Remember from last week how World of Warcraft had a new plan to deal with server overcrowding that wouldn’t involve additional hardware investments: The Character Creation Management System? Summary: ” … a new system that will disable character creation when a realm has a queue to better control realm populations.” Ya, well, it’s not working for shit. On my realm, anyhow. Climbing queues, 60+ minutes primetime and let’s not even talk about holiday primetimes, and still, STILL, everyone and his imaginary brother can create characters there on a new account. (I guess Blizzard meant to say: a new system that will disable character creation when a realm has a three-hour-plus queue to better control realm populations.) Of course, players already have their own system to deal with 3-hour+ queues, it’s called “Bid that Shithole Fucking Adieu and Check Out what Sony has to Play for Free or maybe Dungeons & Dragons Online even though That Got Terrible Beta Buzz, I Can’t Leave Work at 2 PM Pacific to Get in the Queue for Our Warcraft Raids.”
4 thoughts on “Or, They Could Spend Some Money”
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You’ve referred to Blizzard as noobs to the MMO arena. However, I refer to them as the idiots of the MMO arena. They *could* just go buy better hardware after taking serious steps to optimizing their code. In all of the time I played WoW, I really didn’t ever see any serious effort to optimize the server or client code. And Blizzard still refuses to purchase new hardware. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Blizzard really needs to put some cash into their MMO for current customers and stop trying to eak everything little dollar they can out of their initial investment of equipment and software.
In other news the game I left WoW for, EVE Online, is installing an entirely new cluster consisting of 70 dual-64bit servers today. Blizzard should take notes from CCP which has actually won awards for being the best MMO company. Before this massive investment, CCP spent a few patches going through all of their code trying to optimize it while at the same time putting out lots of new massive content on a bi-annual basis. I didn’t even notice large amounts of lag in the game either. Sure there was a little in the popular systems but not like the cluster-fuck known as IronForge. CCP just bought all of this stuff because they looked at the growth rate and said 25,000 people on one server is gonna get tight and decided to change out hardware when they hit 23,000. They are even optimizing their client code for dual core system for customers who have the new PentiumD or AMD processors.
If you’re looking for a new MMO Foton, I can send you an EVE 14-day trial account. It doesn’t even require a credit card and trial accounts can actually be converted to regular accounts after the trial is over. Take note of that one Blizz.
At least you can get to a queue. On weekends my server (Moonrunner) shits and dies over, and over, and over. All weekend. Hella fun that.
I think you’re right about the players’ own queue-management system. When I still played WoW I think I was one of the best socially-connected players on my server, particularly on the forums. Of all the people I knew, all but two or three have quit WoW or are just running out their subscriptions. Looks like it’s churn season.
… and don’t even THINK of switching Warcraft accounts during queue time. Forgot to mention that rule of thumb.
I am now officially shopping for a new MMO frustrate me. Unfortunately, just like RL breakups, I have some loose ends to tie up before I ebay the whole operation. Foton doesn’t walk away from equity.