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Horsepoo!!! · 10:41 PM

...they gotta fix those server issues.

I don't know if it was Vivendi's bright idea to force this game to be published ASAP or if it was Blizzard's own decision but the problem is ridiculous. I complained about it during Open Beta and was told to shut up because Blizzard was aware of the problem and that I was playing for free and had no rights to complain. Fair enough...

But now I'm paying for this product...every month. If Blizzard can't provide a fairly problem free gameplay, they're going to have to give free months or reimburse people because it's unfair to pay for playtime that doesn't fit my schedule when the downtime fits right into my schedule.

I had 2 hours of free time tonight...gone. Especially since I was trying to log on after the 1 hour ETA which still hasn't been updated to reflect the reality of the problem.

Morally and hypothetically speaking, if I were to always have free time when the servers are down for maintenance or the servers were suffering from severe lag and whenever I'm busy with real life issues the servers were just fine, would Blizzard really charge me 13.99 for that month?

These problems, or the most of them, should have been fixed *BEFORE* retail.

I still love you Blizzard...but please, for the love of god, fix the servers.

PS: I know complaining will do nothing...they are aware of the problem and are trying to resolve them as quickly as possible.

PPS: Quicker please.

edit: really...I can't believe what I'm seeing here. This week might be the only week I can play this game because group projects and exams are coming up. And Blizzard will fix the problems when I'm overloaded with studying and still have to balls to charge me for the month (well, the first month is free but that's still a free month I'm losing.)

CaptainHaddock · Nov 24, 2004, 11:39 PM

I'm in total agreement. Blizzard's World of Warcraft launch is going down as one of the worst online RPG launches in history. My friends and I have been sitting around all day trying to play, with almost zero actual game time logged.

Hey Blizzard, you guys knew you'd sell 100,000 copies your first week. Why didn't you bother putting up servers that could handle the traffic?

Ah well, at least I had some fun yesterday night at 2 am.

Adam Betts · 03:17 AM

*note to self: try to sleep and get over it before posting*

rbarris · Nov 25, 2004, 01:19 AM

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
And their advertising is unbelievably bad. All I see in New York is ads of Everquest II.

I've heard enough "WoW's already out!?!" responses to make me really sad.

Now, if they did a decent job on advertising and pulled more people than 200k, imagine how much worser the server lag can get? Blizzard is far from being prepared.

I really want to go on ranting about what a horrid launch this one was but I'll try to give them some chance for a few days.

The Blizzard server team is working 24/7 to improve the situation. More hardware, server side software tuning, and some other clever ideas. I've seen some of the details and I am optimistic about their plans. When you get 200K new accounts in a single day, the pressure on the system is immense.

Given that the game is selling out everywhere you can find it, and the servers are heavily taxed with the player load, do you still think we should invest in more advertising?

Adam Betts · Nov 25, 2004, 03:13 AM

Originally posted by rbarris:
Given that the game is selling out everywhere you can find it, and the servers are heavily taxed with the player load, do you still think we should invest in more advertising?

Actually never mind what I said earlier.. I'm just expressing my frustrations like everyone else

entrox · Nov 25, 2004, 06:43 AM

Bah, stop complaining about not being able to play for 2 or 3 days. Us Europeans won't be able to play for the next 2 or 3 months! Be glad with what you've got

On a related note, I want to express my appreciation for the continued Macintosh support at Blizzard, supplying us with high quality ports from day 1. Thanks.

Horsepoo!!! · Nov 25, 2004, 07:56 AM

Well, hopefully everything will smooth out soon. I'm confident Blizzard will have this resolved in the next couple weeks. I'm unfortunately a WoW slave so no matter how crappy the servers are running, I'm still going to play this game.

Leonard · Nov 25, 2004, 12:00 PM

Could you put the game title in the subject of the thread next time. It took a few minutes to figure out what game you were talking about.

It sounds like Blizzard is as bad as Apple in underestimating product demand. How can you not be prepared for 100,000 to 200,000 new accounts in 1 or 2 days? They're games are top-selling games. They knew how many copies they were sending out, and probably could have got pre-order numbers showing the interest.

Bookie · Nov 29, 2004, 12:17 PM

Makes me feel better for not jumping oin board right away. Next summer looks ideal to me, time for Blizz to iron out the wrinkles, and time for me to play.

eevyl · Nov 29, 2004, 12:37 PM

Originally posted by Leonard:
It sounds like Blizzard is as bad as Apple in underestimating product demand. How can you not be prepared for 100,000 to 200,000 new accounts in 1 or 2 days? They're games are top-selling games. They knew how many copies they were sending out, and probably could have got pre-order numbers showing the interest.

Yeah just my thoughts exactly. Blizzard has a large user base, which is really similar to the Apple one. We love their games, not just "like" them, we embrace the universe of them and we look forward to getting more from them reading the websites, the fansites, books, making mods for the games, whatever. They have been teasing that userbase with this game for years, Warcraft III game just prepared the universe for it, and a lot of the owners of that game looked forward for this one to be released so we could get our dose of the Warcraft universe regardless if we were MMORPG players or not. This is a key point I think they missed, they thought most of the World of Warcraft gamers would be experienced MMORPG coming from others, with a few newcomers to the genre. IMHO that's wrong, it's obvious they failed in that guess and my take is that a lot of Blizzard games fans bought WoW as their very first MMORPG.

Just my case, I never expected to get hooked by a MMORPG game. In fact I tried Star Wars Galaxies with a free 14 days trial and I only played a few hours for two days and forgot about it. However once I tried the US Open Beta of World of Warcraft ... I was hooked and I am now waiting anxiously for the European Final Beta to start in December (I pre-ordered the game here so I got a final beta key). As I cannot be the only one with this type of situation, I can only guess that a lot of Blizzard games fans are doing the same, more than Blizzard themselves expected.

-Q- · Nov 30, 2004, 11:28 AM

Originally posted by entrox:
Bah, stop complaining about not being able to play for 2 or 3 days. Us Europeans won't be able to play for the next 2 or 3 months! Be glad with what you've got

And be happy us yanks are smoothing out all the server issues so when you do get to play, it'll be b/c we dealt with the pain and left you with the polished release.

webb3201 · Dec 3, 2004, 05:21 PM

Originally posted by Leonard:
Could you put the game title in the subject of the thread next time. It took a few minutes to figure out what game you were talking about.

It sounds like Blizzard is as bad as Apple in underestimating product demand. How can you not be prepared for 100,000 to 200,000 new accounts in 1 or 2 days? They're games are top-selling games. They knew how many copies they were sending out, and probably could have got pre-order numbers showing the interest.

Yep, this is an issue. Blizzard need only look at every other major MMORPG to see this was going to happen. When you regularly sell the numbers Blizzard sells and couple it with the fact that this game is dependent on servers, you need an architecture that can address huge numbers of users swamping you. It can be done. Simply saying "wow, we did not know this would be so popular" is no excuse. Be prepared to sell all of the copies of the game you ship. That is the only way to prepare.

Drakino · Dec 4, 2004, 04:31 PM

Blizzard's World of Warcraft launch is going down as one of the worst online RPG launches in history.

Actually, Blizzard has had a pretty typical MMO launch, even though it is now the quickest selling PC game. While yes, the server issues have been annoyning, it generally has been better then say Shadowbane. There, the population never reached over 50k during the lifetime of the game, and at launch players got to deal with downtime, and rollbacks of what was gained. Not minor rollbacks of a minute or two, but hours upon hours at times.

Even now, you can log into Shadowbane and experience hideous server lag. Blizzard I am confident will have WoW running smooth in a month tops.

Big lesson any future MMO needs to learn, implement the ability to move people between servers before shipping. My guild got set up in WoW pretty early, and we really didn't want to start over on another server. Had we been able to move, we would have done so.

boy8cookie · Dec 4, 2004, 06:08 PM

Dunno if anyone's noticed but it looks as if blizzard is using the d2 are w3 servers to help take the load

One day there is no line for making a d2 game, next day I'm waiting in line for up to 400 people >_< Kinda lame for us d2 faithfull... Blizzard had just gave us those nice servers when they restarted ladder, now we dont got em

Just in time for x-mas break too, how lame.

rbarris · Dec 5, 2004, 03:00 AM

Originally posted by boy8cookie:
Dunno if anyone's noticed but it looks as if blizzard is using the d2 are w3 servers to help take the load One day there is no line for making a d2 game, next day I'm waiting in line for up to 400 people >_< Kinda lame for us d2 faithfull... Blizzard had just gave us those nice servers when they restarted ladder, now we dont got em Just in time for x-mas break too, how lame.

I suspect this can't be true because there are totally different generations of hardware involved between the D2, War3, and WoW servers. But I will ask and be sure..