No More Players for World of Warcraft - For Now

Chris writes "FileFront has broke the news from Blizzard that they are no longer placing their highly popular MMORPG on store shelves, due to the recent server problems reported by Slashdot on Tuesday. Denying rumors that they had asked several stores to pull the game from shelves, Blizzard rep Gil Shrif is quoted as saying: 'We're just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.' The online store on Blizzard's website shows the game to be out of stock. No word on whether or not this will affect the Korean release."

I gave up

[zhevek]

I gave up less than a week ago. I have all this free time now, I don't think I will go back even if they get the servers fixed.

More Demand? Less

[CrankyFool]

I wonder how this will affect the demand for WoW.

There's probably ample discussion of this in economics, but it seems pretty clear that some shortage scenarios result in people 'panicking' (perhaps too strong of a term) and really really trying to get whatever it is that's in shortage; I'm guessing there are people out there now who are thinking "OMG, WoW is closed! I've got to see if I can find a copy somewhere near me because I might not be able to get it later!"

And then, at some point, at significant enough shortages, people just sort of give up and don't care anymore. I'm guessing vendors would love to optimize their shortages to fit between these two points.

(Case in point: I wanted an iPod Shuffle, and called the Apple store a bunch of times, waiting for a shipment; they finally got one, but all of the Shuffles went to people who had pre-ordered; they were no longer accepting pre-orders, and told me to check in Friday. At that point, I got tired of the whole ordeal and decided not to get a Shuffle, at least any time in the near future. Not that Apple's hurting).

B.Net

[FiReaNGeL]

I would have thought that Blizzard had more experience handling a massive amount of players. If I remember they had the same exact kind of problem with Warcraft III on Battle.net, underestimating demand, creating endless queues to join a game. The fact that they have to pull the game from the shelves is surprising; it shows that they don't have the control of the situation, and that they don't plan to in the near future. Of course, it could be a marketing ploy, to create demand by rarity, but I doubt it. It's producing a very bad image for Blizzard.

Meanwhile, players are still beta testing, but for 15$/month.

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Cecil]

It's just amazing that they don't forsee the ammount of people. Especially right at launch and the months surrounding when you have most people logging on.

Dude, they have 88 servers. I mean, they were expecting success, sure. But they've sold more copies of the game in the last month than FFXI (as a random example I know the number for) has subscribers.

Besides, even if they believed WoW would be very successful, they can't just assume "Woohoo, my MMORPG entry into the already saturated market will be a wild success! I'm gonna take out a loan and buy $50 million worth of datacenter equipment to host 20,000 servers!" and many MMORPG businesses have been nearly if not entirely bankrupted in the recent past for taking that line of thinking. Blizzard was perhaps a little pessimistic in their expectations for World of Warcraft, I don't think I can blame them.

Re:Not at all

[aichpvee]

They should stop charging players who already have copies until they fix their problems.

Re:I'm a consultant, and I'm here to help you

[DAldredge]

That would have been much better if you had used the P word...ParADIGUM :)

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Peyna]

Perhaps the issue isn't the number of boxes that sold, but the amount of time the average player is wanting to play. The game is good enough that even those who might have thought they would be "casual" players are logging considerable more hours than might have been expected.

So if they targeted their loads for 1,000,000 users, with the average user playing 15 hours a week, and instead they've got 1,000,000 users with the average user playing 30 hours a week, you can imagine the problem.

I know I've played a lot more than I intended. I think my total playing time is over 10-12 days.

Remember Starcraft? Or Diablo?

[narfbot]

Remember Starcraft? The instability of the servers at Starcraft's release prompted the development of bnetd. Yet, there are now thousands of fanboys saying that bnetd was only for stealing. Maybe now some of them actually see the pain. I spent hours just trying to connect with Diablo.

At the time these games came out, the only way blizzard offered a way to play on the internet with these games was battle.net. Kind of defeated the point of buying the game for multiplayer. Of course there was modem, which some War2 veterans did in the ancient days (with people in the neighborhood huh!), but that's only 2 player. Then there was kali, which provided a type of IPX tunnel. Which, I might mention, kali got a few kids jobs at blizzard. Of course something like Kali would be against the TOS today, despite it was *OK* by blizzard back in the day.

So with the shutdown of bnetd, I only despise companies like blizzard. It did nothing. Only put out the talented people that created it.

I also think that it is still ironic that people are actually paying for WoW, yet they are still having server trouble. Although it's not terrible, but I have still heard there have been problems with the servers from friends. Taking the game off the shelf is a way to slow this problem, but I think it will continue until this MMO loses interest, which will ultimately happen.

Re:Server restriction...

[oneiron]

I played Diablo2 on bnet a LOT immediately after d2's release, and I rarely had problems connecting in a timely fashion. There were times that the waits were long, and very rarely, there were scheduled downtimes. Bnet wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be, and it improved VERY quickly. Within a couple months, it had evolved into a well oiled machine.

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Incoherent07]

If people had to wait 2 days when a movie blockbuster came out, for example, there'd be riots.

You mean, like, when the tickets are sold out for the first weekend? Because we all know that never, ever happens on a big name release, and when it happens there are always brutal riots that we always see on the news.

Is my sarcasm heavy enough yet?

Re:Not at all

[happyemoticon]

I've only been playing the game off and on at my friend's house, but I've decided that I'm going to wait until at least midway through the semester, both for scholastic reasons and because I want it to be stable when I do decide to play.

But, to Blizzard's credit, they are doing this smart. This is their first foray into the MMORPG world, and they don't want what has happened to the others to happen to them: a launch disaster, leading to public embarassment and thousands of angry subscribers. If I remember correctly, there hasn't been a really smooth launch in the history of the genre. Rather than let the greed of corporate immediacy taint them, they're actually planning for the future! Fancy that. You know they're planning for an expansion pack at some point (because that's just how Blizzard works, come on - and the current level cap is such a weird number: 60?), so the eyes of the world are really upon them.

Part of the problem is that the big servers get most of the traffic. I was able to play very well on one of the lower-volume servers, but I anticipate that the current disparity will remain. When you're going to a party (for the sake of the analogy), you don't head to your buddy's dinner get-together when Marti Gras in New Orleans is down the street.

Re:Not at all

[Spleener12]

They are, to an extent- they just gave two free days of playtime (basically, delayed their next monthly charge by two days) to everyone who had an account to make up for the server outages. They did the same thing a couple of months back as well, I think.

Re:Doesn't Blizzard Deserve Props?

[drew]

i don't know. it sounds to me like the way they've been running battle.net for years. overpromise, underachieve, and they might have a fix in place six months from now. which will cause new problems they may or may not get around to fixing another six months later...

Re:The Power of Penny Arcade

[sgtsanity]

Blizzard hasn't made any copies since the launch. It became exceedingly hard to find in some areas weeks before PA even started chirping about the problems.

Penny Arcade has been incredibly influential in the past, especially when running the "Child's Play" drive, but this particular time they were with the curve, not leading it.

Re:Bittorrent?

[tukkayoot]

Actually, Blizzard does use a BitTorrent client to assist in distributing game patches.

But something like BitTorrent would be completely useless to try and address the issues that World of Warcraft is suffering now, which have less to do with bandwidth and more to do with some problem with their database software or the hardware it's running on. The latency, etc. isn't bad at all.

Re:Not at all

[Seumas]

I play wow and I can say that the situation is blown way out of proportion. I play on one of the most heavily populated servers (Blackrock) and have since the second day of release. The only problems I've encountered have been more along the line of "I can't do any of my 30-40 level quests because a dozen level 60 players from the other side are ganking everyone that goes near the quest areas and the advertised honor system to deal with this was removed". Call me a carebear. Whatever.

There are sometimes long queues, with waits of almost an hour to connect. But not often. And when the servers have been down, Blizzard has compensated us with additional game time

Yeah, the servers have been down a few times outside of the maintainance periods, but it hasn't been an overwhelming amount of time and when the servers are up, they run pretty decently. I think most of the people complaining are the Australian players who have swarmed to (and outnumber Americans in many instances) the West Coast servers. Of course the game is sucking for you, that far away!

This hasn't been a flawless release, but compared to every other MMORPG I've played (and I usually get bored and drop my subscription to them within a month or two), this has been the most flawless I've experienced.

If Blizzard was ignoring all the issues, I'd be upset. If they weren't working on anything, I'd be upset. If the situation was being brushed off, I'd be upset. But this isn't the case. They've acknowledged problems and are working on them. Their existance and profit rely on it and they know this.

And yes, you can argue "but they should have done all this in beta!" and "they shoudl have known!" and "but I'm paying for it and I want my service - that's all I care about!". It's even understandable. It just isn't realistic. This isn't exactly like saying "Our resturant will seat 200 people, we'll average two persons per vehical - so we need a parking lot big enough to fit 100 cars". This is much more difficult to size and deploy and even when you plan things out to the last inch, things tend to go wrong.

And while we're at it, maybe I should try to sell my account? I bet it's worth a nice amount of cash now that the game isn't for sale anywhere!

(I'm just kidding . . . don't boot me, Blizzard . . .)

Re:World Of Warcraft doesnt use UDP

[baadfood]

Clearly, you are clueless. When comparin gUDP to TCP, UDP is *always* the wrong solution.

Why? Because writing code that actually CAN tolerate packetloss is a very hard problem. So hard in fact that no one does it. The first thing every MMO that uses UDP does is implement a re-transmit on suspected dropped packet logic. Which means they would have been better off just using TCP.

Depending on your realtime requirements you can disable tcp naggle and perhaps some other options.

I'd rather, frankly, have packets that are late than no packets at all.

well

[Stu Charlton]

They don't specify, but I suspect by "backed DB server" they mean "IBM zSeries running Oracle" not "Dell Poweredge running MySQL". From the amount of data that goes on, and the fact that multiple actual game servers talk to one backend DB, I'm betting it's big iron from IBM, Sun or the like.

There's a good chance it's Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), which is what EA uses for their backend gaming database. Oracle is a big pusher of Linux/Intel/AMD blades or 1U racks attached to shared storage.

Though the downtime doesn't say anything about the quality of the DB software -- we really have no idea if it's a configuration issue, capacity planning problem , or software defect.

High profile database failures in the past (eBay, Orbitz) were blamed on the hardware/software vendor in the press, but afterwards reality showed it was administrator error (ID-10-T type mistakes) that exacerbated what were reasonably normal issues.

Re:World Of Warcraft doesnt use UDP

[HeghmoH]

TCP gives you three things over UDP:

- Reliability. Your data always arrives or the connection drops.
- In-order delivery. Regardless of network conditions, the data always arrives in the order that it was sent.
- Rate-limiting. Your data stream will be limited to a rate that the intervening network hardware can handle.

TCP provides and requires all three. Many interactive applications aren't real gung-ho on reliability. If you're sending ten position packets a second and one gets dropped, you don't care about it. If two of them arrive out of order, you don't care about it.

Because TCP mandates both reliability and in-order delivery, a single dropped packet can result in huge (multi-second) delays while the retransmits happen.

I'd rather, frankly, have packets that are late than no packets at all.

To paraphrase Stuart Cheshire, who wrote one of the first realtime internet-playable action games, "I can write an algorithm to recover from a lost packet, but I can't write an algorithm to send one back in time when it arrives late."

It's a tradeoff. Writing a reliable protocol on top of UDP is not always the wrong solution.

Re:Not at all

[banzai51]

Wouldn't huge stability issues, outages, and login queues two months after release construe a disastrous clusterfuck launch?

It would if they continued with no real fix in sight ala Star Wars. But the logon queue were really only seen during the first week of launch, and they have already fixed some of the nasty crash bugs. All and all, the game is working smoothly for the majority. The major problem now is that popular servers are getting performance reboots. So much for unix stability under load.