Read about Alienware and how they got their start building gaming machines of the gods: Making money by making gamers drool. Boy, they once were the shit. Top of the line Alienware Aurora ALX today, without monitor, $9,439. Special financing available, 6 months same as cash, that’s $1,573 a month before taxes and shipping. Ya, I don’t think so because I know that machine will STILL only last about 2 or 3 years and then it’ll be an embarassment to discuss in gaming public.
Monitor envy: Quake 3 running at 10240×3072 resolution on 24 monitors and Warcraft 2 running at 3840×2160 on 9 monitors. No matter who you are, there’s someone with a better setup. I would except Bill Gates there, but he’s probably playing Warcraft on a 15″ LCD discarded by Accounting.
What is it with the data centers scheduled for April openings? My work servers are going to a minty-fresh center by April 1, AFK Gamer is being moved to another minty-fresh center by April 1, and now I read the new World of Warcraft center is scheduled to go live by April, too. There must’ve been one helluva sale in 2005.
So here’s the latest plan to receive the service we have been paying for, quoting Ordinn:
In January we outlined our plans for improving the performance and overall play experience in World of Warcraft. [Ed. Ordinn’s Link] We’re farther along with implementing some of the changes mentioned in that update, and we wanted to share the details with you.
We’ve spent the past few weeks obtaining new, top-of-the-line equipment and preparing it for deployment at a new World of Warcraft site. This new site, which we expect to go live by the beginning of April, will allow us to open new realms to accommodate our growing player base. In addition, we will be able to transfer existing realms to this new hardware to alleviate pressure on our current systems.
To make sure the launch of the new site goes well, we plan on testing the new hardware, along with the 1.10 content patch, on the public test realms. This testing phase is scheduled to go live next week. In addition to monitoring the impact of the new game content, we will be able to observe the performance of the new hardware under conditions that closely resemble a live environment.
To make things interesting, we will be holding three skill-based contests during this test. Players with active accounts in Europe, Korea, and North America will be able to participate in these contests, and each winner will receive a spot in the beta test for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. We’ll be announcing the contest details on the official World of Warcraft community Web sites in each region soon, so be sure to check back from time to time in the days ahead.
Prepare for a crush of threads nominating each realm to be moved to the new data center.
My server is always passed over for population reduction measures — I have no delusions that we’ll get the primo hardware. Early congrats to the new realms and the low-pop realms that will get the deluxe boxes. (No, I’m not bitter. MUCH.)
I wish someone would start a community-based reporting system for queue lengths similar to the WhereIsMyWoW site I wrote about earlier. I know our mid-primetime queues are horrific — 800-ish or so, 1k+ on the weekends — how freakishly huge are the other servers’ queues? I’d really like to know.
Then we could all point and laugh. It really helps to know someone has it worse.
RELATED LINKS:
Furl archive of Ordinn’s 3/3/06 Data Center announcement
Furl archive of Ordinn’s 1/11/06 post “Regarding Recent Performance Issues”