World of Warcraft Server Problems 116
vjmurphy writes "Connectivity to the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft servers and web site appears to have had some difficulties over the past week. Their hosting is provided by AT&T." That includes my raid's dying twice in MC due to 4000 latency, and also a soft reset of MC. Good work, AT&T.
Makes a news item in Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
P.
Possible cause.... SBC/ATT merger? (Score:3, Interesting)
Refunds? (Score:1, Interesting)
DDoS Attacks, Perhaps? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's New? (Score:3, Interesting)
If we could see inside Blizzard I think we'd find a company that knows how to make good games, but one that doesn't have a good record at making good management decisions on how to run them.
There's little point in me going into great detail about the many mistakes and poor decisions they've made, but I can say that if they were a financial institution we wouldn't be discussing this. Finance seems to have this understanding that time is money. Somehow Blizzard hasn't quite caught on that 5.5 million subscribers might eventually go away, especially if they get frustrated enough with the downtime/lag. Sure, there's not much place for those gamers to go, but this may not be true in 1-3 years.
Re:Suck it up (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, it's a game, and sure the rewards appear to be entirely virtual and owned by Blizzard. However, this is not completely the case. While it is just a game, millions of people are putting a lot of effort into it. The rewards they reap aren't just items, reputation, and experience. They are also getting personal satisfaction and developing relationships with distant friends and guildies. The amount of effort put into this game by an average player still deserves respect. When their efforts result in nothing, it would be akin to working at a real job and your employer suddenly saying they won't pay you for your last 6 or 8 hours of work. I'd rather be kicked in the jimmy. >_> <_<
To think about the argument from the other side of the street, what would you say if your job decided to heap three times your normal workload on you and not give you any extra compensation? It's only a job, right? You only do it for 8.. 10... maybe even 12 hours a day, and in the end you still get paid, right? You've still got the rest of the day to do what you need to or want to. Why should you be upset? (Before you start answering with reasons to be upset, realize that this specific argument is designed to be fallacy.)
Inevitably, someone will argue that a job gives real rewards (money) as opposed to programming code that is technically not owned by the player, but I would argue we need personal satisfaction and relationships at least as much as we need money or we stop being human.
DDoS possible (Score:3, Interesting)
I mention it because perhaps something similar is going on here. The servers are getting destabilized and forced to restart. And you can use a server restart(and the small rollback that usually hits because of it) to dupe items or gold(this works, I've seen it done).
In the end its just a random collection of rumors that fits the facts. So take with whatever amount of seasoning you need.
Sounds like nothing has changed... (Score:3, Interesting)
No shit Sherlock. (Score:1, Interesting)
We used to be able to call BBNPlanet and an engineer would pick up the phone and their service was so good that they even fixed a connection problem for us that was our fault by connecting into our router directly and doing the dirty work, and doing the whole thing with a smile! The day we switch to AT&T I was lucky to even get somebody on the phone that spoke English, and this started to become a fairly common experience because their network was so bad that we were disconnected frequently and always had poor bandwidth.
Bottom line, AT&T's network sucks, it as always sucked, and until they actually start to give a shit about their customers it will continue to suck.
Re:DDoS possible (Score:2, Interesting)
I should have been more clear in my first post.
There is most definately an exploit involving the Dire Maul instance that is causing the increased lag. Of the dozens of players in Dire Maul--only a few are causing the server lag. They tend to be easily identifiable by their names and lack of guild tag. i.e. the chinese farming brigade.
Regular players aren't causing the lag. On our server there are 5 to 6 of the farmers on the Horde side and double that number on the Alliance side. Our server runs lag free until these 10-15 players connect--then wham! Lagcity until they disconnect.
What they are doing to cause the problems I don't know, just that rthe exploit seems to involve Dire Maul, Hunters, and produces lots of Traverler's Knapsacks, Major Health Potions, Major Mana Potions, and Ace of Warlords. (probably more stuff I haven't noticed.)