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.

Also: Furl archive of World of Warcraft Battleplan Vol. 3

Most players are a superstitious lot when it comes to the randomness of loot; my Warcraft guild is no exception. We perform an intricate ritual each week before we enter a fresh raid zone, the details of which I cannot reveal. They (meaning the collective developer They) don’t want to reveal how they seed loot for dungeons, I don’t want to reveal the intricate ritual which gives us more perceived control over the seeding. We all realize the ritual is bullshit on some level, of course, but we dare not deviate lest we receive only warlock drops for the night. Again.

Goddamn lucky bastards. And a bigger group of idiots you will not find. Seriously, I’ve started to refer to this as Our Warlock Problem, as in, “what the hell are we gonna do about Our Warlock Problem?”, which you might think means that we’re short on warlocks or that there’s a server-wide shortage of warlocks, but you’d be wrong. It means our warlocks are MORONS. Very well-equipped MORONS.

Anyways. Kylindra of the Cenarion Circle Warcraft realm went through her guild data on Molten Core drops and discovered something very interesting: it’s like ummm, random. Heh, just like They told us. Class drops can be streaky, for sure, but over time, it’s random and evenly distributed. Heh, just like They told us. Read: Pwned by Data: The *Real* Story on Drop Rates.

Reviewing my own guild’s records, our Molten Core drops have been, within reason, evenly distributed. While my perception was that the warlocks were rolling in purple splendor, the truth is more complicated: our rogues have made out like bandits, our druids are getting the shaft and our warlocks should be glad to receive anything at all.

Facts aside, we’ll stick with the intricate ritual — I don’t want to mess with partial success.

Also: Hanzo archive of forum thread as of 5/3/06.