And we’re back.
It wasn’t enough that I almost single-handedly saved my office from certain bankruptcy by covering for all the sick people last week — I had to spend my weekend hacking up black stuff and blasting snot all over everything and everyone, which is even less appealing than it sounds.
I would like to thank the nation’s schoolchildren for sending that latest flu my way via working parents. Revenge will be mine when I turn over a bankrupt Social Security system fifty years hence … or sooner!
So, yesterday the long-awaited Warcraft patch arrived. It’s a content patch, too! Look closely, the new content is in the first two paragraphs: a new dungeon, Dire Maul, and two new dragons. Mostly it’s a bajillion fixes with the usual smattering of nerfs we’ve all come to know and love.
Improved flight paths is a welcome change, especially the Auberdine to Talonbranch Glade run … that one was a bitch. I still wish we could jump off the griffs midflight. Annoying as hell to fly over my camp with a few minutes of flight time left. That’s another five or ten minutes out of my life that I can’t get back.
Buff timers, additional action bars in the default UI, all good. Not sure why those took four months to program, but what do I know? Nothing.
Even though guildmate BitterExEQMonk had dutifully downloaded the patch and threw it on the guild FTP, I tried out the Blizzard patcher … just for sport. Some thirty minutes later, I had 1/3 downloaded and a similar amount uploaded. Hey, I was doing my part to seed the system, and at a blazing fast speed of 6.00 KB/s, too!
Fortunately, the patch was available not only from my guild site, but all over the world from third parties, so I pulled the cord on my experiment and considered myself lucky. And isn’t it endearing that the entire world is covering Blizzard’s ass on patching?
Here’s my latest theory on the core problem with this company. They’re fucking cheap. They get away with that shit because they can (so far). Normally, I’m down for that, do it myself when I can; I just don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of it.
Shoestring customer service … cheap.
Shitass patching system … cheap.
Months of delay on meaningful fixes … cheap.
Server transfers to existing servers instead of split servers … cheap.
Whatever their damn problem is with the hardware and databases … cheap.
I understand all about bottom lines and the intricacies of balancing revenues and expenses; I could write paragraphs about the economics of a 1.5 million player game and how I would market this morass and try to keep it afloat. I just don’t care.
Cheap isn’t playing well with me and it won’t play well with the 1.5 million. It’s not endearing, it’s not edgy, it’s not indie — it’s just cheap.
Could you play last night? Sever (or auth server) was down for me.
Think I was lucky. I snuck through the various downs, restarts and hotfixes around 6 pm PST, only had to wait at authenticating/login about 10 minutes. I think an hour earlier or later and I would have been SOL.
It’s terrible because the essential choice we are presented with is give up WoW or deal with Blizzards sheer incompetence. They do not seem to have their priorites in order at all, and I have stopped recommending the game to others as a result. The server I am on has crashed at least once a night for the last few days before the patch. They have had months now to fix the issues, and have not managed to make much headway. Having said that, once I got past the awful hurdles of my primary server being down for eight hours and the patch taking it’s sweet time to dl, my in game experience playing last night was much better than it had been before this patch.
One of the things I have read is that this patch was announced on the 7th of March on the test servers, tested for 2 weeks there, and then installed on all of the player servers. 2 weeks of testing, in my book, does not seem to be enough time to iron out all of the bugs.
I fully expect to find problems in Dire Maul and with the new dragons. Hopefully some of the old problems they fixed with this patch stay fixed and do not create new problems.
Been downloading the patch since yesterday. Poor 56k modem never knew what hit it. Probably take me 16 hours to download it!
I call bullshit on this post. WoW has set a new bar for MMOG quality and performance, yet you talk like it’s the worst release ever. They also have spent more money on WoW than any MMOG to date.
You need to seriously check yourself, and then think back to UO, EQ, AO, etc. if you experienced any of that. I was there for all of them and WoW is sheer bliss compared to that.
(Foton: Spam Karma ate Adam’s comment, no idea why. Anyhoo, restored the comment.)
I beg to differ. Quality? Ya. Performance? No way in hell, not with regular server crashes 4 months into live.
I can appreciate they’ve spent more on development than anyone in history and they need to cover those expenses as quickly as they can, but goddamn, if people can’t play when they want to play, why pay?
I can forgive all the other crap that is inevitable when trying to entertain 1.5 million people, but worsening lag and more frequent server crashes does not bode well, especially in comparison to EQ, DAoC, SWG launches. (Ok, AO a notable exception there.)
On the point about previous MMOs . . .
Just because the infrastructure is half or a third as shitty as the previous MMOs to you, doesn’t make it acceptable.
“WoW doesn’t hurt half as much as the other MMOGs did!” . . . but why should it hurt at all?
I’m fairly new to WOW and I’ve lately been reading your blog and others to get background info, strategies etc. It strikes me that many MMORG veterans spend an inordinate amount of time whining about how terrible everything is and how Blizzard is somehow beholden to your every gripe or concern. My experience with this and other Blizzard products has been excellent and as such I will continue shell out my money. Sure, I’ve had occasional lag problems, but never once had to wait in queue. The two major patches received, I downloaded with no issues directly from WOW. In one important sense you vets are right: Blizzard doesn’t listen to you and probably never will. They know their future market is fueled by neebies and they will continue to cater to their needs. Blizzard ain’t cheap (whatever that means when applied to a successful business), they’re just smart.
OK, I agree now. Blizzard nerfed Hunters. They are the enemy. 🙂
However, I am wondering about all this downtime you folks are talking about. I played straight from day one very intensely (at least 8 hours per day or more) for about 2 months to get my hunter to level 60, then quit because the content stopped at that point. I am on Silvermoon server.
Are you guys dealing with server-specific stuff maybe? Because man, our server has been smooth sailing for a long time. We had a few days of weird auction house problems, then they fixed it and I can only remember two times I couldn’t get online.
WoW is a mixed bag: fantastic game with problematic support.
I’m one of the 1.5 million players who love the game, yet repeatedly run into annoying support issues — like the Menethil Harbor Auberdine boat disappearing while in the middle of the Great Sea.
Thought the problem was fixed, but support problems are as unpredictable as quest drops. You know they’ll occur ‘eventually’ you just don’t know when.
From an objective, logical perspective, the surest way to infuriate someone is to get between a gamer and their game. Blizzard appears to have underestimated this.
But what Blizzard is banking on is the game itself will keep a large percentage of its subscribers, and add many new subscribers, despite its lags, crashes and bugs.