This past weekend in the Warcrap world can be summed up in a word: catastrophe. Although any word that means “fucked up big” would do. (Blizzard’s most recent apology)
Some background: I don’t have queues on my server yet. But, performance has been dwindling rather steadily as of late, so it’s probably only a matter of days before the queues arrive. My first Warcrap character was on one of the large PVP servers, and after a few weeks and 20 levels, I had enough of the multi-hour queues and fled to my current server, which had a population of roughly 12 people.
At first, the low population was kinda the suck, since nothing was ever on the AH and there weren’t many players to do larger instances, etc., but as other refugees arrived, the situation improved … and went beyond improved back to sucking again.
My server’s woes are nothing compared to those other servers, however.
This should be interesting to watch (from very, very far away), as this is not only a public relations disaster for our Blizzard overlords, but potentially a financial disaster as well. They really can’t take people’s money for a box then say, “Bummer, we can’t deliver the service. Thanks for stopping, man.” I mean, they can try, and it certainly seems that they are, but in the end, that won’t work.
Now, what I find particularly humorous about the situation is: which part of “we’ve just sold 600,000 boxes” did they not understand? After the queues in Open Beta, even I (fool that I am) figured I better get my gaming ass to a store the first day before they limit box sales to ensure adequate service. In hindsight, I was an idiot — they didn’t become alarmed until much later.
At my office, we do project work. We don’t keep taking on every project that’s tossed our way, hoping that we’ll have enough people to complete the jobs. We regularly turn away work because promising things we can’t deliver WOULD BE BAD. We know, because of COMMON SENSE, that we can’t hire 100 people each week and get them up to speed in a few days. Weeks later, the work noobs are still asking about office equipment and expense reports. (No, we won’t pay for a round of golf on the road, ffs.)
I haven’t decided yet if the Blizzard Collective are just raw noobs or if they’re fucking arrogant raw noobs. I’m beginning to suspect the latter.
I got news for them: this game of yours, it’s good. But it ain’t that good.
I think Blizzard tried a few things in order to “Boldly go where no gaming company has gone before”. Some of these things look great on paper but in reality suck ass.
The P2P patching system is an example. Sure it takes less of Blizzard’s bandwidth but it is woefully inadequate for the scope and mass of this game. They just need to knuckle up and buy the necessary bandwidth and scrap the P2P patch system.
The queues are designed to keep the servers within operating limits. They want to make sure lag is minimal and to do that they need to insure the load is within certain parameters. They don’t want to limit server populations because that would be EXTREMELY difficult to do. Since at times the server would be peaked and at others there would be wasted utilization.
I think the soluition is pretty straight forward. Do what Evercrack did. Split server populations. Do character transfers. Many will jump for a low population server. In EQ I have seen entire guilds go over. This does require buying more servers and despite the sales and subscription money they may not yet be liquid enough to outlay that kind of cash.
I think they will eventually get a handle on these problems. The big question is how soon? If they take too long they will lose customers. If they rush too quickly they could make the problem worse. It’s a delicate balance. I hope they get it under control quickly.
I had an hour+ wait last night to log in. A guildie logged in then got booted and had to wait again. Now that is the suck of all suckiness.
BTW…Nice site I always get a good chuckle when I read this site. I thought I was the only sane person in MMOGs. Nice to see other pockets of sanity out there.
The way the mods are talking on the forums, sounds like they’re going to offer to move high-pop characters to selected low/med-pop servers. (like maybe mine — DOH!)
Which isn’t really good news for those that enjoy a low/med-pop server .. a sudden influx of level 40+s, instead of slower, steady growth? Ouch.
Why not offer server splits to brand, spanking new servers? Why the hell don’t these people see what has worked for other games (or hasn’t worked) and use past experiences as their guide? That’s kinda where I’m getting this fucking arrogance thing.
Christ, learn from others’ mistakes. Isn’t that something we all learn at least by our 20s?
Immitating solutions that have worked for others in the past is all very good, but it won’t happen overnight. They’d really lodge it up their arse if they break the game more with their fix, oh, say, loseing items etc during their server change.
Right now, the numbers that that are looking at, are how many people have gone one their their monthly payments, and those people will be around for a while, and how many people are approaching the end of their free trial. I’d wadger that last number is rather high and a few people are pissing their pants right now.
I am with Foton here. Do server splits to brand new servers. That would be far superior to splitting off to low/med pop servers. Then the low/med servers become high and have queues then they have to ro more transfers…etc…
All they will be doing if they do that is spreading the problem to more servers.
BAD IDEA Blizz!