On World of Warcraft's Network Issues 407
alphaneutrino writes to mention a C|Net article discussing some of the recent problems the World of Warcraft playerbase has experienced. From the article: "'Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center,' said Evgeny Krevets, a sometimes-frustrated WoW player. 'I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job.' Blizzard blames some of the problems--such as the disconnection, for several hours on Friday, of players linked to several servers--on AT&T, its network provider. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.) "
A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:5, Informative)
Monday: *gasp*, playable (until 11pm)
Tuesday: Weekly Maintenance Day. Nothing else EVER needs to be said about this day.
Wednesday: Playable (until 11pm), good chance maintenance aftermath.
Thursday: The 10 second instant-casts day for MC & BWL.
Yeah, it goes on. Our server reliably bites the dust around 11pm every night for 6 hours, not to mention the constant plague of login issues and 30-minute loading screens during peak hours. Funny how this is all on a low-medium population server.
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:2)
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:2, Funny)
I'm waiting for my man
Twenty-six dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington, 125
Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive
I'm waiting for my man
Hey, geek boy, what you doin' online?
Hey, geek boy, you hackin' our servers with third party addons?
Oh pardon me sir, it's the furthest from my mind
I'm just lookin' for a dear, dear friend of mine
I'm waiting for my man
Here he comes, he's all dressed in black
PR department and a big EULA [worldofwarcraft.com]
He's never early, he's always late
First thing you learn is you alw
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A typical week on Mal'Ganis (Score:4, Funny)
They BROKE a continent? I hope it was still under warranty...
Ahhh.... (Score:3, Funny)
$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:2, Insightful)
And _why_ are there any problems whatsoever?
Blizzard, I can guarantee this: if you spend $35 million per month on refactoring, hardware and bandwidth, all your problems go away. Guaranteed. I promise.
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:3, Funny)
They need multiple sites around the world, with multiple OC192s to multiple providers, all BGP'd to the gills. They need to buy dark fiber and light that shit up.
Then again, why bother, it's not like it's a free market out there and there won't be any competitors to WoW that can get their act together, right? I mean Blizzard owns the patents on M
Well, no, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:3, Insightful)
They've had nine months. They should be having a baby every month now.
Downtime is either being caused by poor design, hardware/software limitations, or bandwidth limitations.
These are not things that are unknown, or uncontrollable.
If this project is too complex to get a firm handle on the problems, and the work force can't be scaled to meet the demands, then your only avenue for relief is to scale back the complexity.
Otherwise you'r
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really think that they are currently depending on a bunch of hacks that are coding in Visual Basic and their entire network knowledge consis
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:2)
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:3)
that sums up my impressions after playing wow for 9 months or so since its release last november (2004 not 2005). the network setup(s) theyve had just do not work for the load the game has generated. i think that short stress test semi-open beta they had (right before release) was cut short a few months too early. but hey, they had to trump eq2 right? whats funny is soe still got the jump on blizzard
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:4, Insightful)
But, then again, I may also be an idiot... who knows?
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
1) You need a SLA with each ISP you pull backbone level feed from. You can use InterNAP and hook into the peering points in the US and a few other places, but it's got it's own issues- and if you just use them, you're still with only one ISP; if they fail, you're still up a creek without a paddle.
2) You'd need to frame the servers into one massive data center with a HUGE honking data-pipe from each ISP with BGP routing on the inbound routers from the ISPs to your DMZ to establish one IP address range for the front-facing servers
OR
Come up with some sort of nasty DNS trick to hopefully make the server front-ends transparent to the clients and spread them across multiple IP blocks (Which is what epicRealm did to make their CDN actually completely transparent to client and customer- and to be able to handle dynamic HTTP content...)- but be prepared, because in order for this to work right, you either need to trust the client's state, share state across server pools on different IP blocks, be stateless, or somesuch like the previous.
There's a bunch more, but those above two and the first item will hopefully show you why someone (a bean counter, most likely...) will make the decision to just simply hold the ISP or Tier-1 host (Which is the most likely case here- they're very probably colocated at an AT&T Tier-1 facility...) to the SLA they promised- because it's cheaper and waaay simpler if everything goes right and they're "not to blame" if things go wrong. If you went an alternate route and had a mishap that wasn't server related, then you'd be to blame and have nobody to point fingers at when it all broke (And you just KNOW it will at some point- it always does...
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:3, Insightful)
ANY company that makes a significant portion of its money from internet sales should have multiple providers for EVERY public-facing server. I'm not saying that every machine should have multiple NICs, but they should have their servers connected to beefy network equipment that can switch all traffic to working providers the moment one provider has problems.
In this case, they can even control the protocol and contents of the packets, so they can't even blame protocol limits f
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:2, Interesting)
remember each region pays a different rate.
AND most importantly, Vivendi Universal gets a MASSIVE cut of this figure. Why? Because they footed the bill for Blizzard to finish the game during the last few years of development and as part of that agreement they dictated they get a tremendous amount of the subscription revenue (upwards of 70%, I've heard.)
So then it becomes a question of, who actually is responsible to maintain the servers? Blizzard of
Re:$15/mo times six million users.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes they are making money (businesses are allowed to do this, remember?) Re-architecting a massively distributed game like this takes time *and* money. They underbuilt their infrastructure to begin with, which is where they really went wrong. They are supposedly trying to remedy that, but by the time you have re-architected the system it has grown to the point where you have to do it again.
Also, they're pulling so much bandwidth from so many disparate places that when a link close to them goes down, all the other links have to compensate and there's not necessarily enough fat pipes close to their datacenters to allow everyone on. I would be curious to see what percentage of traffic flowing over certain core routers can be attributed to World of Warcraft; I am betting it is non-trivial.
Are they a victim of their own success? (Score:2)
Then again, they're getting $15 a month from 6 million people, you'd think throwing some money at the problem could help, but it's never that simple.
8 hours? Coincidence? (Score:5, Funny)
Or are they too cool to be running the servers out of their parents' basements like the rest of us?
Last heard from the WoW datacenter... (Score:5, Funny)
wow (Score:2)
Seriously, if the game goes down for a few hours, you can do other things. What about cleaning your apartment? i bet it needs it.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Server preformance varies from realm to realm. I hadn't really had any issues until the last week or two when my server decided to drop 40 minutes into our 45 minute baron run, and then again in the BG's later on.
As someone else mentioned, I think they are still a victim of their own success. Sure it's been over a year since launch, but they were expecting 250,000 subscribers and got 6,000,000.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The controlling factor for their server performance should not be the total number of subscribers, but the number of subscribers per realm, and Blizzard has complete control over that number, because they can mark a realm as "full" and disallow logins/signups. IOW, as you know, those 6,000,000 people are not all playing in the same game at the same time.
It should be possible to make the realms completely independent, so that this just becomes a matter of horizontal scaling, and having hardware/systems monkeys roll out new realms via some standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately, based on the rumors I have heard, Blizzard has chosen to tie a bunch of stuff together. For instance, the common web forums use the characters from all the realms (the web forums know about your level 23 mage), they have a single set of auth servers, it's not clear that the item databases are not shared between realms, and so on. This is sort of sad, because it's not like Blizzard are the first people to roll out an MMORPG.
Now, some might argue that tying some of this stuff together makes for a better user experience. However, when this entanglement leads to downtimes, one could make the argument that it's not worth it.
Anyway, my point is not to bash on Blizzard; I'm sure they've made some difficult design decisions correctly, and some difficult ones incorrectly. My point is that "we have lots of users" is not a good excuse when you have a service that lets you divide those users into sub-populations, and that there are probably architectural improvements they could make to improve their scalability. The real question is whether they have competent and experienced systems engineers to help them make those improvements, and whether management is committed to supporting them.
Anyway, so much for pre-coffee ramblings....
Re:wow (Score:2)
Actually, that's a little off. I read they estimated about 1-2 million subscribers the first year. Unfortunately, they got 1 million in the first month or so.
Part of the issue is just a basic fact: no one has ever had an online app on this scale before. Web sites have far more visitors but the content gets downloaded in drips and drabs. In Wow, millions of players are ALL connected at the SAME time f
Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Then Blizzard should not have distributed 6 million copies of the game. They've brought this upon themselves. Open beta consisted of a very small user base (relative to what it is now). So the kind of resource pressures they face now were never realistically tested pre-release. So really, the first (and it seems, current) adop
Re:wow (Score:2)
Why, though? If they scheduled all day, and were up after an hour, fine, because it means when something goes horribly wrong with an update, they've scheduled the time to fix it. What I don't see is why patches take so long, or why they need to have weekly maintenance.
Anyone?
Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)
It's funny what people get used to. In the original EQ, patches were just a few hours in the morning, one day a week, unless something went wrong (which generally didn't happen, despite what the boards say).
In Horizons, another MMORPG, database lag was so bad that you could pick up an item and not see it in inventory for 10 minutes. You could run through an area full of monsters and not see one by the time you were through, because
Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)
You're doing it wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference is that Blizzard sees itself as already having it's customer's money. Therefore, there's no reason to spend any more for service. Your boss needs the network up just to make money.
Re:You're doing it wrong (Score:2)
As a corellary, imagine how much they would have to spend to ensure 99.9% uptime? It would get exponentially more costly as you tacked more 9s on the end of that decimal, in a similar fashion.
AT&T have a right to provide poor service to W (Score:3, Funny)
wow @ WoW... (Score:2, Informative)
Guildwars (Score:2, Interesting)
Network and other WoW performance issues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Network and other WoW performance issues (Score:4, Funny)
"But why do we need two providers? ATT has assured me that they can provide all the bandwidth we need, and that they have failover capability! *plus* their datacenters are built on SPRINGS!"
Monthly fee (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, I still can't believe how easily people took to paying monthly subscription fees to play games that already cost $60 and, without paying the fee, are completely useless. It's kinda like giving cold, hard cash to a charity. You have no idea where that money is going, and you sure as hell can't trust Blizzard's PR department to give you the whole truth.
I stand fast in my asserti
Re:Monthly fee (Score:2)
You don't pay to go to the movies? Or for cable TV? Or for any form of mindless entertainment out there?
Re:Monthly fee (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but my cable TV doesn't go out for 8 hours every other night.
Re:Monthly fee (Score:2)
Re:Monthly fee (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think it's a good thing to charge a monthly fee, that way even folks who don't understand the concept of opportunity cost won't be blissfully unaware that playing games all day is never "free". The really annoying thing for me is that most of these games require you to, basically, work (in the game).
E.g. in WoW at some point you'll want to collect a set of gear from Molten Core. Each class has eight pieces of "tier 1 set gear" which can be obtained from Molten Core (we'll ignore the other stuff you can get there). It takes 40 people to clear Molten Core, you can only do it once per week, and you get about 20 pieces of set gear from one trip. Do the math and, optimistically, you'll need to do Molten Core 16 times to equip each of those forty people (of course, it will actually take much longer -- say six months -- to get most of the people most of their pieces).
Now, every visit to Molten Core -- once you figure out how to do it -- is pretty much the same. So after your first few nightmarish two-three evening death-a-thons, you'll eventually be able to "do" MC (as it's known) in maybe three hours. So we're talking at absolute minimum 48h solid gameplay, much of it mindless repetition. (You know how to do everything, you're just waiting for your helmet to "drop".)
But that's not all. At least until you all become very well equipped, Molten Core takes a toll on your equipment and consumables (e.g. potions and ammunition). To stock up on victuals and repair your gear, you'll probably need to spend another couple of hours prep time for each "adventure". So, we're now talking, at absolute minimum, 80h of solid grind to get a complete suit of "tier 1" gear. Again, all of this is mindless repetition.
Now Molten Core is just one instance. I don't know how long it took to assemble it, but I suspect it would take a team of developers fewer person hours to put something like Molten Core together than it will take a typical guild to finish collecting set armor. Of course, they had to attend meetings and so on, so multiply that by ten, but what you're looking at is the fundamental flaw in all current MMORPGs
Re:Monthly fee (Score:3, Insightful)
The interesting thing is that with an MMO like WoW (not just WoW, there are others similar) you actually get quite a bit of content in the lower levels. You then run into this brick wall. It really starts with the tier 0 sets in the level 55-60 dungeons. You get to spend a couple hours for an 8% chance for an item th
Code patches? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could it be that WoW suffers constant attempts at subverting the framework of play
Re:Code patches? (Score:2)
2. DB compaction - the back end of these games is a large trans
Re:Code patches? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Code patches? (Score:2)
They need to be listed as a Service. (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as their continuing stability and growth issues.
STOP SELLING THE DAMN GAME.
Sheesh, how hard is that to understand? If you cannot provide a stable set of servers and servers where people can play WHENEVER they want to then stop selling new copies until otherwise.
Hopefully with the number of
Re:They need to be listed as a Service. (Score:2)
That is, except for the problems they have with their own ISP. What does it take to get good service from an ISP nowadays?
Re:They need to be listed as a Service. (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:5, Interesting)
Our game had its server problems and we were in "learning mode" to deal with some major outages, major gameplay renovations, major strife from jerks, and major socio-legal issues behind the scenes such as player-to-player harassment and real-life stalking. EA/Origin's Ultima Online started later and had some of the same issues in an almost predictable order and timing. Then EverQuest repeated our mistakes, and so on.
I would think that as an industry, as a set of geeks, we MMORPG server managers would learn from each others' mistakes, but apparently, we do not. It is also a problem in that the management in *product* companies think it is easy to become a world-class *service* company, where the service is being sold to thousands to millions of *household* mass market customers.
Re:Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:5, Interesting)
However, Blizzard has really dragged their feet when it comes to fixing things. The article makes it sound like this is a recent phenomenom for WoW, but it has been around since the game was first released.
Granted, they didn't anticipate quite the initial subscription numbers they got, but within weeks we saw login queues show up, and Blizzard hastily added more servers. In fact, I do believe the more servers they added happened to be all that they had originally contracted for, and they used up that "growth servers" room right away. Now they have maxed their server capacity with their ISP, and they were sorta screwed at that point. Not that they couldn't have thrown money at the issue, but this is a game company owned by a media company. Throw money at the problem? Bwahahahaha
Heck, I was on one of the original "terrible 20" servers; Uther. It was down so much it was scary. I think I ended up with more than 2 weeks of free play time for service outtages, and probably closer to a full month.
Also, this whole thing about "a patch caused a new set of problems" is also not new for Blizzard and WoW. Every patch they did for the first several months would break half the server lag fixes they put in. Loot lag was so bad you could be stuck for more than a minute looting a corpse. From launch to when I quit playing 9 months later, they still had the problem of ore nodes and/or harvest nodes that would lock your toon up because it had nothing on it but failed to clear. I suspect that bug is still in place, but I don't care anymore. After a while, things got better, but as the queues came back, so did the content breaking patches, and the wife and I got out. Heck, we were 60, and bored.
What is different is that most of these game companies have had their act together after 1 year, give or take a few months. It's been what, about 16 months since WoW was first released? They should really have their act together about now, or damn close to it. But they don't.
Re:Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps this problem is symptomatic of their lethargy in getting their syst
Re:Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:2)
It is also a problem in that the management in *product* companies think it is easy to become a world-class *service* company, where the service is being sold to thousands to millions of *household* mass market customers.
The cable company seems to do fairly well at this job. Ser
Re:Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:2)
I can build a solution for a single person, and I can scale it up to work for 10 or maybe 100 people. After that, I have to start looking at reworking my initial architecture. Blizzard probably prepared for, seriously, an order of magnitude fewer players than they have right now; based on past trends in this marketspace, that would have been reasonable.
At a cert
Re:Nothing new for MMORPGs (Score:2)
Square Enix & PlayOnline recently debuted XBox 360 service for the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI, with the new expansion pack Treasures of Aht Urghan. Prior to the 360 release there was an extended open beta for those users. They had a similar miscalculation - they didn't expect as many users as they got. Nonetheless, the worst problem they had with the server? It finally hit a physical limit for characters on the server (each "server," or "world," is a cluster of servers) and SE/POL were forced to delete ina
O.o (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason they're having so much trouble is because the integration with the AT&T to government monitoring station upgrades are taking too long.
AT&T: Keeping terrorists off WoW!
More Crafty (Score:5, Insightful)
And that AT&T is exploiting them, marketing a new "premium service/support" contract by letting them go down.
I can't wait until WoW has to pay AT&T (and its handful of competitors, if they get rid of the SPF) the extra "premium tier" routing fees, once the telcos market their "nonneutral" Internet. Because a world of angry Warcraft players jonesing for their fix will be a nice gift for telco suits just trying to make it home from work.
NSA Agents Hot on the Trail of Horde Terrorists (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Service Providers In General (Score:2)
account (with another company I might add) as a backup. Just in case.
And those cases have so far happened 6 times this year.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Service Providers In General (Score:2)
"Well, then, I'd like to cancel my account."
"Excuse me? Why do you want to cancel?"
"There wouldn't be any difference between service when I pay you, and service when I don't pay you, so I might as well not pay you."
One of the reasons why companies get so smug about not giving good service, is that the consumers are so willing to bend over and take it from behind. Vote with your dollars.
Re:Service Providers In General (Score:2)
we're expected to endure countless menu selections, long delays in call-centre queues and lengthy outages as a matter of course.
I agree on the outages. However, the call-center thing is a matter of simple math. At $30 a month - let's be generous and let the phone company's margin be 20%, that's $6 a month in profit. If you keep one call-center agent busy on the phone for 15 minutes, that's about $3-$4 in salary plus overhead - oops, there go
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Where it really shows (Score:4, Informative)
My guild is doing MC BWL, ZG and AQ20 right now. It is a regular occurence right now to wait 20 minutes to start a fight because of disconnected people, only to then lose that battle because you lost two priests to a disconnect during it.
The anger may not be at the threshold point yet Blizzard, but it most definitely building fast. The thing about angry customers is that there is a point of no return when they are forever lost. Blizzard has a lot of customers right now, but they would lose them fast if somebody else stepped up with a great game and more reliable game play.
Blizzard, you executed very very well on game content by effectively removing much of the grind that other games are plagued with, but you have failed with customer interaction. Some of your representatives treat your customers with borderline contempt (Tseric) and you fail miserably at explaining properly the multitude of changes you make to the game.
Blizzard, your six million customers are waiting; it's your move, take too much time and you could lose them. Start with being public about your server improvement plans, telling people what you're doing and why and how its going to make things better. Not knowing when things are going to get better is really making people angry.
System Administrative Failure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:System Administrative Failure (Score:2)
Particle & Nuclear Physics are probably fair comparisons. Massive amounts of data and processing required. Processing typically being done on very large grid clusters and supercomputers(same thing?).
From the Wikipedia on CERN [wikipedia.org]
This accelerator will g
Re:System Administrative Failure (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously, one of their biggest failings is communication and there is no excuse for that. It's cheap and easy and would at least keep people hopeful that their lost gaming time is being spent in the pursuit of greater future stability.
My account expired yesterday... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it is tough for Blizzard, but as a customer I have been the one paying the price for that so far, from now on that cost is Blizzards again. At least for the time being.
Ill communication (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, a little timely information goes a long way. Yes, I agree that the downtime they have is absurd; consider that *every Tuesday* the game goes offline for *six hours* of maintenance. That's *planned, scheduled* downtime, folks, so that *alone* means they aren't even attempting to have greater than 96.4% uptime, and I can't think of another commercial service for which you pay a monthly fee where that would be even remotely acceptable; if your cable or your phone just plain didn't work for 6 hours every Tuesday, heads would roll. Then things just get asinine when you factor in all the spontaneous, freewheeling, unplanned downtime as well.
But know what? I'd feel a lot better about it if, when something shits the bed, or goes tits-up, or whatever colorful metaphor you'd use to describe a server-killing technical problem, Blizzard would tell us, promptly, as they receive the information themselves:
1. We know there's a problem.
2. We know what the proglem is.
3. Here's what we're doing to fix it.
4. Here's when we expect it to be fixed.
5. Update as old information is obsolete.
They don't do this. A few hours after something happens, you might get some of the above information. Or you might not. Usually, it's the latter.
Re:Ill communication (Score:2)
Maybe that's because cable and especially phone (911 !) is a little more important than a friggin' online game?
If you hate it so much, last I checked there were a lot of alternatives on the market.
Disclaimer: I don't play WoW. I play one of the alternatives.
Re:Ill communication (Score:3, Informative)
It's awful. I'm not even sure why they called it D&D, 'cause it's not. Let's just break down some of the problems.
1st: Leveling is ridiculously slow. In actual D&D, you hit second level after 1000 xp. In Stormreach, it's 10,000xp. Then the discrepancy just grows. To offset this, they give you, basically, minilevels every 20% of the way through each one of your real levels. At each minilevel, you get an action poi
Its all a matter of money (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but the difference with WoW is the money. When eBay, Amazon.com, and E*Trade have outages they are losing money. When WoW has an outage they don't lose a dime. Only thing they lose is the 1 or 2 players who get frustrated and abandon all the 'work' they put into their characters and cancel their accounts. Blizzard
thank you AT&T! (Score:5, Funny)
Tech Support Staff Bother Me More (Score:2, Informative)
Same Ole Blizzard (Score:2)
This is the SAME Blizzard who couldn't manage the hacks / cheats / dupes / cross-realm bugged items in Diablo II. Sure, Diablo II was a free to play on Battle.net so you get what you pay for, but the mismanagment of the realms / game are now showing through on a service that ISN'T FREE.
Friends of mine are trying to get me to play WoW, and I refuse. I will _never_ buy or play another Blizzard
Well, duh! (Score:2)
I think that's the number one reason to halt all this illegal wiretapping!
Oh, and maybe the 4th amendment - it seems we're having time-out issues with that as well.
Same problem in Germany (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the reasons why I left (Score:2)
There was a stretch of damn near a month after Christmas where there were queues on all the listed servers save for a single handful. I was so frustrated with waiting through a 1000 person queue on the couple month old server I'd moved to that I went through the entire list checking on whether they had queues. I believe there were three servers that didn't have a queue.
Even after we'd get in, either Kalim
Another thing about their datacenters (Score:2, Informative)
Why I Quit (Score:2)
Find a new game (Score:2)
http://www.mmorpg.com/cov_trial.cfm?fp=1920,1200,1 145983133843,20060425123853 [mmorpg.com]
I tried WoW, but I'd rather fly (or leap, or superspeed) than walk or take a slow horse. And I'd rather fight and run missions than spend endless hours craftgrinding. And I like playing with my friends and being able to even when we're
Translated (Score:4, Funny)
6 million subscribers != 6 million players (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It seems... (Score:2, Funny)
The above poster needs to learn to become tough like valient AOL users did, and who were also the tip of the spear that tamed the net for WoW players to come a decade later.
Re:It seems... (Score:2, Offtopic)
AOL vital? Email and stock tickers through AOL vital! Now, I do believe I've heard everything! It's one thing to celebrate the Mom and Pop ISP's that filled the dialup service needs for millions of people, but celebrating AOL users as valiant is comparable to celebrating underarm bacteria for helping drive home the hygeine issue.
I only WISH the AOL users back in the 90's were at the tip of the spear! A awl pike actually.
Re:It seems... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It seems... (Score:2, Flamebait)
I wonder why you bother talking to us, you're way too cool to hang with nerds like us.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I love about patches and hotfixes... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What I love about patches and hotfixes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Real code is complex, and generally written as a massive matrix of inter-related side-effects causing things to happen*. When it gets written, the entire matrix is designed, intended, documented, and understood. Two years later the guys working on the code have no clue about the matrix of side-effect driven code, no clue about the complex set of business factors driving the technical aspects of the code (and by business factors, in a MMORPG I mean things like class X has bad faction with everybody making it more difficult for him to start out, but in return for overcoming that challenge has more powerful magic later in life - stuff like that) and when they are making a change they go in, find the one line of code that looks like what needs to be fixed and just change it without knowing all the places that change will ripple back to, invisibly, via the side-effect matrix.
A technical phrase to understand here is 'globally scoped variables' - and another one is 'design intent' - and as the current set of hacks don't understand the ramifications or scope of either, this is what happens.
Footnotes
* I didn't say it was a good idea. I just said it happens.
Re:Quit the game about three weeks ago... (Score:2)