Project Lore

Magtheridon, my home server, has been off ever since the Lich King was released upon the masses.  Pings of 100-200ms (56k speeds) have become the norm.  Unplayable pings of 500ms and beyond plague prime time on Tuesday and Wednesday.  As the week moves on the server becomes more playable.  To little to late, as the damage is done to most guilds.  Including mine, which raids on Tuesdays and Wednesdays only. 

After a successful 25-man with my two 10-man guilds last Tuesday, this Tuesday's was an absolute disaster.  While forming the raid we realized that the pings were going all over the place, from tolerable to two seconds of lag.  We zoned in hoping that the instance cluster would be more stable.  It wasn't.  We cleared trash, but could not get past Marrowgar due to the sporadic latency.  After the raid dissolved a 10-man was formed to tackle Ignis, the new weekly quest.  Our assumption was that being outgeared would make up for any lag.  The quick demise of Flame Leviathan gave us hope.  False hope, we wiped.  Repeatedly.  Our failing was chalked up to lag and everyone logged in disgust.  Who knows if my rogue will get his weekly done now...

Click to read more ...

Earlier this month two new MMORPGs released, Global Agenda and Star Trek Online.  Both of them saw some hiccups early, and STO still has long queues, but things have settled down and stabilized for the most part.  Over five years ago World of Warcraft launched to a larger mess than either GA or STO.  It wasn't devastating by any means.  In fact, the problems were mostly due to the game's incredible popularity, which caused Blizzard to scramble to put dozens of additional servers online ASAP.  The subscription base has bloated over the 11 million mark forcing Blizzard to continue to add additional servers to the mix to compensate.  Fine and dandy, but what's been going on with the old servers.  The originals, the systems that were put together before the game was even released?  They've been upgraded, but has it been enough?

The past few weeks have been awful for the two servers I predominately play on.  Coincidentally, both server happen to be original.  Things have been so bad on Magtheridon this week that Tuesday and Wednesday were total loses for raiding.  Tuesday was marred by the extended maintenance, which is fine and understandable, but Magtheridon became Lagtheridon immediately after going online.  The entire world, instances and all, was totally unplayable.  A server restart didn't help, and I eventually gave up around 10:30 PM.  Wednesday followed with more of the same, but cleared up much earlier.  The damage had already been done, all the raiders gave up and logged before Magtheridon became stable, so nothing died.

I know my server is far from the only server to connect people to Azeroth, but from what I've heard around the blogosphere and official forums is that something is amidst.  Many people blame it on the new holiday and its mechanics.  Others point out that server instability is not a recent occurrence.

Whatever the reason, it seems that WoW players are giving Blizzard a pass on the issue.  That's partly because we've become somewhat accustom to the day-long hiccups.  I believe it's also because we play so much WoW that we can shrug off missing a day.  We just use the unexpected free time for other forms of entertainment or games.  It's old and busted to us now, not new hotness. 

Imagine if your brand new MMORPG was largely unplayable for two days just after its launch.  If WoW had released alongside STO and GA, that's exactly what would have occurred.  Can you imagine the nerd rage that would have hit the Internet? 

I know WoW's server farm is far more complex than STO or GA, but that doesn't give Blizzard a free pass.  After all, WoW is pulling in a billion dollars a year for Blizzard.  Yet, few players seem the least bit outraged.  I guess that's one of the advantages to having five years behind you?