World of Warcraft Suffers More Downtime

_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.

Tychos Comments

[ben0207]

Fair enough. Although Id imagine theyll give the award back when the servers are unborked.

Ridiculous

[DrZombie]

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.

Re:Patience is a virtue

[llefler]

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.

And so it begins

[Reapman]

Ahh this brings back memories.... frankly you haven't hit bigtime in the MMO world until you start getting complaints about downtime..

Seems like only yesturday UO opened up public, and it was quite the crappy experience... downtime, bugs, you name it. People claimed the game would be dead in a year, lawsuits were made, Coaster of the year awards given, etc etc... yet, long after the game should be gone imho, it's still kickin.

Not to say that Blizzard should'nt get these problems fixed but, sadly, I consider downtime for the first month or so to be more the norm then anything... I told friends that WoW would have downtime... they're like no, they're Blizzard, they got experience, they'll get it right. And now that I'm proven right, they're pissed at Blizzard.

I still standby the statement that, for the first 6 months to a year of an MMO's life, expect problems. If you don't want problems, wait for the first expansion pack. They'll eventually fix it, and in a year people will forget all about these problems, and complain that the Ultimate World of Everlasting Quests, the latest MMO released, and proclaimed as the second coming, has problems. And they will be suprised.