In recent weeks, a good portion of the Warcrap servers have been going down just about every night — instead of like in the “old days” when it required the weekend crush to bring those bad boys to their knees.
I wonder if it’s gotten to the point yet where the suits walk downstairs to where all the khakis are and just stand there and sigh. Once a suit has moved past screaming to sighing, it’s getting serious. That’s the “I really want to murder you all” sigh.
Goddamn, can’t they just make a few phone calls and steal some IT people from SOE with the lure of piles of cash and be done with it? At least SOE’s servers are up most of the time — last time I played a SOE game, about a month out from launch, they at least had most of the shit cleared up and were ready to do some serious nerfing.
I am enoying this in a very perverse way because: 1. What can ya do? It’s the sad state of affairs with this game, and 2. It hasn’t affected my server … yet. I have a feeling that if I did play on a cursed realm, I’d be giving some serious thought to cancelling my account until they got their act together.
This game isn’t so compelling that the (almost) daily aggravation is worth it … ESPECIALLY, after almost four months. (Heh, I read on the forums that one of the players has 6 characters, all on different servers, so he/she had a character to play when a realm would tank. Last night, he/she made a 7th character to get some play time — the other 6 were on dead servers. That is just fucking sad.)
Anyways, I ran across some Warcraft news feeds, if you’ve a mind to follow the Realm Status board (feed) or the Warcraft news page (feed). More detailed info in this thread from the VN Boards.
Those feeds are courtesy of some Icecrown WoW players: Belatucadros and Taggart of Twilight’s Legion, respectively. I’d ask why Blizzard doesn’t host their own feeds, but I already know the answer to that.
So I saw this interview:
http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/467/2/
My favorite quote:
Shane Dabiri: We continue to place more copies of World of Warcraft into the market at a steady pace. It might not be as fast as some gamers would like, but we are trying our best to meet the demand. **We’re quite happy with the level of service we have currently,** and so you have seen an increase in the number of units for sale across the country. As recently as last month, 70,000 new copies were put on store shelves in North America.
Well, apparently, the constant crashing of multiple servers brings them satisfaction and maybe an overall sense of well-being.
I don’t think it’s their IT people. SOE at it’s peak had 460k Subscribers. WoW has almost 1.5M subscribers. It is like triple SoE user base. I think they need more servers in the pool of servers that makes up a realm. They are probably tweaking the NLB settings.
They may not have done much more then built a better EQ but they are in uncharted waters as far as # of subscribers goes. What they need to do is steal some of the people who engineered Lineage’s infrastructure. They have the money now to pour into new hardware so maybe we will see an end to these issues in the near future.
My realm has been fairly blessed. I have had it go down a couple of times but certainly no where near daily.
Nothing like blind optimism, eh Mannox?
Update on the cursed servers
It would seem that Mannox may not be insane, after all. Help could be on the way. *insert your own joke about what the timeline for the fix might be*
And yet another update.
Seems to be an appropriate restitution to the cursed players: 5-day time extension (per the usual guidelines .. heh, usual downtime guidelines. sad.) and full rested experience. They’d probably rather be able to play, as I would, but if ya can’t, this seems good.
One of the damned from the servers of the damned signing in.
Stealing Lineage’s IT people is a great idea – anything to alleviate this bullshit would be welcome.
Bah, victim of their own success.
Anon said:
“Bah, victim of their own success.”
Exactly. Which can also be described as “poor planning.” These problems are *easily* predictable.
actually these problems are not easily predictable.
Blizzard made a rather long beta test, and a long open beta too, everything was going fine then, they didn’t expect to need 80 servers.
You might say they should have been prepared, i agree they maybe should, but i also understand why they were not, because a success like this could not have been predicted by anyone….
Ps: being a WoW Subscriber AND an EQ2 subscriber i must note that EQ2 got the same (if not bigger) problems with zones crashing.