World of Warcraft AQ Gates Open! 433
Tayman writes "Wow...who didn't see this one coming? The players on the World of Warcraft Medivh server opened the gates to AQ. What happened next? The server crashed repeatedly. Why create content the servers can't handle?
The very first time I read about this patch, I knew the servers would crash. The more people who open the gates, the more angry customers Blizzard will have in my opinion. With 5million+ subscribers, you would think Blizzard would have the best servers/connection money can buy. Although, I'm sure it's more complicated than simply plugging in a few ram chips and faster processors though.
Most of the people involved in the raid are having a great time though. Could this be the most epic battle ever introduced to the mmorpg market? All signs point to yes. Let's see how long the mobs will respawn. Hopefully, the people of the Medivh server haven't seen anything yet.
Either way, I would hate to be a network admin for Blizzard atm. ^_^
Here are some pics of the event. Thanks go out to all of those who took these pics.
World of Warcraft AQ Pics Check out MMORPG Veteran to keep up with the events as they unfold." Update: 01/23 13:44 GMT by Z : Additionally, brandor wrote in with a link to some video of the event.
Very nice of you to tell us (Score:4, Insightful)
An expansion? Just a new dungeon? What's so special about it that it causes such server overload?
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:3)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Informative)
Almost all major dungeons have a two letter abbreviation related to their name. Some have three. One is named for its boss instead of its name because that would ocnflict - DM is Dire Maul, and VC is Deadmines (VC for Van Cleef, the boss).
Short list of other major dungeons, in case they are referenced in this article:
(PS I don't know what the Hordies use for their faction-only instances. Sorry. <3)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:4, Informative)
Stockades (no abbrev.)
Sunken Temple (ST)...I forget the real name of this place, but it's what everyone calls it.
Wailing Caverns (WC)
Blackrock Depths (BRD)
Other abbreviations I've seen used (Score:3, Informative)
Uldaman - uld or ulda
Maraudon - mara
Wailing Caverns - WC
Ragefire Chasm - RFC (horde only...and personally I find RFC/RFD/RFK to be confusing sometimes, but that's the names people use)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:3, Informative)
I've also seen Gnomeregan shortened to just Gnome, and Maraudon to Mara.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, no. AQ is in Silithus. You're thinking of Tristfal Glades. And I don't think the Scarlet Crusaders would take kindly to you insulting their home.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:2)
P.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Informative)
I think. I was pretty confident that I knew what was going on until I read that terrible, terrible article summary. The reason the submitter brought up server stability is that players from all the 100+ servers started creating characters on the "Medivh" server in order to watch the in-game event that opens the dungeon, because Medivh finished the quest before all the other servers. Blizzard suspended new character creation on the server though, so I'm not sure if stability is still an issue or not.
Just Wondering.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just Wondering.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Interesting)
As a level 43 undead rogue on Darkspear this is not entirely correct. Even if we can't raid the new dungeons yet contributing to the war effort is fruitful in the way of items and reputation. Every time you turn in items you receive tokens you can turn in for reputation as well as a chest which has random items in it.
Turning in 20 wool bandages that I made from wool dropping off of mobs netted me 25 gold when that chest had a blue (rare) mace in it that I was able to sell on the auction house.
The AQ is very difficult to get. (Score:2, Funny)
And, of course, an AQ dispenser.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Informative)
Players have constantly complained that the WoW game world is static - there is no way for players to change anything in the game world: all the mobs respawn, dungeons reset, etc.
Blizzard's solution to this was to make AQ accessible only after a one-time server-wide event. The much-anticipated secret event ended up being players on each server having to turn in huge amounts of stuff (800,000 linen bandages, 20,000 wolf steaks, etc...) as well as one player doing a TON of grinding to get some hammer or another (in effect, the most efficient way to do this being to have an entire faction choose one player to help - cue politics and drama). After all these exciting preparations were completed (Medivh being the first such server, apparently) the gates to AQ finally opened, and... it looks like players are still waiting to find out what happens next.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, with the opening of the gates, many new cenarion circle centered quests become avaliable. Most are in the form of 'get x number of these items' or 'kill x number of these beasts', but most can be done solo or in small groups. Each gets progressivly more difficult and do end in epic items. I did not play on the test server, but apparently virtually all of them can be done in a 5 man group.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:5, Funny)
NPC: "Hey kids! Give us 8 million linen bandages and 476,000 crisp basilisk urethras!"
Player: "Won't that be terribly boring? And completely useless for actually advancing my character?"
NPC: "You don't understand! This is for... the War Effort! You asked Blizzard for more content, right?"
Player: "Soooo.... Content means turning everyone on the server into farmers? For worthless items?"
NPC: "Shut up, kid. This is an epic adventure. This is what you're paying for."
Player: "Okay, okay. Even if it's not very useful, it won't be so bad to have all these resources stored up for when we want to storm this new dungeon.... "
NPC: "Wait, what? You mean you thought you'd ever see any of that again? We're pretty much burying those bandages and urethras out in the desert."
Player: "Sigh. I guess this is what you have to deal with if you want to see the high-end content. Or even if you don't, really."
NPC: "That's the spirit! And look, the dungeon just opened! You can find it past the--"
Disconnected from server.
Re:Very nice of you to tell us (Score:3, Funny)
Girlfriends
School Assignments
Work Projects
War (except that the **poof** part is the desired outcome)
Aq is Antarctica ... ? (Score:2)
Finally! (Score:2, Funny)
A million addicts cry out at once! (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously though, this game looks like loads of fun but everyone I know that plays it has a total life-consuming addiction with it.
I'll climb onboard once it's free and less addicting than heroin.
--
Washington DC Metro? Fairfax Underground! [fairfaxunderground.com]
Re:A million addicts cry out at once! (Score:2)
I've tried them both.
You're better off with the heroin
Re:A million addicts cry out at once! (Score:2, Funny)
Best not to think about it really, and have a nice relaxing smoke of crack.
Re:A million addicts cry out at once! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem I have with your logic -- or anyone that heavily criticizes people for spending too much time on any one activity -- is the assumption that if they did other activities, they would inherently have more value.
I know people that spend hours a day, pretty much all of their leisure time, watching sports on TV. Is that really any better or worse than playing WoW for an equivalent amount of time? I don't think so (especially given that ESPN costs more).
I'm willing to bet that most people who are on WoW, if Blizzard went under tomorrow, would find something equally useless to do in their spare time. This idea that people who play games are all going take up triathlon training or feed the homeless in their spare time, if games weren't available, is dumb. In all likelihood they'd just watch TV.
I'm not arguing that too much of anything can't really mess up your life -- when people stop going to class or work to play games (or watch TV, or whatever), it's a real problem. However I'm not sure that games are much worse in this regard than any of several "time wasters" that I can think of, it's just that you don't hear about the other ones.
Re:A million addicts cry out at once! (Score:3, Insightful)
I just have to say that:
1. I was an EQ addict
2. I replaced my TV time with Game time...
Now I dont play EQ anymore, but I have returned to TV..
What was better?
This is exactly my point. I think the answer to your question of 'which is better' is "whatever works for you." As long as it doesn't keep you from going to work/class/school, and doesn't damage your health, that is. I think computer games get a bad rep, when they're really no better or worse than spending an equivale
sounds cool... I think (Score:5, Funny)
Don't.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could have been getting good grades, chasing chicks, and figuring out what the "#$# to do with my life. I seriously messed up all three. Instead, I just had the coolest equipment in some worthless game. A couple people I know failed out of school entirely because of these games.
You can do better.
Re:Don't.... (Score:2)
Exactly the same here, except my MUD online time was about one and a half _years_ (real time).
I allow myself to play Puzzle Pirates, but WoW would immediately mean losing my job and all the life I built up after MUDs.
Re:Don't.... (Score:4, Funny)
He eventually did flunk out. He was a nice guy; just picked a bad direction in life.
BTW, for all you young pups out there, a "terminal cluster" is a room full of dumb text terminals attached to a single computer, like our VAX. We only had Windows/386 AND WE LIKED IT! I'm going to go soak my teeth now...
Speaking of regrets, I could have spent all my time writing Windows 3.0/3.1/95/NT programs, and gotten rich, instead of wasting my time on UNIX. Oh, well.
Re:Don't.... (Score:5, Funny)
Had you spent the 1400 hours chasing chicks, what do you think you might have had to show for it? Other than VD or a seriously brused ego?
Re:Don't.... (Score:3, Funny)
At the very least, stronger ab muscles, and probably some really nice photos and videos.
Re:Don't.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:sounds cool... I think (Score:2)
Re:sounds cool... I think (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sounds cool... I think (Score:2)
Re:(OT) Re:sounds cool... I think (Score:5, Interesting)
Next came Luclin, which was more or less the worst: 2 very high end zones (Ssra Temple and Vex Thal, the latter being only available after a very long, time consuming quest, and requiring to beat the boss of Ssra temple), heaps of monsters with mountains of hit points and very few shortcuts (some of the boss monsters in Vex Thal used to take more than an hour each to beat, from the time you started hitting on it to the fall of the monster), in fact Vex Thal itself was usually done in 2 to 3 days (6-10 hours raid each day)
Then came Planes of Power, which saw much less "huge-ass HPs" mobs, but more event-driven things... that in the end took about as long, and it had 10 times the number of boss mobs Luclin had. Not only that, but even the short events were a pain (a single error and you'd have been preparing for 3 hours for nothing, thank you drive through, come back next week... and i'm not joking here), most of them were buggy and unreliable at first, the top tier guilds spend a year "debugging" the various scripts before being allowed to reach the final zone of the expansion.
I got done playing soon after my guild beat PoTime (disc: I wasn't in a top tier guild, so that was in mid-2004) because it was just taking too much time, and wasn't fun anymore (to me), but I'm pretty sure the high end hasn't changed much (may be slightly funnier, but it's no less time consuming)
When I stopped playing, I had a /play of 160 days over about 4 years I think (160 days as in 160*24h with the character logged in the game), I know some people who had been averaging that kind of /played every year since the release of EQ (had a guildmate with 500 days of /play)...
There, you have it, that is EQ's insanity. And we even liked it.
Re:(OT) Re:sounds cool... I think (Score:2)
Why does (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why does (Score:5, Funny)
Mozilla: View->Page style->No style
MSIE: File->Exit
guh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:guh? (Score:5, Funny)
"What happened next? The server crashed repeatedly. Why create content the servers can't handle? The very first time I read about this patch, I knew the servers would crash."
The mental image this creates for me is of some brain-damaged ex-geek -- their mind finally snapped from too much Bawlz and sleep deprivation -- safely locked up in a rubber room somewhere, gibbering spastically to themselves. They're having a delightful conversation, too bad they're the only one there.
I don't normally criticize Slashdot articles, because I figure that getting the information out is more important than spelling, grammar, or not sounding like a dyslexic fifth-grader. However this one was just so egregiously bad, I couldn't resist; it goes after some misguided sense of style at the expense of being informative, and that's just not good.
Glad I play City of Heroes... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh well, at least I have a good time RPing and writing [rpcongress.com] in it...
Worst idea ever in a mmorpg more like it. (Score:5, Informative)
I just wanted to say 1 thing as a wow player.
1. To create content that not only is unplayable for the people that participate in it (how many times did medivh crash yesterday?) but also makes the game unplayable for us not participating in it really is very very crappy. Yesterday I had 172 mins wait in a queue before I could log on only to find the lag made the game unplayable and then all crashed and I gave up. It has been like this since christmas (more or less) and it really is unacceptable for a game 1 year old. I know that this was the last drop for me and will make me look for another game.
Re:Worst idea ever in a mmorpg more like it. (Score:2)
-WS
Re:Worst idea ever in a mmorpg more like it. (Score:2)
-Eric
Great concept, bad implementation (Score:4, Interesting)
EVE had a great concept, but it was too full of bugs and no real endgame other than mindless mining and farming NPCs in 0.0 space. There was supposed to be this rich commerce market, but the truth was that the commerce market crashed almost instantly with oversupply, and the only people who could make profit were those that controlled the rare Tech 2 blueprints. The problem is that CCP made it too easy for one player organization to control the T2 market. (Yes, I know that organization happened to be MY corporation. I disliked what happened nearly as much as the little guys that got stepped on, partly because I did spend 1-2 months as the "little guy".)
I got tired of the game, and while I loved Xanadu, the game mechanics caused us to fight internally way too often. I wound up leaving the game before it destroyed friendships. Unfortunately, not everyone was so smart - I don't recall the details but Xan tore itself in half a month or two later. I wasn't surprised.
I play Dark Age of Camelot now, which has a much simpler concept (bad in some ways) but a much more well thought out endgame (very good) and game mechanics that don't easily contribute to strife within guilds/corporations/whatever they may be called in a given game. The only bad thing is that none of my former Xan buddies play.
Re:Worst idea ever in a mmorpg more like it. (Score:2)
Of course, it's not hurting them that they're gonna be placing a new 64-bits cluster somewhere mid Febuary, which should noticeably increase performance.
As mr. Oveur (main dev. over at the company who makes EVE) puts it:
Re:Worst idea ever in a mmorpg more like it. (Score:3, Informative)
Part of the problem this time was that the roll-out of new content didn't happen over all servers at once, instead being triggered on a per-server basis when all the items have been gathered. This had the problem that people from other servers who didn't want to wait for the event on their own server created characters on the servers which were ahead, resulting in this one server being first to open the Gate but also falling over repeatedly as there're many times the normal number of people trying to log o
Irony of discussing Blizz's net problems (Score:2)
I'd much rather be a Blizzard network admin than admins of the dead-or-dying site you linked to! At least Blizzard saw it coming! Sheesh. 07:30 CST and their server is already melting into a puddle.
Coral cache links:
http://www.karashur.net.nyud.net:8090/mmorpg/ [nyud.net]
http://www.karashur.net.nyud.net:8090/aq_wow_pics. php [nyud.net]
Always rebooting / crashing (Score:2)
If google can get queries to span the whole web (granted highly paralizable) it seems like something could be done (given the profit) to make the blizzard servers keep working.
Re:Always rebooting / crashing (Score:2)
They're a Game Company (Score:2)
Perhaps there's room in the indust
I am not surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
My advice is this, get pissed if lasts more than a week. Else give 'em slack. As a way to compare, MOST large websites(like e-com) suffer on searches. Searches to 'full table scans' of product, product text, inventory etc... Imagine all the other dynamics WoW has vs your frigging browser.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:2)
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
I work for blue chip companies setting up websites that are the busiest in their respective industries, including full connection through to back-end systems.
When the systems die at peak trading, it's 10s of millions in revenue lost. An hour.
My current company provides video downloads off our main sites. We service several hundred retail outlets. We offer very complex product search capabilities, and obviously we permit those products to be purchased. We're dealing with exceedingly large bandwidth, CPU and memory use. We have IBM mainframes, more Sun kit than you could fit in your house and more Wintel boxes than I'd like.
All of this is being provided for less than Blizzard's monthly subscription revenues. Far less. In fact, 3-4 months of WoW subscription revenue in Europe alone would cover the IT costs of our entire business.
So for Blizzard to be unable to handle the loads involved is frankly astonishing. Their systems architecture clearly isn't adequate. Their bandwidth isn't reliable. Heck, they can't even keep their website up and running at peak times - quite a simple website, at that.
This is despite being live for well over a year now. They know how much bandwidth each user needs. They know how many users they have. They know what the capacity on each server is. They already have logon queues at times of peak load, to control the numbers of logged in players.
I have no sympathy for Blizzard on this matter, because they've had plenty of time to get this sorted, and consistently fail to deal with it. This isn't rocket science, you don't need to steal Google's employees to find a solution, just get someone competent in and fund the necessary infrastructure.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
While WoW is big, it's nowhere near that big. Blizzard does not make tens of millions an hour in revenue from this game. Half a million subscribers paying $12 per month gives around $8000 or so per hour. Revenue is only lost if people cancel their accounts, not if they don't get to play for a few hours.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Informative)
Yawn... Call me again when you have 5 million hits (Score:4, Insightful)
Also serving static web content is trivial compared to tracking the state of 5 million clients and letting them see each others in real time is so far beyond web hosting that it is laughable.
I worked at video game companies (Turbine) and I worked at some of IBM's large server farms (Poughkeepsie, Southbury) doing performance balancing. As far as software goes I have to say video games server technology makes web content delivery look like the stone age. The only thing that even compares in complexity is when IBM hosted the Olympic coverage. Trying to compare simple web content to a system where clients are all making updates to each others environments in real time is impossible.
I hate it when the Wow server's crash, but I have had my ego battered by what the guys at Blizzard have managed to do. They have done some great work and I am curious to see other game companies surpass the work Blizzard has done.
Nothing here is trivial. If it was it would have been done right the first time.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Funny)
Am i the only one that read that as 10 silver out of millions lost?
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Interesting)
A WOW session contains several events per second, probably more, perhaps more than 20, two ways. These have to be provided within tight QoS parameters, or the whole play experience is damaged - the users then complain and bitch and moan. Contrast this to a web site experience... you click and wait, nothing happens. You stop it, click again, the page comes, no problem - this it a key difference; the QoS required is almost 0 compared to WOW.
Ok - then moving f
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, they're well aware of their scaling problems, and have added things in to prevent the type of occurances that caused crashes(City Raids), as well as scaling back the max server populations(hence queues). So not having prepped properly for a World Event of this magnitude, especially given their revenues is inexcusable.
My guess is the situation at blizzard is the following:
Most of the core devs went onto other projects
Like most MMOs their network code is laughable.
Their code doesn't parallellize well, so they can't just toss more hardware at the problem
They can't fix the above without a drastic redesign, and by the time they did that it would probably cease to matter.
And yes, it's doable, I've seen MUDs/MUSHs written as hobbies that handled several hundred concurrent users on hardware from the mid-90s. An MMO doesn't push *that* much more traffic than a text-game that saturates a 56k connection(as many did), and it certainly doesn't do many more back-end calculations. Considering how much hardware has scaled and how much further we've gotten in various areas, there just isn't any excuse for several hundred people in a single world-segment causing the server(not the client) to go OMG and crap out.
No web-based business craps out under that kind of traffic. How to cope with it is well-known at this point. I mean shit, this is the type of crap DIKU's massive list of socket descriptors did under load, and that was written over 10 years ago!
Imagine a phone switch doing this! That's tech from the 70s that handles waaayyyy more traffic than one of blizzard's servers. Google easily copes with orders of magnitude more traffic every moment of every day, and holds up like a champ. Stop being an apologist for a drastic lack of planning and poor engineering.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:2)
I play WoW, I love the game, and I don't let queues or downtimes get to me. I have other things I can be doing instead. They'll keep my business, and the business of a lot of casual gamers.
Saying they have to offer refunds/free play time/whatever because the service does not meet your standards is about as useful as saying that if it rains tomorrow, God better give you another day to live that's sunny.
For those who don't know... (Score:2, Informative)
lame game (Score:5, Interesting)
B) Get money
C) Use A&B to "level up"
D) Use results of "level up" to do A&B faster!
All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats). I'd like to see a game where NOBODY get's to see ANY numeric values for ANYTHING. The only player indication should be health which should be some sort of description at the bottom of the page which says something like "you feel awful" or "the pain in my leg hurts like hell!".
No "levels" for the players to work toward. All you could know is that you used that cool two-handed sword to kill the troll and it was kinda easy....should you go attack that dragon? These games would REALLY be interesting then.
The game producers KNOW that numeric stats addict people because people naturally like to make systems efficient.
Re:lame game (Score:2)
The numerical system in use today is the direct result of pencil and paper type games. It is also good psychology. Look, the point of the game is to make money (for all but just a few games). People who don't have control over a situation tend to try to get out. T
Re:lame game (Score:2)
When I played pencil and paper roleplaying games way back when (Aeons ago) we experimented with taking player stat sheets away from everybody and having the GM do all the dice rolls behind a piece of cardboard. Some players loved it, the ones that liked to "tweak" their characters and play as "rules law
Less numbers -- more roleplaying (Score:2, Interesting)
Innovative MMORPGs (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed, the levelling up is usually just as exciting as filling in numbers in a spreadsheet, but there are some MMORPGs that try to do something new. You are even stuck on thinking that it has to be about combat and killing stuff. These people try to do something even more innovative, which might be why they haven't become as popular:
Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com], the first mmoarrrrrpg. You simulate combat by solving puzzles. Different players that crew the ship perform different puzzles, the better they do the more tokens the captain gets (movement, cannon shots, ship health..) to use when the sea battle commences.
A Tale in the Desert [atitd.com], a game that has NO combat. You "win" over other players by performing artworks, building pyramids, getting people to vote for you or performing cermonies and rituals, like for instance
"Have 20 charactars stand still and quietly observe the sunrise. If one speaks or moves away the ritual is destroyed."
or "Bury a large bag of money in the desert. Tell 10 other players where it is. If the bag remains for a week undisturbed you have passed the test of friendship. The other players get nothing for participating in the test. Unless they cheat, in which case they get the money."
You can get laws voted through that changes the whole game, and so on.
Both games are characterised by having more mature and social players than the hack and slash games, and a much larger percentage of female players.
I haven't played them myself though more than the demos. I stay away from most games and especially online games after shaking off a one year Everquest addiction 5 years ago.
Try them! Both have demos available, ATITD have a Linux client, PP both Linux and Mac (runs on all platforms that have Java actually).
Re:Innovative MMORPGs (Score:2)
One thing that REALLY pisses me off. Watching my brother who is a multi-tasking madman with two monitors playing WoW. I was standing behind him the other day and told him - paraphrased of course - that since he's SO good at multi-tasking and tweaking numbers that he could probably make a BOATLOAD of money as a day trader working at some stock firm on Wall Street. Tweaking numbers is basically what they do, trying to make money by understanding the system in r
Re:lame game (Score:3, Interesting)
those who prefer Playing Skills over Grind time play Guildwars [guildwars.com]
Level cap of 20, it only taks 20-30 hours to reach full level and have a bag full of "Phat Loot" , then its all about your playing skills.
Guildwars had a pvp sneak preview of the upcoming chapter (expansion doesnt cut it, its a full seperate game, that you can "plug in" to your old account) and a new end game dungeon we had to download 10-15 megs each, with most people logging in over the space of an h
Re:lame game (Score:2)
Re:lame game (Score:3, Funny)
Re:lame game (Score:2)
It is a novel idea.. but the players will turn it into stats collection and analysis if there is ANY type of true experience being collected. Someone will quanti
Re:lame game (Score:3, Informative)
Re:lame game (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if the genius player decodes (or even reverse-engineers) such an algorithm, it's perfectly possible that they will never be able to turn this knowledge into an easily transmissible formula for leveling up.
Another way to 'hide' character properties is to make them performance metrics relative to the playing population. If it's only possib
Um.. blog entry? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree, Blizzard should have tested that part of the patch more specifically. Apparently, the gate was already opened on the test server (this is what I've heard from other players, I never did test the patch) which would leave me to suspect they never tested opening the gate very much.
I actually expected this crash.
Big Surprise (Score:2)
Come on, folks, give 'em a break. (Score:2)
What can you do when 5+ million players all want to see the new content, but their own server's gates aren't open?
Reporting half the story FTW (Score:5, Informative)
What's unclear from the story as posted is whether the fault here is solely Blizzard's fault or whether players with no affiliation with the Medivh server caused the overcrowding and subsequent crashes.
More pics! (Score:3, Interesting)
Quit WoW and Improve Your Life (Score:4, Interesting)
MMORPGs in general, and WoW in particular, have a way of slowly sucking you into their world and chewing up ever increasing amounts of your time. It's human nature to want your virtual character to grow stronger and do well. But WoW is a game of timesinks. You invest massive amounts of time or you don't progress. In the end you may find it feels more like a vaguely exciting 2nd job.
My advice: if you are playing WoW more than 10 hours a week, give it up for a month and see if you don't feel a lot better.
I stopped playing WOW (Score:5, Informative)
Blizzard lost me as a customer as soon as I finished the last 5 man casual quest. Enough with the dungeons that take 8 hours to complete. I don't have that kind of time, I have a job and a wife. All i see coming down the line is patches adding more RAID content. SO I moved on.
Playing EVE now. What I like most about it, other than it being completely different than WOW, is that the play experience is dictated by me. I can be as indepth as I want, sinking hours upon hours into it at my leisure, or just login every now and then to check my skill training. Which makes it much more accessable to me during the week while I work, just login for a quick 30 minute to an hour fix and actually still come away feeling like I accomplished something.
Its also a game that involves some patience and time-management too, since all skills are learned in real time (even while not playing). The end result is as long as I choose carefully what skills to advance there is no way to literally be left behind training wise. Money still takes some grinding but not like it does in WoW.
A fun MMORPG without so much tedious upkeep.
Re:I stopped playing WOW (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I stopped playing WOW (Score:4, Interesting)
But I also think that when you looking at raw numbers casual players are much more likely to dump your product for the next big thing. Those Hardcore 16-hour a day guys are much more likely to keep paying long-term because they've already invested a lot of time getting that ultra-super-pimp-smack-yo-ass-elite gear. So even if they do decide to try another game, they are less likely to discontinue their subscription due to all the work they put into it. I'm just not sure if Blizzard has enough of those uber-gamers to maintain all those servers when the casual players start dropping in droves for lack of content.
Of course some casuals just re-roll and start a new character. I did twice but never felt like playing the new characters, I was just re-doing pretty much everything I did with the other character just in a slightly different play-style. SO I walked.
Re:I stopped playing WOW (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, the hard-core players are (generally) the ones who post on the forums. I tried once, but the forums move too quickly for me to keep up with and, like you, I have a life and a job. When your topic goes from the front page to page 13 in like two hours, who can possibly have any kind of meaningful discussion on those forums?
But anyway, yes, I left WOW for the same reason. They don't give a crap about casual players. Sadly, the other post is right... probably one of the best games for casual players right now is EVE Online. Too bad EVE is so boring when you start.
Re:I stopped playing WOW (Score:3, Interesting)
When my guild started working on Upper Blackrock Spire (a 15 player dungeon) in March 2005, it took us 6 hours to reach the last boss and we didn't even beat him. A few weeks later, we were beating it in 4 hours, then 3 hours, and now we can do it in a little over 1 hour. Each time we played through the dungeon, we got better gear, and we became more kn
"I'm so glad I don't play"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or its is some strang kind of elitism, "Well I may play games, but least I don't play those dirty MMOs." I know people that play console games MORE than I play WoW (more hours a day that is) and yet people always blab about "MMO addiction." NEWS FLASH, any form of entertainment can be addicting, but its easier to marganalize people with a form you don't particularly like. But tell me, which is "worse" spedning 4 hours in from of the tube with a controller in a completely self absorbed activity, or spending 4 hours in an MMO where you actually can speak and interact with actual people.
So for all the "I'm so glad I avoid MMOs" people, get over yourself and put your hypocracy where its wanted.
Re:"I'm so glad I don't play"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because we are immediately suspicious of any transaction where one side has a financial interest in how you spend your time. If MMORPGs did not have subscription fees, I'd be all over them.
We have that reaction because on some level, we realize that publishers of MMORPG's are the electronic equivalent of tobacco companies. They have a direct vested interest in making their games as addictive as possible, and they
Re:"I'm so glad I don't play"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which has an ending.
or spending 4 hours in an MMO where you actually can speak and interact with actual people.
Good thing you didn't say "actual women." That would have been humorous.
Re:Mob Respawn? (Score:2)
Re:Mob Respawn? (Score:2)
Re:Good Job Blizzard! (Score:5, Insightful)
The war effort isn't 'cool' either. I played world of warcraft for the WAR part, not to team up with the other faction. They could have made it a competitive effort on the pvp servers. Of course, they haven't cared about pvp since last June.
If they continue to release carebear crap like this, and endgame super dungeons for the ubernerds, they will lose a good deal of their playerbase. Personally, I'm getting sick of having to do lame ass raids just to hang in the battlegrounds.
Re:So far off the subject (Score:2)
Why is it that anytime a new video game, television show, or geek activity comes along, there are the people who feel compelled to shit on it? Congratulations, you prefer real sports to virtual, don't even own a television, and only interact with friends face-to-face.
Know your audience.
Re:Aha (Score:2)