No More Players for World of Warcraft - For Now 544
Chris writes "FileFront has broke the news from Blizzard that they are no longer placing their highly popular MMORPG on store shelves, due to the recent server problems reported by Slashdot on Tuesday. Denying rumors that they had asked several stores to pull the game from shelves, Blizzard rep Gil Shrif is quoted as saying: 'We're just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.' The online store on Blizzard's website shows the game to be out of stock. No word on whether or not this will affect the Korean release."
Too much Southpark? (Score:5, Informative)
As far as not affecting the Korean release, it won't. Korea will have its own servers. The MMO's in Korea are traditionally not released in boxes. They are downloaded for free and the players pay a greater fee per month. I believe the number was around USD$23/month in Korea compared to $15 in the US.
Re:Too much Southpark? (Score:5, Funny)
EA *IS* the hemorrhoid.
Re:Too much Southpark? (Score:2, Funny)
Not at all (Score:5, Informative)
However, they've been making strides in fixing the problem. There are still lines, but they are much shorter (minutes long instead of hours) and the servers seem to have stabilised. Ok, that's good, but not good enough. There need to be NO lines and the servers need to BE stable.
According to Bilzzard, it's all related to peak load on the servers, and is a fixable problem. So I agree with their decision: fix it, then resume sales. Don't sell more copies, make things worse, and lead to people leaving.
They aren't saying "you can't come and play here". they are like ar estraunt saying "I'm sorry, we are full and completely booked, you'll have to wait until later to come eat here."
I have no doubt they are eager to resume sales as soon as this problem is fixed. I'm betting it will be sooner rather than later. They claim it's a software bug on the DB servers causing them to freak when there are too many transactions, even though the hardware can handle it. I imagine if the hardware does turn out to be the limitation, they'll throw more hardware at it. Remember we are talking a $100 million revenue stream at the current subscriber level. It is in their intrests to spend money to maintain that, and allow it to grow even further.
Re:Not at all (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, his sig explains his situation.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Interesting)
Releasing the game in Korea may improve that stream, but unless they have plans for cafe usage... not by much.
Aside from all that, someone on Evil Avatar pointed out that WoW has ~85 servers, and FFXI has 33. WoW has all these problems, FFXI doesn't. Yet FFXI has 200,000 more subscribers, not limited to the US. The lag on FFXI is almost nonexistent, only rearing its ugly head when you enter an area with an obscene number of people.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Interesting)
WoW may also have twice the number of NPC characters, twice the number of quests, twice the spawn rate, twice...
I wouldn't be surprised if they had some inefficient code in there, too.
Re:Not at all (Score:2)
I bought WoW on release day, and had it running as soon as I got the game out of the box (having already had the beta client installed), and I've only had marginal issues due to picking lower population servers.
If you really want low server load, switch over to an RP server. The crowd can be a little kooky at times, but the smoother gameplay is easily worth it.
-9mm-
Re:Not at all (Score:3)
Please don't. If you don't want to actually Role Play your character (thus the RP server designation, the extended ruleset, the expectations of behavior, then please don't join an RP server.
If you can't chat in complete sentences, please don't join an RP server. It's not an environment for d00dz looking for ph@t l3wt. kthxbye.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I wholly support the parent's statements, and th
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Funny)
All your foes are belong to us.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Insightful)
I've only been playing the game off and on at my friend's house, but I've decided that I'm going to wait until at least midway through the semester, both for scholastic reasons and because I want it to be stable when I do decide to play.
But, to Blizzard's credit, they are doing this smart. This is their first foray into the MMORPG world, and they don't want what has happened to the others to happen to them: a launch disaster, leading to public embarassment and thousands of angry subscribers. If I remember
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Insightful)
It would if they continued with no real fix in sight ala Star Wars. But the logon queue were really only seen during the first week of launch, and they have already fixed some of the nasty crash bugs. All and all, the game is working smoothly for the majority. The major problem now is that popular servers are getting performance reboots. So much for unix stability under load.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Funny)
"all of my foes"
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Insightful)
But you can still get the game. (Score:2, Interesting)
Try eBay. I have one copy, and my fiance wanted to play. (It's a good way to get her to not complain that I am playing the game).
I read this post, went to eBay, and 15 minutes later I bid on and won a copy for $75.03. The guy emailed me the CD key, and I'm installing it now.
Yes, there have been server problems especially on Tichondrius (where I was playing). Switching to another lower population server is working well so far.
Seriously, if you want to play (and you should
bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
{melt}
Re:bad idea (Score:2)
Remeber diablo 2? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:2)
I love Wow. I actually have it alt-tabbed as I type this. I've also been fortunate to be on a server that rarely has any problems. However, I have friends who have experienced these issues, and they royally suck.
Imagine buying a CD, for example, and not being able to play it AT ALL for 2 days. Or having to wait for 500 other people to play the CD before you get to play it. Or, when it does work, having it frequently skip (even though it's new)
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, the horror.
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is my sarcasm heavy enough yet?
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, they have 88 servers. I mean, they were expecting success, sure. But they've sold more copies of the game in the last month than FFXI (as a random example I know the number for) has subscribers.
Besides, even if they believed WoW would be very successful, they can't just assume "Woohoo, my MMORPG entry into the already saturated market will be a wild success! I'm gonna take out a loan and buy $50 million worth of datacenter equipment to host 20,000 servers!" and many MMORPG businesses have been nearly if not entirely bankrupted in the recent past for taking that line of thinking. Blizzard was perhaps a little pessimistic in their expectations for World of Warcraft, I don't think I can blame them.
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if they targeted their loads for 1,000,000 users, with the average user playing 15 hours a week, and instead they've got 1,000,000 users with the average user playing 30 hours a week, you can imagine the problem.
I know I've playe
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:2)
Re:Remeber diablo 2? (Score:2)
Yeah, by suing people who provide alternative, better server software, for starters. Oh, but we're supposed to give them a free pass because WoW is the next EverCrack. Can't let things like ethics interfere with the drug supply!
Max
Remember Starcraft? Or Diablo? (Score:3, Insightful)
At the time these games came out, the only way blizzard offered a way to play on the internet with these games was battle.net. Kind of defeated the point of buying the game for multiplayer. Of course there was modem, whi
Server restriction... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Server restriction... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Server restriction... (Score:4, Informative)
"Also, we are currently analyzing the possibility of allowing users to move their character(s) to less populated servers. We do not have an estimated time of when we will be able to provide such a solution, but we would like to emphasize that we will try to provide this solution as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this, and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that your game experience in Azeroth is enjoyable, reliable, and fair."
This sounds like a step in the right direction to me, as since I finally made it through registration, have been having no problems playing on a low pop server.
Better than AC... (Score:4, Interesting)
I gave up (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I gave up (Score:2)
That's as long as the increase in stability seen over the last 36 hours continues.
Same here, after they charged me $70 for 6/months! (Score:2)
More Demand? Less (Score:5, Insightful)
There's probably ample discussion of this in economics, but it seems pretty clear that some shortage scenarios result in people 'panicking' (perhaps too strong of a term) and really really trying to get whatever it is that's in shortage; I'm guessing there are people out there now who are thinking "OMG, WoW is closed! I've got to see if I can find a copy somewhere near me because I might not be able to get it later!"
And then, at some point, at significant enough shortages, people just sort of give up and don't care anymore. I'm guessing vendors would love to optimize their shortages to fit between these two points.
(Case in point: I wanted an iPod Shuffle, and called the Apple store a bunch of times, waiting for a shipment; they finally got one, but all of the Shuffles went to people who had pre-ordered; they were no longer accepting pre-orders, and told me to check in Friday. At that point, I got tired of the whole ordeal and decided not to get a Shuffle, at least any time in the near future. Not that Apple's hurting).
Re:More Demand? Less (Score:2)
A couple of stores were charging $150 for the collectors edtion.
Im planning on starting WOW in april, since i dont have time at the moment, that should give them enough time to get everything working well.
Sounds like it's time for a war (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sounds like it's time for a war (Score:2, Funny)
That'll show 'em.
Re:Sounds like it's time for a war (Score:5, Funny)
Good plan. Once the players are dead, Blizzard can just delete their characters!
bandwidth or bugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bandwidth or bugs? (Score:5, Informative)
They don't specify, but I suspect by "backed DB server" they mean "IBM zSeries running Oracle" not "Dell Poweredge running MySQL". From the amount of data that goes on, and the fact that multiple actual game servers talk to one backend DB, I'm betting it's big iron from IBM, Sun or the like.
Well, if it does turn out they need more of that, you don't just get it overnight. Even with commodity PCs it still takes a couple days, usually a week, to get a system to you. For mini-mainframe class hardware, it's a lot longer. Then once you have it you have to get it configured and migrate over the parts of the DB it'll be handling and so on.
If all that happened in a week, I'd be amazed.
Personally I'm incluned to believe them that it's a software problem not a hardware one. Assuming they are using a major DB provider, and it would be almost unthinkable that they aren't, they'll get a fix. Again, however, you have to test and work on it. The last thing they want to do is roll out another fix that makes things worse.
That's what started this whole mess. They were upgrading their servers, hardware probably, to deal with lag. They had a big 16 hour downtime for this. They promised it'd fix all the lag. Well it didn't, and on top of that the game started bombing all the time.
They don't want a repeat so whatever the fix, I'm sure a little more testing will go in to it this time.
well (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a good chance it's Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), which is what EA uses for their backend gaming database. Oracle is a big pusher of Linux/Intel/AMD blades or 1U racks attached to shared storage.
Thou
Re:bandwidth or bugs? (Score:3, Informative)
As good as it is to make money (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As good as it is to make money (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it better be the WORST feeling for them. They can't even keep the servers up for the existing players to play.
Many will tell you that the servers were "down" from Thursday through Sunday regardless of whether or not the official status was "up." That's in addition to the 16 hours of scheduled downtime on Thursday.
The kicker? The 16 hour downtime to fix the problem actually made it even worse. That's when they introduced even more population caps without first informing the customers. Now players can sit in queues for anywhere between 1 to 3 hours...and if they're lucky enough to wait that long and log in, they may get 10 minutes of actual playtime before they get booted out of the game or lag out and forced to sit in the queue yet again.
This isn't just a problem for the high population servers, it's affecting even the low population servers. What does this mean? Nobody but Blizzard themselves can say with any certainty...but I'm willing to bet this has nothing to do with the popularity of the game and how many copies were sold. My guess is they have a poorly designed backend/database system that is simply broken and cannot be fixed even by throwing more hardware at the issue.
Re:As good as it is to make money (Score:2)
Gamer FUD (Score:3, Funny)
I'll show you a poorly designed backend. Ever heard of Rosie O'Donnell?
It's funny how much of an interest so-called customers suddenly take in the business interest of a MMORPG deale^H^H^H^H^Hprovider when they can't get their fi^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplay their game. The world won't end just because servers go offline, nor will the company go belly-up, be
Re:As good as it is to make money (Score:4, Funny)
It was a catastrophic success!
B.Net (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, players are still beta testing, but for 15$/month.
Re:B.Net (Score:2)
Name one computer software product that did not require some form of patch or update within one year of being released due to the discovery of bugs by users?
Has anyone updated bnetd yet? (Score:2)
I hope this sort of thing catches on! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a consultant, and I'm here to help you (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm a consultant, and I'm here to help you (Score:2)
Re:I'm a consultant, and I'm here to help you (Score:2, Insightful)
Real Trouble (Score:2, Funny)
Dear Blizzard (Score:2)
I work at an EA Games in Manhattan. We were told by management this morning to pull our copies of WoW from the shelves. Guess this is the reason.
Sad, really, that your system isn't scalable enough. Your loss!
Letter
Re:Dear Blizzard (Score:2)
Doesn't Blizzard Deserve Props? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, this could be a ploy just to drive up sales with rumors of a new player "blackout." But Blizzard is really well known for taking drastic actions to make sure their games are as good as possible. Is there any reason Blizzard should be bashed for this?
This will create a huge blackmarket for people selling their characters and accounts, though...
Re:Doesn't Blizzard Deserve Props? (Score:2)
They had one of the longest-running and largest beta-tests in MMORPG history. They have no excuse for not finding a scalability bug of this kind.
And their handling of the bug, in terms of how they've communicated with their userbase (including the typical 'overpromise/underachieve' statements) has been terrible.
For a company the size of Blizzard, it's a major screwup. They, of all people, should know better.
Re:Doesn't Blizzard Deserve Props? (Score:3, Insightful)
World Of Warcraft doesnt use UDP (Score:2, Interesting)
However here in the U.S, our network infrastructure is not so homogenous nor cutting edge in all places. There is a reason so many mmogs
Re:You are a moron. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok then, answer me this... why are the South Korean WoW servers not affected?
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp ? se archid=7415
And don't say its because everyone is playing Lineage... according to the above link, WoW is setting concurrency records over there. But then why aren't those servers suffering from the same fate as the U.S servers?
I submit its because of t
Re:World Of Warcraft doesnt use UDP (Score:3, Insightful)
- Reliability. Your data always arrives or the connection drops.
- In-order delivery. Regardless of network conditions, the data always arrives in the order that it was sent.
- Rate-limiting. Your data stream will be limited to a rate that the intervening network hardware can handle.
TCP provides and requires all three. Many interactive applications aren't real gung-ho on reliability. If you're sending ten position packets a second and one gets dropped, you don't care abou
Posted on the WoW forums by Blizzard (Score:5, Informative)
The overwhelming success of World of Warcraft has brought hundreds of thousands of people together to adventure in Azeroth, and concurrency numbers are well beyond what we expected or even hoped for. Unfortunately, this high concurrency, especially when concentrated on a small number of realms, initially caused issues with our hardware infrastructure. We were able to streamline our code to increase performance in the weeks following launch. However, the holiday season nearly doubled our player base, and it quickly became apparent that in order to handle not only the current player base, but all future players as well, we needed to make some upgrades to our infrastructure.
Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.
In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.
The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our players this weekend. This process coincides with our constant efforts to improve the current performance of World of Warcraft, and sometimes issues can arise when implementing these improvements. We will do our best to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, and we once again thank you for your patience and understanding.
And now for plan "B" (Score:2)
We don't need no steenking Korean release, we got bittorrent release!
Sold out everywhere (Score:2)
Supply and demand? WoW is going for almost double its retail cost on Ebay.
You can have my spot (Score:2)
I much prefer real-time shooters. I used to be very good at Jedi Academy online but I had to make myself quit because I played too much. I can't get that "addicted" feeling with MMORPG's, they're just not compelling enough to me.
The great benefit of World of Warcraft to me... (Score:2)
Ha, yeah it was hard to find a copy yesterday (Score:2)
WoW Already Launched in Korea (Score:3, Informative)
They were down several hours yesterday, but were back up again today. Game is very popular and seriously competeing with Lineage and Lineage II in time in the PC Baangs.
Bruce
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
I'm sure Blizzard knows what kind of press they get from PA and have a pretty good idea of their influence on gamers. However, in this case, the decision was made a long time ago and they're just announcing it to the public.
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
That's the software companies' fault for allowing downtime in the first place. If they'd keep their servers up, the gamers would have no time to visit a website.
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:3, Insightful)
Penny Arcade has been incredibly influential in the past, especially when running the "Child's Play" drive, but this particular time they were with the curve, not leading it.
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
Just a hunch.
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
It can be deemed influential if it is the opinion of the poster that it's influential.
Just because you don't think so (and probably a majority of the world....) doesn't change anyone else's opinion in the slightest.
OK, so I'm bored in a training class, so I'll stop feeding the trolls.
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
In gaming circles, that makes it influential.
Re:The Power of Penny Arcade (Score:2)
Big Numbers (Score:2)
Re:Big Numbers (Score:2)
Re:Come back! EQ forgives you! (Score:2)
now. They weren't always.
Re:Come back! EQ forgives you! (Score:5, Funny)
If I might make an analogy,
A: "Hmm. The amusement park is closed."
B: "Let's go and break broken bottles in this deserted, garbage strewn alleyway! It's filthy and no fun, but it's always open!"
Re:Come back! EQ forgives you! (Score:2)
I loved EQ, but even I didn't live in a fantasy world about it!
Re:Actions not words (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been playing from day one (and a few months before that -- in demo) and let me just offer you my subjective experience. As soon as the problems surfaced on a number of Western servers, Blizzard suggested players to spread out without regard to the time zones, and they promised that the choice of a server in a different time zone will not affect the performance. I did just that, (moved to Sargeras, in central time) and did not experience any significant outages ever since. Little annoyances are abound -
Re:Actions not words (Score:2)
Re:Money == server stability? (Score:2)
Verant (Score:2)
Verant Interactive is in bad financial shape.
That would lead me to believe that:
a) a portion of the money goes to Verant Interactive
b) Verant may have pushed the release a little earlier then they should have.
Noooo, Vivendi! (Score:2)
Blizzard is with Vivendi. EA also now owns a stake in all of this, just to make things even murkier.
Re:Money == server stability? (Score:2)
Re:Money == server stability? (Score:2)
Re:Money == server stability? (Score:3, Interesting)
With the lack of instances for such large areas as WoW does, does mean that people are all on the same physical server and why they are needing to upgrade the hardware.
In the older days of MMORPG(3-4 years ago) 3000 was the magical number passed around as the max number of people that could be logged on at
Re:Korean release unaffected... (Score:2)
Tinfoil hat alert!!! (Score:2)
They are owned by the same company.
I like me.
Re:Bittorrent? (Score:3, Insightful)
But something like BitTorrent would be completely useless to try and address the issues that World of Warcraft is suffering now, which have less to do with bandwidth and more to do with some problem with their database software or the hardware it's running on. The latency, etc. isn't bad at all.