Blizzard Talks About WoW Stability and Service 100
Via 1up, information from Producer Shane Dabiri on the future of the World of Warcraft service. He offers up details on the new server setups, new server sites, and the much-anticipated character transfer service. From the article: "Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player's will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag. We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented, so we'll share further details as soon as more information becomes available. "
Talk about stability (Score:2, Insightful)
They should upgrade their forum servers first and then if this works out, think about upgrading the game servers and doing al those nifty things they're talking about.
Translation of server transfer (Score:3, Insightful)
It could mean that Blizzard is expecting a rather massive drop in player numbers and may need to reduce the number of servers. They will transfer characters to other servers at random and then need that feature to let people get back together with their guildmates. Of course, it needs not be Free Beer, but that's probably just my paranoia speaking.
Here's what will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard will disallow Horde Players on A to leave. Horde members get more grumpy, being outnumbered AND unable to leave. Blizzard will encourage Horders from other servers to move to server A to "balance" things.
Horde member on server C, suffering the same fate, sees the opportunity and jumps over to server A. Only to realize that he traded purgatory for hell. He gets grumpy and with a sigh decides to drop his old char.
Moves back to server A and makes an Alliance character...
Re:I love WoW players. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no WoW player, but...
Shocking, I know.
Demonizing Blizzard (Score:5, Insightful)
People are really willing to demonize Blizzard for things like server performance. Lots of claims about how I would just fix the code, or how I would buy more servers, or how I would do this or that.
The fact of the matter is that Blizzard is running one of the single largest scale applications in the world period. Their database requirements are way more than anyone reading Slashdot (who doesn't also work for Blizzard or Google) has ever had any experience with.
No matter how much experience you think you have, all the rules change when you cross certain thresholds, and even if you're a really good enterprise architect, unless you have a single data-drive heavily-transactional application with many millions of users, and many billions of records, you don't know what they're going through.
No matter how sinister you might think Blizzard is, they're still a for-profit company (actually, the more sinister you think Blizzard is, the more this applies). For-profit companies don't do things (like be lax about fixing their network problems) if they can help it, since they do lose customers for that sort of thing, and that obviously directly correlates to lost income.
I guarantee that there's tremendous pressure from on top to fix these issues, and if they're not fixed yet, then it's because your php website that supports 20 SIMULTANEOUS users(!!!) was a little easier to fix.
Consider things like common complaints, "Why don't they just throw more hardware at it," maybe their data centers have consumed their floor space, air conditioning capacity, or available power supply. They have 5 independant data centers in the U.S., and each data center can support up to 40 realms. That means, yes, data centers have limited capacity, and if you're full, you have no option to put another server in without begining to risk bringing the entire data center down. You can add more capacity when you physically enlarge the building, buy bigger air conditioners, and also get the power company to run bigger power lines, each of which can take many months to complete.
Not all things are easily fixed with brute force, and people's jobs are on the line here guaranteed, the guys who are in charge of this stuff are more interested in it working than you, since you can turn your computer off and go outside; they can't just ignore their jobs.
Re:Demonizing Blizzard (Score:2, Insightful)
But seriously, I'm not one to tell them how to fix the problem - true, but I do know things have not gotten better in the last year, they've tumbled worse. And when it comes down to it, they don't pay me to fix their computers, or even understand them. I pay them for a service they aren't delivering. That's the most aggrevating thing a company can do. It would be different if Blizzard would own up and institute a policy of "server's down, free day for all associated accounts". Which they do do sometimes. But not all the time, it's very inconsistent.