Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg (
More info?)
Hey Bob, how goes it?
"Bob Perez" <myfirstname@thecomdomaincalledSHADOWPIKE> once tried to
test me with:
>
> "foamy" <bombelly@wahs.ac> wrote in message
> news:WnDLd.240700$Xk.206350@pd7tw3no...
>
>> A friend who plays told me they have 80 something servers and about
>> 280K players. Is that about right ? An average of 3500 per server ?
>> If that's
>> so, it doesn't sound like their servers have much of a capacity
>> before being
>> overloaded.
>
> Yeah I've heard the 80 server number too but I haven't actually
> counted them up, there's a *lot* of em. Unfortunately I'm on one of
> the high pop servers and it's a nightmare to get on. Every time we log
> in we wait in a queue of several hundred to get in, with an average of
> around 20-30 minutes just to log in, sometimes an hour or more. Places
> like the Auction House in Ironforge are unbearably laggy, but
> fortuanately you don't spend that much time there, most of the time is
> spent out adventuring and lag out in the game world has been a less
> problematic issue. Still annoying (like a weapon switch macro, or a
> /tell may take a few seconds to happen), but not crippling.
Wow. I'm on a High pop server also but it is nowhere near that bad. I've
had to wait a TOTAL time of maybe 20 minutes on login queues. That's not
20-minutes per session, that's 20-minutes since i've been playing WoW
(started the Sunday after release). I tend to play in the evenings on week
nites and I play on the weekends off and on all day, especially in the
evenings. The Auction House in Ironforge is pretty laggy during peak hours.
But it's more or less usable most of the time. I rarely put up with it
though to be honest.
About 95% of my WoW time has been very enjoyable. I've had a few real
annoying lag-related problems, a few crashes, a few queues to wait in, and
by far the most annoying thing that has happened are a couple of cases of
"roll-back" where I lost maybe 20 min of progress on my character due to a
server bug that dropped me to the char login screen and when I came back in
it had lost some xp and skill-ups and stuff.
But BY FAR the majority of my time in WoW has been pure pleasure.
> If the game didn't have these technical problems it would be near
> perfect. As it is, the overall experience is still a major positive
> and if I were playing on the one of the low pop servers it would
> probably be near perfect.
No you wouldn't. I have toons on a low-pop server for when my main server
is down (Argent Dawn is my main and Thunderhorn is my alt server). TH is
just plain BORING to play on. There's never anyone around to group with. Of
course unless my real-life friends who also play on TH are there too, I
don't have anyone there I know. Finding a pickup group is extremely
challenging. I am playing Horde there and that might have something to do
with it, I've heard that Horde are like about 25% as popular as Alliance or
something to that effect. That's definitely true on AD.
What would be nice is a server that is maxed out WITHOUT ANY OF THE LAG
PROBLEMS. In other words, a server that has just the right number of
players to where there's no lag during prime time and no login queues but
still easy to find players. Maybe the Medium pop servers are like this, not
sure. My thing is, I go for Argent Dawn since it's an RP server. Plus now
I'm guilded there.
I do agree that if WoW had no technical problems it would be absolute
heaven to play. I'm loving the actual gameplay. There's a few things I
think that need changed but overall I'm very happy with it.
> One of the problems all these MMOG guys have is the peak factor. Right
> after a release of a new game (or server) you get this huge peak of
> activity while everyone is trying it out, and then the activity
> recedes to a point where it stabilizes and becomes more or less
> consistent. If you build for the peak, you wind up overinvesting in
> overkill for the aftermath, and if you plan on building to the
> aftermath you suffer during the peak. Given all the uncertainties,
> it's not surprising to me that there's a bias toward conservative
> optimism that tries to anticipate a peak. Blizzard's game broke all
> records and so demolished any conservative peak expectations and we're
> all paying for it now. It's not the first time Blizzard's had to do
> this, you'd think they'd have learned the same lesson from the D2
> release (where similar excuses were made about failure to anticipate
> just how successful they would be).
There really is no excuse for some of their load balancing problems. They
HAVE enough servers.
> I'm also surprised that they didn't architect a system that's more
> scalable and dynamic, using virtual server boundaries that could
> contract and expand to accommodate load variance. As it is now, they
> have discrete systems that are vastly under utilized (low pop servers)
> and those that are vastly over utilized (high pop servers). In this
> era of peer-to-peer loadshare (they even use bittorrent!) you'd think
> they'd have a more modern approach to server architecture. Another
> indication of their relative inexperience at MMOG design.
All they need to do to fix their problems are:
1. Have a (free) way for a group of players to, as a GROUP, move their
characters from one server to the next. This should only be allowed ONE
TIME. And only to a similar server (i.e. PVP to PVP, RP to RP, etc). They
also need a few extra new RP servers to help balance out the existing ones
(which are pretty rare).
2. Put Auction House in EVERY CITY so that you do not have to congregate in
one area and lag that area out just to participate in the game economy.
They've talked about #1 on the boards already but so far hasn't been done.
And they've said that #2 is coming in a patch.
So my guess is this WILL get fixed, the question is, will I already be
tired of WoW before they fix it?
--
Knight37
The gene pool could use a little chlorine.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram