kill such and such and I can't find that area without using the Brady official guide or Allakhazam. Some quests are self explanatory, some are quite obscure and the description is inadequate and sometimes even incorrect (the 3 raptor nest location is wrong in the quest text for example).
If you have played other MMORPGs like EQ or AC or DAoC then the grind and long travel times and lag and bugs may be what you can accept. I have been playing City Of Heroes more and more lately because their lag is very low even in busy areas, travel is very painless once you get travel powers and missions are easy to understand and find and there is never any need for a fan data gathering site. Maybe I like playing games that don't come with baggage, some people who like the grind are gluttons for punishment and accept it as a norm.
To each his own, but I personally do not think WoW has lived up to the hype.