Blizzard representative Drake (his mom calls him, Shane Dabiri, lead producer) posted a World of Warcraft State of the Game address yesterday: World of Warcraft Battleplan Vol. 3. Highlights:
Dispersing the Population
Twenty-two new realms have gone online since January 1, 2006. (Holy crap! Stop buying this game, sheesh.) They recently brought a 5th hardware site online in North America (as we know), each site can hold up to 40 realms. A 6th site is to go online before the end of May (which we didn’t know). More sites are planned to handle the Burning Crusade population issues.
Everyone can’t play World of Warcraft, there’s not enough hardware in the world, plus I don’t want a Blizzard server farm built in my backyard, so some people are going to have to play another game. You can do your part by discouraging your friends, relatives and neighbors from purchasing the game or the expansion.
Going Retro, a pithy title for Fixing the Old Stuff
The expansion will increase Azerothian land mass by 25%. Hardware at the 5th and 6th sites can handle this; the old, crusty hardware cannot. Therefore, they’ll be retrofitting Sites 1 through 4 with new hardware to handle the expanding mass.
Upcoming Character-Transfer Service
Drake confirms that this will be a PAID service available this summer, with restrictions. No solid details are given other than the PAID part. I’m thinking $50 or $75 to transfer with equipment and there’ll be some song and dance about how much paperwork and programming this involves, ergo the high pricetag.
Individual Realm Performance
There are 156 Warcraft realms in North America. (Stop Buying This Game!) Bla bla bla, PR stuff, they’ll continue to work towards improving performance on the craptastic realms.
Weekly Maintenance
They need to do weekly maintenance, he tells us why, yawn yawn, future small bugfix patches will be available for testing on the test realms.
Authentication, WorldofWarcraft.com, and the Forums
The hardware that handles the login requests to both the game and the forums was designed to handle a large number of players, but the recent increase in players has exposed some limitations to our system.
(stopbuyingthisgame) A new, more robust!, login/authentication system is to go live before the end of May, although I will say, the login system has been rather snappy for me lately — robust! sounds even better. Also, new forums are planned for next month “… that will allow us to make additional communication improvements”. Dare we hope for a working search function? Let’s not dare just yet.
Moving Forward
(I’m going to pause here to point out that it’s “we’re” not “were”. Jesus. The first time, I assumed it was a typo, unfortunately missed on the proofread, but after ten paragraphs, I get the idea that it’s not a typo.)
PR stuff. Feel the love.
Resolving World of Warcrafts current performance issues and upgrading our current hardware in preparation for The Burning Crusade is Blizzard’s #1 priority. Were (grrr) all World of Warcraft players too, and we know how frustrating it is when you experience loot lag, get disconnected fighting a boss, or miss the beginning of your 8:00 PM AQ raid because you can’t log in. We’ve been working around the clock to respond to the issues as they arise, and we will continue to do so for the life of the game. We will also remain focused on taking proactive steps moving toward the release of the expansion so we can avoid similar issues in the future.
I FEEL THE LOVE! I FEEL IT!
Uh oh. What was that? I just got the sneaking suspicion that they’re about to raise the monthly fee. Big rah rah speech, all the money they’re plowing into architecture, Sony just raised the rate on the Station-whatsit Pass, Blizzard might need some scratch to keep this ship afloat. They could get away with it too.
Man. I’m not feeling the love now. I feel like I’m sitting in the car salesman’s office while he’s off to get “The Manager” and there’s NO WAY I can sneak out without someone noticing or trying to apply rust-proofing to my underside.
Of course, if you new people would stop buying this game, we wouldn’t have some of these hardware issues and they might think that a fee increase isn’t practical. So, the important message from the State of the Game address is this: Stop Buying This Game.
Well said, Drake.
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Followed by vastly extended downtime for a suite of servers, oh it is to laugh.
“You can do your part by discouraging your friends, relatives and neighbors from purchasing the game or the expansion.”
I pretty much stopped playing at the end of December and my account expired in February. Now I’m a happy lvl 48 Necro in EQ2. Will wonders never cease. When I left WoW I was certain I would buy the expansion (pre-order it even!) but Blizzard’s continued inability to deal with their own growth has made that a lot less likely. How many people who have left the game will flock back at the launch of Burning Crusade? How much faith do you have to have to presume that this time Blizzard will have the hardware and software ready to support that onslaught of players?
I’m also seriously wondering how they can possibly balance the lvl 60-70 content considering the vast difference in itemization between lvl 60 players. I dropped out with 6/8 tier 0 items, 1 epic and a pair of pants from DM. How could I compete with players decked out in tier 2 or 3 gear?
Now I find myself looking more towards other future MMOs. Warhammer, Conan, LOTR and who knows maybe someone will do something non-fantasy for a change that’s worth playing.
Just be glad to know I’m doing my part to help reduce your lag.
For a while now, I’ve felt like im out of the loop whenever blog sites talk about WoW. I had to stop playing in beta in order to support my Lineage 2 clan, and never ended up going back. I’ve had a strong urge to play it for at least 6 months or so to get a better feel for what kind of end game 6 million people are spending every day working towards… but…
nah.