On World of Warcraft's Network Issues 407
alphaneutrino writes to mention a C|Net article discussing some of the recent problems the World of Warcraft playerbase has experienced. From the article: "'Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center,' said Evgeny Krevets, a sometimes-frustrated WoW player. 'I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job.' Blizzard blames some of the problems--such as the disconnection, for several hours on Friday, of players linked to several servers--on AT&T, its network provider. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.) "
You're doing it wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference is that Blizzard sees itself as already having it's customer's money. Therefore, there's no reason to spend any more for service. Your boss needs the network up just to make money.
Guildwars (Score:2, Interesting)
Monthly fee (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, I still can't believe how easily people took to paying monthly subscription fees to play games that already cost $60 and, without paying the fee, are completely useless. It's kinda like giving cold, hard cash to a charity. You have no idea where that money is going, and you sure as hell can't trust Blizzard's PR department to give you the whole truth.
I stand fast in my assertion that I will not pay a monthly subscription to play any game except under one of two circumstances: 1) the game must have an equally fun single player mode (and it better be damn good), or 2) the game itself is free, and the monthly subscription is the only cost.
Call me anal, but it's bad enough when I pissed half my college years away playing Diablo II online for free. I don't see the point in having to pay for the privilege to waste my time.
Code patches? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could it be that WoW suffers constant attempts at subverting the framework of play
They need to be listed as a Service. (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as their continuing stability and growth issues.
STOP SELLING THE DAMN GAME.
Sheesh, how hard is that to understand? If you cannot provide a stable set of servers and servers where people can play WHENEVER they want to then stop selling new copies until otherwise.
Hopefully with the number of professionals playing the game one of them will get annoyed enough to sue them in court, either to force a change by ruling or just having their named dragged into the mud.
Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:5, Interesting)
Our game had its server problems and we were in "learning mode" to deal with some major outages, major gameplay renovations, major strife from jerks, and major socio-legal issues behind the scenes such as player-to-player harassment and real-life stalking. EA/Origin's Ultima Online started later and had some of the same issues in an almost predictable order and timing. Then EverQuest repeated our mistakes, and so on.
I would think that as an industry, as a set of geeks, we MMORPG server managers would learn from each others' mistakes, but apparently, we do not. It is also a problem in that the management in *product* companies think it is easy to become a world-class *service* company, where the service is being sold to thousands to millions of *household* mass market customers.
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:2, Interesting)
remember each region pays a different rate.
AND most importantly, Vivendi Universal gets a MASSIVE cut of this figure. Why? Because they footed the bill for Blizzard to finish the game during the last few years of development and as part of that agreement they dictated they get a tremendous amount of the subscription revenue (upwards of 70%, I've heard.)
So then it becomes a question of, who actually is responsible to maintain the servers? Blizzard of VU? Also remember, that's not all going to be spent on WoW. Blizzard has other games in development (Starcraft 2, Starcraft MMO, Diablo 3, WoW Expansion). These people need to be paid something. Not everyone is happy to work purely for recognition. Some of us have these things called bills that we have to pay every once in a while.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:5, Interesting)
However, Blizzard has really dragged their feet when it comes to fixing things. The article makes it sound like this is a recent phenomenom for WoW, but it has been around since the game was first released.
Granted, they didn't anticipate quite the initial subscription numbers they got, but within weeks we saw login queues show up, and Blizzard hastily added more servers. In fact, I do believe the more servers they added happened to be all that they had originally contracted for, and they used up that "growth servers" room right away. Now they have maxed their server capacity with their ISP, and they were sorta screwed at that point. Not that they couldn't have thrown money at the issue, but this is a game company owned by a media company. Throw money at the problem? Bwahahahaha
Heck, I was on one of the original "terrible 20" servers; Uther. It was down so much it was scary. I think I ended up with more than 2 weeks of free play time for service outtages, and probably closer to a full month.
Also, this whole thing about "a patch caused a new set of problems" is also not new for Blizzard and WoW. Every patch they did for the first several months would break half the server lag fixes they put in. Loot lag was so bad you could be stuck for more than a minute looting a corpse. From launch to when I quit playing 9 months later, they still had the problem of ore nodes and/or harvest nodes that would lock your toon up because it had nothing on it but failed to clear. I suspect that bug is still in place, but I don't care anymore. After a while, things got better, but as the queues came back, so did the content breaking patches, and the wife and I got out. Heck, we were 60, and bored.
What is different is that most of these game companies have had their act together after 1 year, give or take a few months. It's been what, about 16 months since WoW was first released? They should really have their act together about now, or damn close to it. But they don't.
Re:What I love about patches and hotfixes... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes they are making money (businesses are allowed to do this, remember?) Re-architecting a massively distributed game like this takes time *and* money. They underbuilt their infrastructure to begin with, which is where they really went wrong. They are supposedly trying to remedy that, but by the time you have re-architected the system it has grown to the point where you have to do it again.
Also, they're pulling so much bandwidth from so many disparate places that when a link close to them goes down, all the other links have to compensate and there's not necessarily enough fat pipes close to their datacenters to allow everyone on. I would be curious to see what percentage of traffic flowing over certain core routers can be attributed to World of Warcraft; I am betting it is non-trivial.
It's Entertainment People... (Score:2, Interesting)
It strikes me as odd that we constantly compare MMOGs to other games or services regardless of the validity of the comparison.
MMOGs are Entertainment. There are very few other services that one may purchase for "only" $15 per month that will provide the volume and quality (yes, quality) of entertainment that a MMOG will.
One night at the movies - easily $20 for ~2 hours. A night out drinking/dancing >$40? for 4 hours? Any concert >$40 for a few hours. A date? (I know this is /. just trust me, they are expensive).
My point is that it's not a waste of time. It's entertainment. We choose to play them. We choose not to watch TV. MMOGs are actually social behavior (we chat and make friends). If you play MMOGs instead of watching cable/direcTV/TiVo you are paying considerably less per month and interacting with more people while you are doing it.
I consider myself a casual gamer (maybe an hour or two every-other day, more on the weekends) and per-hour I pay about 20 cents/hour to play WoW. If I was hard-core, it would be considerably less.
Relax, and let the silent majority have their fun.
-A
Re:Monthly fee (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think it's a good thing to charge a monthly fee, that way even folks who don't understand the concept of opportunity cost won't be blissfully unaware that playing games all day is never "free". The really annoying thing for me is that most of these games require you to, basically, work (in the game).
E.g. in WoW at some point you'll want to collect a set of gear from Molten Core. Each class has eight pieces of "tier 1 set gear" which can be obtained from Molten Core (we'll ignore the other stuff you can get there). It takes 40 people to clear Molten Core, you can only do it once per week, and you get about 20 pieces of set gear from one trip. Do the math and, optimistically, you'll need to do Molten Core 16 times to equip each of those forty people (of course, it will actually take much longer -- say six months -- to get most of the people most of their pieces).
Now, every visit to Molten Core -- once you figure out how to do it -- is pretty much the same. So after your first few nightmarish two-three evening death-a-thons, you'll eventually be able to "do" MC (as it's known) in maybe three hours. So we're talking at absolute minimum 48h solid gameplay, much of it mindless repetition. (You know how to do everything, you're just waiting for your helmet to "drop".)
But that's not all. At least until you all become very well equipped, Molten Core takes a toll on your equipment and consumables (e.g. potions and ammunition). To stock up on victuals and repair your gear, you'll probably need to spend another couple of hours prep time for each "adventure". So, we're now talking, at absolute minimum, 80h of solid grind to get a complete suit of "tier 1" gear. Again, all of this is mindless repetition.
Now Molten Core is just one instance. I don't know how long it took to assemble it, but I suspect it would take a team of developers fewer person hours to put something like Molten Core together than it will take a typical guild to finish collecting set armor. Of course, they had to attend meetings and so on, so multiply that by ten, but what you're looking at is the fundamental flaw in all current MMORPGs
my theory: blizzard asking for it (Score:2, Interesting)
Being aware of these limitations, Blizzard should have known better. On my webpage criticizing World of Warcraft, http://www.redrival.com/hateown/ [redrival.com] I postulated that Blizzard's design team is to blame for network instability. In a graph on that website I've shown my view of Blizzard's design team constantly increasing massive interaction throughout their worlds. I suspect this is the sole reason why they are unable to cope with volume of customers. As more and more people fight a single super-monster, the networking takes a beating. If the monster hits someone in a particular dungeon (aka instance), aside from the obvious the server has to:
- cycle through 40 players to see if anyone else got hit by splash damage
- notify each of the 40 players that someone or more people got hit
furthermore, when a single player whacks at the monster with their sword (or what have you), the server has to notify every other client about it.
In their design, Blizzard made use of a synchronized clock "aka tick" that is used for synchronizing actions. Good thinking, but it has a breaking point. I believe they are now reaching that point by causing more and more and more players to "chunk". Now, they are dumping the task of making everything better on network admins and scapegoating network issues as opposed to content design issues. It is too late now to take back multiple instances added through patches.
See website for more complaints or to add your 2c:
http://www.redrival.com/hateown/ [redrival.com]