http://articles.filefront.com/No_More_Players_for_World_of_Warcraft/;340;;;/article.html

Hmm.. looks like things aren't going so great atm, hopefully they can fix that soon.

I don't really understand why sites have waited to start reporting on this till now. People have know about this for months, its old news. :confused:

For the most part, the only servers that are having trouble are the ones where people insisted on trying to cram 5x the supported population onto them. Kinda like going to the most popular club in town and then complaining you can't sit down. The rest of us aren't having any trouble at all.

Exactly. I still haven't noticed downtime, except when I try to log on and realize they're doing scheduled maintenance. I'd honestly rather suffer a lot worse for this game, than play EQ2.

I think they are doing fine considering the fact that they have twice the number of subscribers then originally expected.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/ (http://www.penny-arcade.com/)


Blizzard Interview

Mon, January 24 2005 - 4:35 AM
by: Tycho

I mentioned last week that we sent a fairly terse set of questions over to Blizzard. They're a lot more direct than developers are used to receiving. The crazy thing is, the answers we got back were a lot more direct than the interviews out there usually receive. Funny, that.

Without further ado:

1. You say that you sold six hundred thousand units. Is the game not capable of supporting this many users?

The short answer is "The game is capable of supporting this many players," but it would probably be helpful to provide some background information. Based on our market analysis, we made some initial calculations about the size of the massively multiplayer online games market in the United States. We then accounted for new customers to the genre based on our previous games. Looking over this data, we did believe that there was the potential for an extremely sizable interest in a Blizzard MMOG. According to our research, other successful MMOGs in the U.S. had achieved roughly 300,000 subscribers after 12 months of operation. What ended up happening with World of Warcraft is that we achieved double these numbers in approximately the first six weeks of launch. We absolutely can support the number of copies we put on shelves, but we believed it would take us longer to get to this number in terms of players purchasing the game and logging on.

We had not anticipated this amount of growth in such a short time; however, we did have a backup plan that was deployed rapidly. In the first week of launch, we more than doubled our number of game servers and server infrastructure to accommodate the demand. The fact that we had planned to grow the service over the first 12 months of operation was evident, as we had server hardware waiting to be deployed. We just anticipated that this server rollout would be gradual. Copies of the game were being purchased at a much faster rate than anticipated, so we had to abandon our slower-paced plan and go into rapid deployment to accommodate these additional customers. This meant we also had to advance our timetable for additional server purchases.

With such a rapid growth of the network, we started to see several bottlenecks in the infrastructure that exposed themselves very quickly when the expanded hardware immediately took on massive load. These bottlenecks were solvable, but they required additional upgrades to the backend systems to accommodate the load—which, again, we hadn’t planned to see, even with the extreme estimates, until later in the year. Regardless, server stability has remained our number-one priority, and so we acquired and deployed even more equipment as part of the process of addressing these issues. All of this new hardware also required additional software and operating system upgrades on the backend. The problems that some players on the 20 or so most populated servers (out of the current total of 88 servers) have been experiencing are related to some of the upgrades not functioning as desired. We are working diligently with our vendors and internal technical staff to get as quick of a resolution to the problems as possible, and we believe there should be noticeable improvements soon. When our community team commented that people are working 24/7, they weren't exaggerating.

2. If it's true that the server problems are related to the overwhelming number of players, why was no effort made to better distribute players evenly across realms, or allow players and guilds to transfer to less populated servers?

We actually did have a number of checks in place at launch to distribute players as evenly as possible across realms. When a new account logged in, the game would ask what realm rule set and time zone the player preferred, and then it would suggest the realm with the lowest population that matched the selected preferences. That said, we're definitely working on resolving the overpopulation problems that ended up occurring on some realms despite our preventative measures. A realm-transfer option that would allow players to move from their high-population realm to one with a low population is one of the things we’re investigating. We’re exploring this option fully and hope to be able to communicate more detailed information about it to our customers in the coming weeks.

3. Currently, large scale player raids involving large groups of players experience a huge amount of latency. How do you plan to compensate for this in your upcoming PvP Battlegrounds feature?

The player raids often have hundreds of people per side in one area; that area is on a server that is also running the rest of the continent, and that can result in the latency you describe—depending, as well, on the total population of that server. We’re continuing to look into the issues surrounding this dip in performance. Battlegrounds, on the other hand, will run on the instance server, so there should be no such issues. Additionally, players will be unable to "zerg" in Battlegrounds; there will be a limit to the number of players per side.

4. What accounts for the frequent "emergency" maintenance downtime? What issues are you attempting to resolve?

The emergency maintenance periods are to restore stability while we continue to narrow down the cause of the problems. Some of them are also to deploy temporary fixes to various in-game systems while we continue to develop a longer term, more stable solution. World of Warcraft delivers many complex features that are unique to MMOGs. Features such as the in-game mail system, auction houses, player inventories, flight paths, quest states, etc. use a lot of server bandwidth, which makes pinpointing problems on the server infrastructure much more complicated.

Recently, the extended emergency downtime for a certain number of realms was needed in order to better accommodate our growing player base. Some of the upgrades that we planned for all of the realms were made to these realms first, as they are among the most populated and thus most in need of aid. We set the realms up on the latest top-of-the-line hardware and made the software upgrades accordingly, but some unforeseen issues cropped up with the database that resulted in the problems players currently see. This is no fun for our player base, of course, and we don't want to keep the realms running in a condition that frustrates our customers when we can attempt to fix things . So, these downtimes have been used to change hardware and apply fixes that will hopefully alleviate the issues. We have not yet resolved the problems, but we're working on this around the clock.

5. What issues are you experiencing with your login/authentication servers? It is often the case for myself and the people I play with that we cannot access realms our friends are already logged into.

These types of issues stem from the problems described above. Conflicts occur between some of the internal applications running in the background, and the end result can take the form of temporary login issues. We're working to resolve these conflicts so that they are no longer a factor.

6. When do you expect to have the worst of these problems resolved?

We’ll be constantly working on these issues each day moving forward until they’re resolved, but we don't currently have a set date for when that will be. We're doing all we can to make sure these problems no longer occur -- it's our top priority, and we hope to have the issues fixed as soon as possible. We’ll continue to provide players with regular updates on our progress.

7. Will the European launch utilize the same realms, or will these players be hosted on all new equipment? If they are hosted on new servers, what have you done to ensure that the launch will be free of the problems mentioned above?

They will be on their own set of hardware, as with our Korean release. Our teams are learning from the experience of our North American launch and are applying that knowledge to the servers in Europe. We hope to provide them with a smooth launch.

8. What would you have done differently?

It would be easy to speculate about what we could have done differently, but that wouldn’t turn back the clock. Right now we’re extremely focused on the issues at hand, and this focus is helping us methodically chase down the problems that are causing frustration for some of our players. The foundation of our company is based on providing a top-notch game experience and an equally top-notch level of customer satisfaction; we won’t be happy until we feel we’re consistently meeting those standards.

Nice informations in this interview, just 2 things that make me ponder :
3. Currently, large scale player raids involving large groups of players experience a huge amount of latency. How do you plan to compensate for this in your upcoming PvP Battlegrounds feature?

The player raids often have hundreds of people per side in one area; that area is on a server that is also running the rest of the continent, and that can result in the latency you describe—depending, as well, on the total population of that server. We’re continuing to look into the issues surrounding this dip in performance. Battlegrounds, on the other hand, will run on the instance server, so there should be no such issues. Additionally, players will be unable to "zerg" in Battlegrounds; there will be a limit to the number of players per side.
They didn't imagine that town raids would be more than two groups attacking and two defending? Weird.
6. When do you expect to have the worst of these problems resolved?

We’ll be constantly working on these issues each day moving forward until they’re resolved, but we don't currently have a set date for when that will be. We're doing all we can to make sure these problems no longer occur -- it's our top priority, and we hope to have the issues fixed as soon as possible. We’ll continue to provide players with regular updates on our progress.
As I understand that it's a "hard" task to resolve all issues about server capabilities, and so on, this is quite an unacceptable answer. At least not in my work, marketing would laugh at me if I told them "I'm fixing this when I can", especially if it's a little emergency.
"We'll continue to provide players with regular updates on our progress." No update yet means no progress yet? ;)

All in all, good to see this business answering questions, even if soaked in PR crap (I loved the "hundreds of players at the same town "can" result latency", can, no shit), now I'm waiting if lesson will be learnt, and what will happen at Euro start.
/cross fingers

I think they are limiting bandwith per server as a way to offset some of the more popular servers, or playing with hardware.

My guild on Kargath have crashed the server 3 times now. Taking 35 people to raid Alliance towns

35 people on the same boat = crash server
35 people zone into the same instance at the same time = 6 min lag for entire server

Twice now we have had a GM come and ask us to leave the area becasue "the server can't handle the load."

Blizzard have always been known for high quality games why did they so underestimate the load on the hardware. Hell in their beta they had 50k spots and had 200k people sign up. Doesn't really take a genius to figure your initial sign up will be more than 150k.

Beelziod

Blizzard have always been known for high quality games why did they so underestimate the load on the hardware. Hell in their beta they had 50k spots and had 200k people sign up. Doesn't really take a genius to figure your initial sign up will be more than 150k.


blizzard did the same exact thing with diablo2 and Bnet, first few weeks of the games release it was almost impossible to start a game on bnet and from then on it started getting better and better

If you remember WAY back in EQ they had the same problems. Log in jammed / Server side lag, Boats dissapearing etc. Atleast in WoW you dont have the 4 min Zone in Lag.

They will get it fixed but it wont be for a couple months. It will help it greatly when they allow for server tranfers.

If people didnt all flock to 4 or 5 servers like seagulls to a garbage scow they wouldnt be having problems. I am playing on Elune and have yet to see a queue and have had very very few problems overall.

there were queues on elune every night for 4 nights straight when i tried to log onto elune, this was when they tried to put in their plan to get people to play on east coast servers

since i'm not direly hooked on WoW, i wasn't bitching about it, queues are only a problem on a few certain servers, and alot of them are PVP

If you remember WAY back in EQ they had the same problems. Log in jammed / Server side lag, Boats dissapearing etc. Atleast in WoW you dont have the 4 min Zone in Lag.

oh yea, VI decided to put the choke right at the login screen too, preventing alot of people from even moving to different servers, WoW's release is happening alot like EQ's, none of this was unsuspected and you'd be a fool to believe blizzard would be able to do it any better