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."

Remeber diablo 2?

[Nova1313]

I guess no one remembers when Diablo 2 came out. The first few months it was released in the US the Realms were crowded. They crashed all the time, most people couldn't get on. They had to implement a queue much like WoW has. It's not the first time blizzard has had these problems and they always took care of the server problems in the past. at least they are trying. 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. But you live you learn..

Server restriction...

[ZiZ]

Perhaps Final Fantasy had it right - if they had implemented manditory load balancing on the servers, they probably wouldn't be having these problems. Yes, it sucks in some ways, but if the alternatives are "not being able to play the game" or "being able to play, but you have to wait a week before you can join up with your friends", give me a week late.

Better than AC...

[chris09876]

Good for them for taking some initiative to limit the damage. I used to play asherons call back when Microsoft was calling the shots. Practically every update they needed to reset the server, do a rollback, etc. At least blizzard is acknowledging the server issues and doing what they can to limit the number of people inconvenienced.

bandwidth or bugs?

[Suburbanpride]

Blizard is not a small company. you would think that they would have the resources to buy the appropriate bandwidth/server capacity. I wonder if this is more of a problem with how the software itself is written. A rewrite in order to scale better is the only I reason I could see for a major delay.

The Power of Penny Arcade

[xCepheus]

Penny Arcade dubs WOW "Game of the Year."

Penny Arcade blasts WOW for technical difficulties and discusses recinding "Game of the Year" status.

Blizzard pulls game from shelves as part of an attempt to fix the technical difficulties.

I'm not saying they were the sole reason for Blizzard's actions but I'm sure they played a role... A LOT of gamers frequent P-A.

As good as it is to make money

[Datamonstar]

It's gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the "best" problem Blizzard could have had with this game.

Re:Server restriction...

[oneiron]

Why don't we give Blizzard a chance to come up with their own solutions? I would be willing to bet it will be better than any sort of forced load-balancing garbage. Blizzard delivers....always...so far.

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah I remember that. Battle.net would be updated once or twice a week and it STILL didnt fix the problem. I gave up on that game a month later, seriously it was a big dissapointment. Almost all my friends from Asherons Call: Darktide server are playing WoW, which is the only reason im considering WoW, but right now, im gonna re-think throwing down 50$ for a game thats has major problems right from the start.

The guy at EBGames told me that he has copies, he's just forbiden from selling them and that when he can start selling them, I might not be able to join my friends on the PvP server. He was told that once servers reach a population, they prevent anyone from joining it. So if the only reason to play this game is to join my friends in PvP action, and I cant join their server. Im screwed, theres no way im going to get a full refund.

Re:As good as it is to make money

[nuclear305]

" It's gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the "best" problem Blizzard could have had with this game."

No, it better be the WORST feeling for them. They can't even keep the servers up for the existing players to play.

Many will tell you that the servers were "down" from Thursday through Sunday regardless of whether or not the official status was "up." That's in addition to the 16 hours of scheduled downtime on Thursday.

The kicker? The 16 hour downtime to fix the problem actually made it even worse. That's when they introduced even more population caps without first informing the customers. Now players can sit in queues for anywhere between 1 to 3 hours...and if they're lucky enough to wait that long and log in, they may get 10 minutes of actual playtime before they get booted out of the game or lag out and forced to sit in the queue yet again.

This isn't just a problem for the high population servers, it's affecting even the low population servers. What does this mean? Nobody but Blizzard themselves can say with any certainty...but I'm willing to bet this has nothing to do with the popularity of the game and how many copies were sold. My guess is they have a poorly designed backend/database system that is simply broken and cannot be fixed even by throwing more hardware at the issue.

Doesn't Blizzard Deserve Props?

[dancingmad]

This actually seems responsible to me. Rather than sell the promise of server space along with the game or selling a game that has no value without the ability to long onto the server, they are holding copies back until they can fix the issues properly. If this is what they are actually doing, kudos to Blizzard; certainly the backlash they've been getting has something to do with it, but this is more responsibility than many game companies will take (and I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of WoW or the company's RTSes). To a large degree, WoW is like a forum or chat service and I've known forums to freeze new accounts to fix mySQL problems.

Of course, this could be a ploy just to drive up sales with rumors of a new player "blackout." But Blizzard is really well known for taking drastic actions to make sure their games are as good as possible. Is there any reason Blizzard should be bashed for this?

This will create a huge blackmarket for people selling their characters and accounts, though...

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Nova1313]

they saw the applications for the beta though.. lots and lots. Now granted I know not everyone goes out and purchases it that wants to try it. But with the positive response you have from that you would just think wow. I applaud them for doing as well as they did no doubt there... I'm not saying they screwed up either.. But it might be a little better planned... I'm not sure how it works in the videogame industry but I know when our companies software is preordered we get a number. We have a ratio of preorders to customers that buy without informing them.. They didn't even have enough copies at lauch if I remember correctly. It seems as though either they don't get data like that or their publisher vivendi screwed them over a bit.... I love blizzard don't get me wrong it's just not something I wasn't expecting..

World Of Warcraft doesnt use UDP

[Pizaz]

World of Warcraft uses TCP ONLY for its client to server communications and this seems to have been a big mistake for Blizzard. In South Korea, their network infrastructure is first class. They have fiber everywhere and virtually everyone has MEGA bandwidth broadband. That is why WoW and other mmogs in South Korea like Lineage I and II can get away with using TCP only.

However here in the U.S, our network infrastructure is not so homogenous nor cutting edge in all places. There is a reason so many mmogs that are popular here in the U.S use UDP datagrams over TCP steams. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard decides to quickly hack in a UDP based messaging system to fix this issue. If their code is well architected, it shouldn't be too difficult to do this... the question is, are they going to turn paying customers into testers for the next month while they experiment with fixes to the problem?

Re:Not at all

[RvLeshrac]

Actually, the current monthly WoW take is ~$6 million.

Releasing the game in Korea may improve that stream, but unless they have plans for cafe usage... not by much.

Aside from all that, someone on Evil Avatar pointed out that WoW has ~85 servers, and FFXI has 33. WoW has all these problems, FFXI doesn't. Yet FFXI has 200,000 more subscribers, not limited to the US. The lag on FFXI is almost nonexistent, only rearing its ugly head when you enter an area with an obscene number of people.

Re:Actions not words

[melikamp]

I've been playing from day one (and a few months before that -- in demo) and let me just offer you my subjective experience. As soon as the problems surfaced on a number of Western servers, Blizzard suggested players to spread out without regard to the time zones, and they promised that the choice of a server in a different time zone will not affect the performance. I did just that, (moved to Sargeras, in central time) and did not experience any significant outages ever since. Little annoyances are abound -- mostly related to a huge population in the capital cities, and small outages still happen from time to time, but there was ultimately nothing that caused me to think "OK, I want my money back". If anything, I played too much :-)

I think Blizzard is doing the right thing now, aiming to satisfy its current customer base, while sacrificing some of the profits they could make on additional sales. As a current customer, I give them two thumbs up.

Re:You are a moron.

[Pizaz]

And you know this because? (and dont say its because they said so. They aren't going to go around admiting its a design flaw.)

Ok then, answer me this... why are the South Korean WoW servers not affected?

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp? se archid=7415

And don't say its because everyone is playing Lineage... according to the above link, WoW is setting concurrency records over there. But then why aren't those servers suffering from the same fate as the U.S servers?

I submit its because of the network infrastructure in South Korea which makes the U.S problem a "front end" issue. We'll find out soon enough.

Incidentally, if I am a moron, then what does it make you for arguing with me?

But you can still get the game.

[JohnBaleshiski]

> You can't come and play here

Try eBay. I have one copy, and my fiance wanted to play. (It's a good way to get her to not complain that I am playing the game).

I read this post, went to eBay, and 15 minutes later I bid on and won a copy for $75.03. The guy emailed me the CD key, and I'm installing it now.

Yes, there have been server problems especially on Tichondrius (where I was playing). Switching to another lower population server is working well so far.

Seriously, if you want to play (and you should), go her yourself a copy on eBay now.

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[AKnightCowboy]

Coming from a FPS playing world I can't understand why people would ever pay to play multiplayer games. Why doesn't Blizzard just release the server code for Linux and Windows servers and let people run their own servers? They could have hundreds or thousands of them at zero cost to them and still make a killing selling the game. I played City of Heroes for a few months but began to realize that 3 months of subscription was ending up costing more than I paid for the damn game! It's just not worth it.

Re:Not at all

[Issue9mm]

I absolutely respect the rules of RP, and even keep in character until the other person breaks out. I certainly don't want to step on anyone's fun, but I'm mostly just there to play, not to interact a great deal. I have friends and family playing on the same server as I, and we're content to party almost entirely with ourselves, and will keep in character (tho admittedly milder than some of the... more serious RPers) when we interact with others.

That said, I wholly support the parent's statements, and think that it's ridiculous when people go there just to rile up the less casual RPers. RP debates in general chat aren't fun for anyone.

-9mm-

Re:Not at all

[Slime-dogg]

WoW may also have twice the number of NPC characters, twice the number of quests, twice the spawn rate, twice...

I wouldn't be surprised if they had some inefficient code in there, too.

Re:Money == server stability?

[will_die]

The breaking up of the people into different physical servers is the main reason you do implement instances/zones/areas. Then you have a seperate comm server to handle the communication between players.
With the lack of instances for such large areas as WoW does, does mean that people are all on the same physical server and why they are needing to upgrade the hardware.
In the older days of MMORPG(3-4 years ago) 3000 was the magical number passed around as the max number of people that could be logged on at once with, just looking at numbers and WoW far exceeds that. Then to make matter even worse they implemented that very stupid time zone stuff so you get people filling the servers at the same prime time.
Tie that in with the announcement that they implemente code tuning along with the better hardware then look at what is the result and thoses queues are not going away for a long,long time.

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Bacardi151]

What one second. If a game is going to keep me playing it and it only costs me 15 bucks a month to do so, i will take it in a heartbeat. It sure beats spending 200 bucks a month on 4 games alone(having all 3 current generation consoles). WOW has done that for me. I thought the same thing before i started playing MMORPG's, but the simple fact is that if you are actually going to play it, and continue to do so, it costs less in the long run.

Re: Not at all

[shambalagoon]

I've never had to wait in line for access, and the downtime is almost nonexistent on my server. What you're hearing is from people on the few servers that have had lots of problems. And surely they have good reason to be sore, but nobody should get the impression here that it's all like that.

I love World of Warcraft!

It works for me

[clindell]

I realize everyone complaining has good reason, but since all we seem to hear from are the people complaining, I wanted to point out that some people are very happy. At least one, that is.

I started playing the game on 12/29, and have played every day. I'm on the Shadowsong realm. There have been a few times that I haven't been able to log in, but unless it was a scheduled maintenance, I was always able to get on in less than an hour. That 16 hour maintenance was frustrating, especially since my server was the last to come up and it was over 16 hours, but I understand they're going to need to do that sometimes. I've never seen the queues that I hear about.

Yes, I pay for the game monthly and deserve to be able to play it when I want to, but come on, be fair. The game is so great that I know they're smart people - I believe they're doing their best. This game is so addicting that the limited downtime is about the only time I've spent away from the computer or work since I started playing.