World of Queuecraft 304
BondGamer writes "Gamespot has an article discussing the ongoing problems with Blizzard's World of Warcraft. It outlines how the same issues have been plaguing the MMORPG for over a year now with no end in sight. From the article, 'If there's an absolutely excellent game, but no one can get online to play it, is it still excellent?'" Anyone have any hellacious queue stories? Update: 03/01 16:06 GMT by Z : Blizzard also announced today that they've hit 6 Million Subscribers.
Server splits (Score:2)
They need to do some server splits, the way EQ used to do it.
Re:Server splits (Score:3, Insightful)
currently playing MxO, so some may argue my "I expect more." comment
Re:Server splits (Score:2)
Re:Server splits (Score:2)
Re:Server splits (Score:2)
Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
But unless theres a LOT more backend work than you're talking about, you'll only be playing with whoever logged into your server at that time, which is part of the complaints about server splitting from the player's prospective. Plus, the servers are self-contained worlds, which is part of what makes just letting people transfer at will problematic on Blizzard's side as well. If you slay the King of All Evil (or whatever) and this is supposed to
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
That's how it works now - nothing is sticky.
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
At the moment, they're using multiple servers for a single content: a "game server" is not mapped 1:1 to a physical server, Everquest already needed dozens of machine for each game server, and it trusted the client a lot (far too much, which lead to quite a few client hacks and various data sniffing). Current MMOs trust the client far less, which is sensible but results in an even higher load on the server side.
There is more than likely heavy load-balancing involved, but no way in hell to merge everything
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
I thought the method Square Enix implemented with Final Fantasy XI was pretty decent. When you create your first character, you were randomly assigned to a server. Subsequent character creations under your account defau
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Most people would switch early in their careers, maybe shopping around, looking for a good server. Net economic effect: nearly zero. High-level characters wouldn't switch much, because they would lose a lot, but they probably wouldn't
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
-Eric
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Perhaps I'm missing something technical, but given that Blizzard is making ~1 billlllyyyyon dollars per year on WoW I think they could manage to program something up.
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Despite the constant moaning though, most of us are not going stop playing over such issues, so they're not going to fix them anytime soon. And WoW is the best game ever, sadly for my social life and wallet...
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Well one huge difference between Guild Wars and WoW is that GW is very heavily instanced. Last I checked, you are technically in an inst
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer (Score:2)
Guild Wars instances almost all its content. Your "server" is simply which glorified chat room you use to start parties. That means load balancing servers is not necessary.
Chris Mattern
Re:More servers != good solution (Score:2)
Agreed, and agreed again. It would suck specially if you are in a guild that "grew up" together. You have 100+ members and have your strategies down to a T. You do pretty well on endgame instances and battlegrounds. Then the servers become crowded and and blizzard offers to split servers. Half the people on the group will want to migrate, and the other half won't. And so the dynamics of the guild is
Play in the morning (Score:2)
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
I work a full time job (with overtime sometimes).
I take a graduate course at my college.
I'm married.
I get seven to eight hours of sleep per night.
I raid three times a week with my guild (MC, BWL, AQ, ZG, though not all in one week), and I'm an officer organizing things in that guild.
I have tons of free non-game time, though the queues are making things worse. Then again, I just get homework/housework/etc done while in queue.
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
Yes, you're missing the point, but that doesn't mean you'd ever see the appeal.
The appeal is that the journey itself is fun. There's a whole style of gameplay where you attack the same challenge over and over again, getting better at it until it loses its fun and you move on. (See: Tetris, Pac-Man, platformers) There's also a style of gameplay where you cooperate with friends to achieve a task (See: any co-op pla
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
It comes down to sheer logistics. The developers spend months creating these end game dungeons, tweaking and balancing the fights. Players simply defeat these faster than they can be created. It is not possible in ANY game to continually provide new, QU
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
Here is my week's WoW Schedule:
Sunday 5pm clear MC, duration about 5 hours.
Monday 7:30pm kill Onyxia, duration about 20-30 minutes.
Wednesday 7:30pm learning/killing in BWL, duration about 3 hours.
If I really feel like, I can hop on a AQ20 raid or a ZG raid. Depending if I have the time. Lately I don't have the time. My guild is a guild made of casual players with jobs, families and there are 2-3 raids max a week, not to mention Onyxia isn't even a raid.
Re:Play in the morning (Score:2)
I admit I used to put in a lot more time, when I was levelling up. But now that I'm level 60, I'm very casual.
It's still worth my $15. Just
Queues *plus* lag! (Score:2)
Re:Queues *plus* lag! (Score:2)
Queues make it bad for those online and off (Score:2)
And as said, there is no end in sight. After 15 months, if there are not only still queue problems, they are getting worse weekly, what hope do we have for getting things fixed?
But there will still be suc
"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Yes, but that doesn't help me. OK, I don't have this problem myself so much nowadays because the queues aren't as bad as they were, but I would regularly get home from work, fire up WoW, and just leave it queueing for an hour while I watched some TV and had my meal. It's fair to say that no-one could get online for that hour unless they had s
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Re:"but no one can get online to play it" (Score:2)
Ridiculous (Score:2)
My example is probably one that many have experienced. My raid guild was doing its usual round of Onyxia followed by MC and right in the middle of MC, I disconnect. Usually not that big of an issue, as I just do a restart and log back in....to find a que of 780 and
Re:Ridiculous (Score:2)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
The mere fact... (Score:2)
Although, it does suck that servers are filling up as soon as they're created, during the times I play, I don't seem to have too many queue problems... save for Saturdays, but I almost never get a chance to play on Saturdays anyway.
Yogi Berra said it best (Score:3, Insightful)
And the alternative is ... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The alternative to no queues is
A) Let everyone in. I've seen that in other games. It's not pretty. Things don't scale infinitely, and the game server would be unusable. People would then bitch that the game server is unusable.
B) Static cap the server population. They tried that recently. Immediatly there were tons of threads on their forums saying "I can't create a character on world X where my friend is playing! I paid $50 for this game, blah, blah blah".
Personally, I rarely see a queue, and I've been playing WoW for a year on the same server which has been "full" for some time. About the worst I see is about 30 minutes, and I simply alt-tab and read the news for a few or maybe do a quick chore around the house my wife had been nagging me to do
- Roach
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
You have a wife who lets you play games so much you're willing to wait 30 mins to get online?
DANG! That's nice.
Tom
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
Connect, start quest, pick up kids, battle boss and win quest, make supper, start new quest, put kids to bed, finish quest
hehehe
If they could make GTA:SA for the gameboy I'd be in heaven... screw these RPG games. Portable mayhem is where it's at.
Tom
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Buy enough servers that you can deliver the service you've sold. Don't sell it to n + 1 people if your servers can only take n people.
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2, Insightful)
First, your complaint (like most of them) seems to be based on an assumption that they are not working as hard as they can to improve things, and that they simply sit around all day sipping tea. I, personally, do not see this as
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
I'm not complaining, actually. I can't complain, since I'm not playing the game. I'm simply answering to your defense of Blizzard, which amounts to "it's hard to deliver what we've sold so give us a break". It doesn't matter how hard Blizzard is working on the pro
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
However, the dynamically-redistributing system you suggest would be extremely difficult to write and debug. The game would probably still be in beta. It also wouldn't be worthwhile, since after the server population passes a certain point, adding more people degrades the gameplay. It's no fun playing on a server where the mobs you need to kill are always dead already and there's high-level players of the opposite faction everywhere trying to gank yo
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And the alternative is ... ? (Score:2)
C) Get far more servers.
DEATH TO SHARDING (Score:2)
Ok, it looks all nice and spiffy and polished and runs excellent on most machines, blah blah blah, but still... the most clear-cut case ? Isometric sprites (Starcraft) when 3D rendered RTSs started popping up... eh.
EVE-ONLINE. They got the right idea. DEATH TO SHARDING.
Split the world in regions, hold different regions on different physical servers, or just have a freakin' supercomputer running the realm... but have
Re:DEATH TO SHARDING (Score:2)
Re:DEATH TO SHARDING (Score:2)
Queues? We don't need no stinking queues? (Score:2)
At peak hours, we just get "retreiving character list" for 20 minutes when we try to log on. Maybe we'ere queued and they just don't want to say it, or maybe it's just taking that long to get the character list. After we finally get the character list, we get the loading screen. The blue bar fills up... and we wait another 10-20 minutes.
Sometimes we get to play. Other times we get disconnected after the blue bar (perhaps our connect
Surprisingly, Guild Wars cheaper *and* better now (Score:2)
I cancelled my account after that two weeks and went back to Guild Wars. Why?
Guild Wars is great, but not a MMORG, no massive (Score:2)
Don't misunderstand, Guild War is a great game, but it is not a MMORG. There is no "massive", except in chat. Diablo II would be a more accurate match, not World of Warcraft.
Re:Guild Wars is great, but not a MMORG, no massiv (Score:2)
But, to each his own. My point was that WoW could easily use the same type of server system instead of rigidly forcing players to stay on a particular server forever with no abili
It is the weakness of MMO's (Score:2)
Yet that is what 'makes' most RPG's, you the Hero! saves the day, rescues the princess (or prince according to sex and/or preferrence) and slay the evil XXXXX.
But in an MMORPG you can't do that. In fact 99.99% of the time you are in a que of other people getting the same quest from the same NPC while another que is reporting that they completed the quest. Just how many blue stones does that merchan
Re:It is the weakness of MMO's (Score:2)
WoW has shown the world that a huge pile of cash is waiting for he that creates an MMO that is playable at launch. Now all that remains is for someone to make a real MMORPG.
In single player RPGs you can be a hero. In MMOGs no. Well that's not all true. Guilds have their "heroes", the decked out main tank, the badass DPS rogue, the awesome healer. But, it's nothing skill related.
No matter
Why is it obvious? (Score:2)
Not sure why it's obvious. Disney's Toontown does it this way, and as long as you can maintain a friend list and guildie list that is ABOVE the server level (aha, I have 3 friends on bloodscalp and 15 on eldre-thalas tonight), what's the problem?
Since the worlds are all identical (ie the Alliance/Horde ownership of Tarren mill doesn't change), what would be the problem. I know I would ALWAYS try to choose the l
With the money they are generating WHY (Score:2)
Re:With the money they are generating WHY (Score:2)
novel idea! (Score:2)
if you get logged in, just tap a key every now and then so you're not AFK
Re:novel idea! (Score:2)
OK, start at 7:00, go to the bathroom, eat a snack, etc, play by 7:30.
I simply don't play because of this... (Score:2)
Sometimes I want to, sometimes I don't. It helps that we have multiple machines at home. My wife likes the game way more than I do, and plays my high level priest on occasion. But anytime I've gotten kicked off and couldn't log in fast enough to avoid the queue, I just shut down and walk away. One of these days my wife is going to becom
Why new servers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people want to play on low-pop servers. These people don't have much of a problem. Some people want to play on high-pop servers. So they go start a character on a high-pop server, raising the population higher in doing so and drawing the queue up even farther. Several people want to play on medium-pop servers to get the best of both worlds, but you can only have so many people join a med-pop server before it become high-pop, and by that point the server's reputation gets to the point that even more people want to join in. Basically, population gain works exponentially - the bigger you are, the faster it gets worse.
More servers just isn't going to cut it, not unless you can convince people on larger servers to cull themselves into new servers with smaller populations. There are plenty of servers out there that don't have queue lines, but queues just aren't enough justification for people to reroll. Ideally, Blizzard would set limits on population to cut off before queues become a problem in the first place. But then you run the risk of pissing off people who want to play on the same server as their friend does. There is no justice in this matter.
Which MMORPG has the biggest world population? (Score:2)
Re:Which MMORPG has the biggest world population? (Score:2)
only one shard (+ a seperate 'test' server) and 24,000 people online at peak. Generally 10-13,000 when I play.
They've done it right, and there's really not enough love for this game. The majority of the world is player controled, and if the alliance you're part of loses their hold on terretory, the new owners WILL slaughter you and drive you out as well. It's an incredible amount of fun.
EVE Online (Score:2)
Players can give out unlimited free 2-week trials to other people too, so if anyone wants one, drop a note to ja!de@cris==tal @t gmail.com. (remove non-letter characters to get a valid address)
Re: (Score:2)
Shinanigans! (Score:2)
I also love this little nug
Depends on the server (Score:2)
Reading around a bit, I'm convinced that I'm on the the worst WOW server, Kel'Thuzad. Queue'Thuzad is almost always queued from 4pm-midnight, and at peak times the queue can reach 650-800. Lag'Thuzad has also been down for "emergency maintenence" more times than I can possibly remember.
The odd thing is, Kel'Thuzad was crap at first (like it is now), became decent 2-3 months after the game shipped, and then regressed now. The only explainat
No one can get online indeed (Score:2)
"If there's an absolutely excellent game, but no one can get online to play it, is it still excellent?"
Right, just because you have to wait in a queue to get in must mean that nobody can
Gamespot, Blizzard, and credibility (Score:4, Insightful)
So, uhm. I think I am uninclined to believe that Gamespot's either competent or reliable, and I don't think I trust them to fairly evaluate the situation.
Yeah, the queues are bad. Simplistic analysis of how much money Blizzard ought to have doesn't tell us what resources they really have. Furthermore, it's not obvious which of the many proposed "solutions" would work. More servers? Lag is a question of bandwidth, so more servers might not help. Let more people log in? More overloads and crashes. There are many possible options, but I'm not sure they'd help a whole lot. Furthermore, if the database servers are shared, it's pretty hard to grow database servers effectively; you can't just throw more hardware at it.
I dunno. I'm okay with things pretty much as is; ongoing attempts to optimize the back-end database may matter more. So maybe we should let the people who built WoW run it, rather than some people at gamespot who haven't done anything of the sort?
Re:Users' own servers? (Score:2)
Exactly, 50 dollars for the product or 50 dollars for the product at 180 per year... You decide what you'd rather do as a businessman.
And I can just imagine some of the people who would try to build their own servers to play WoW on. You think it's bad today? At least Blizzard has everything to lose. This motivates them to do better. I can imagine some of the RPGers out there who actua
Re:Users' own servers? (Score:2)
Has been done before with BattleNet, see http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/ [eff.org].
Blizzard killed that one through ligitation (and got itself on my personal boycott list).
Considering player-supplied suggestions for game features, I have played Neocron for a while and we had all sorts of suggestions. The quality scale ranged from unrealistic to well thought out and worthwile.
The company making Neocron d
Re:Users' own servers? (Score:3, Informative)
Phil Hibbs.
Re:Users' own servers? (Score:2)
Re:Unlucky! (Score:2)
It really sucks.
Re:You would think... (Score:2)
- RustyTaco
Re:You would think... (Score:2)
Re:How to handle something you don't like (Score:2)
Re:How to handle something you don't like (Score:2)
Re:How to handle something you don't like (Score:2)
I've been playing WoW on my Mac, but I'm getting bored with it now, and may cancel my account soon.
I doubt I'll go out of my way to find another MMORPG. These days, I find I enjoy the brief distraction of console games over the level grind of computer RPGs.
Re:Queues? (Score:2)
It sucks.
Re:Queues? (Score:2, Interesting)
At least during those queues, you can stay in line, but run around and quest/farm/auction/chat/etc. The issue here is the queues just to get ON the s
Re:Queues? (Score:2)
So they want you to pay to transfer your player to another server, so that you can play the game you're already paying for? Wow! Good luck to them if they can get away with that!
Re:queue madness (Score:2, Funny)
Re:queue madness (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, are you Alliance or Horde? I wonder if players get put into different queues depending on what faction they belong to.
Re:queue madness (Score:2)
They could weight it on how high a level your characters for each faction are and which character you've been playing lately, but I doubt they've put that much effort into it.
Re:queue madness (Score:2)
Re:queue madness (Score:2)
Re:queue madness (Score:2)
Re:queue madness (Score:2)
to increase the communication barriers between the factions and to promote the ongoing race war?