WOW Rant

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Hey here's an idea: You know you're going to have to patch again. When you do the realm status web server is going to get hit hard. How about you proactively invest in this server now. Just an idea. The realm status server doesn't go down because of a random hardware failure that they can't control. It goes down due to incompetent IT management. Some of you guys are stuck so far up blizzards butt that you'll make excuses for them. Go on, get started...

They could also make the page a lot simpler than it is now and have a better chance at surviving. It doesn't have to be pretty, and it's absolutely ugly if it's just an error page.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: CVSiN

Originally posted by: Sunner
Casual gamer who plays more than he works, what did I miss?

that is casual... there are peeps in my guild that can play from work in thier NOCs...
they put in 18 hour days playing non stop except for commute time and a nap before work.. then they do ti again...
there are peeps in my guild working on having 4-6 fully equipped L60s...
i cannot compete with that..

edit why wouldnt i do soemthing I enjoy more than work btw?

Im divorced on weekends its nice me and my friends go to the beach on our motorcycles and do the social thing...
during the summer Im sure my play hours will drop but hey.. i saved over 8 grand this winter by playing WoW and not much else =P

Not saying there's anything wrong with it, just that 4-6 hours per day isn't anywhere near casual.

As for your guildmates, they really should seek help, that's not playing a game, that's manic behavior.

Me and a few other people have actually become quite concerned with a friend since he plays so much, but he's nowhere near manic enough to play at work(or as it would be, school).

 

[Dacalo]

My subscription expired a couple of days ago and I don't plan to renew. I only have a few hours a week to play the game and it seemed like whenever I am free to play, the server was down/too laggy. Not to mention all these immature kids playing the game.

I have had the game since it came out and I was only lvl 43.

 

[Smilin]

Yay! I'm back again! 3rd rant in just over a week...

I alt tabbed to take a peek at thottbot for a lost new guy and when I came back that nice little graphics problem they have cropped up. You know the one where the z-buffer disappears and everything stretches to a point at infinity?

Anyhoo... I typed a quick note to the guy I was helping informing him that I was crashing and I would be back in a sec... I have that particular crash once or twice a day so I've gotten good at messaging blindly to give my teamates the "crashing brb.." message.

When I tried to log back on it just sits there at authenticating...

Hm. I try again not completely unlike the rat at a feeder bar that I am... no luck.
I call tech support (NOT!) then I hop over to the forums to see if anyone's posted anything. Nope. I'll try then...

LOGON SERVER NOT RESPONDING.

Oh joy, here we are again! Let's see if the other realms are having trouble. We won't have the issues getting realm status like we did before. They took them down for several hours this week to upgrad.

OOPS!! CAN'T CHECK REALM STATUS EITHER!

Ah.

The good news: Empire Earth II is shipping this month. That should get me by until Doom III expansion and so forth..

My days of giving blizzard my money are numbered because they are clearly begging me to quit. I'm trying to think of what else they could do to ensure that they lose me as a customer. Hmm.

 

[Gurck]

Seems WoW isn't for you, that's cool, different strokes and such. Hope you find something you enjoy. I'm still loving WoW though Btw that bug you're describing is likely on your end; I've never experienced it nor heard of anyone else experiencing it.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Gurck
Seems WoW isn't for you, that's cool, different strokes and such. Hope you find something you enjoy. I'm still loving WoW though Btw that bug you're describing is likely on your end; I've never experienced it nor heard of anyone else experiencing it.

Since you've never had the problem and your system is 100% identical to mine I must surely be tripping eh? :roll:

Several other guys in my guild have the same issue. There are a number of references to it on on blizzards support forums as well.

Recently I fell one version behind on my video drivers so there may be a new fix available. The problem is completely isolated to WoW though. System is otherwise 100% stable with all my other apps (3D and otherwise).

 

[torpid]

OK, so do any of you have a bus pass? Do you get pissed when it's 3am and the bus route you want to take is not available?

That is what tuesday maintenance equates to. If it goes beyond the 6 hour window or occurs on other days, you have at least a somewhat legitimate gripe (that would be like the 8am bus being out of service).

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: torpid
OK, so do any of you have a bus pass? Do you get pissed when it's 3am and the bus route you want to take is not available?

No. I would be an idiot for standing there at 3am expecting a bus. It's not practical for a bus company to run 24/7. It's also not practical to run servers with absolutely zero scheduled downtime. It's *possible* with properly written software on clusters but often not truly practical with finite fiscal resources.

That is what tuesday maintenance equates to. If it goes beyond the 6 hour window or occurs on other days, you have at least a somewhat legitimate gripe (that would be like the 8am bus being out of service).

By your explanation my gripe is legitimate.


I'm not griping because they said maintenance until 11am and I'm trying to play at 10:55am. I'm griping because:

1. Maintenance until 11am and it's 7pm and it's still not up
-or-
2. It's 11:30pm, right in the middle of primetime with no scheduled maintenance and it goes down (like it did last night).

Furthermore, to keep using your analogy:
If you're on the 8am bus and it breaks down you would expect another bus to come along within say an hour to pick you and your fellow passengers up. Not so with blizzard. With them, the replacement bus (tech support forum, other realms, realm status page etc.) also breaks down and never shows up.

I think I'm having a hard time getting my point across. I don't think my expectations are unreasonable, yet they are not being met. I'm further frustrated because blizzard has a really great product on their hands and they are blowing it! People on their forums will gripe about anything, nerf this, nerf that, fix my crummy computer with out of date drivers and no open firewall ports, yada yada. I hope you guys don't think I'm doing that here. All I'm asking is: I pay my money, give me what I paid for.

 

[CVSiN]

Originally posted by: Smilin


Yay! I'm back again! 3rd rant in just over a week...

I alt tabbed to take a peek at thottbot for a lost new guy and when I came back that nice little graphics problem they have cropped up. You know the one where the z-buffer disappears and everything stretches to a point at infinity?

Anyhoo... I typed a quick note to the guy I was helping informing him that I was crashing and I would be back in a sec... I have that particular crash once or twice a day so I've gotten good at messaging blindly to give my teamates the "crashing brb.." message.

When I tried to log back on it just sits there at authenticating...

Hm. I try again not completely unlike the rat at a feeder bar that I am... no luck.
I call tech support (NOT!) then I hop over to the forums to see if anyone's posted anything. Nope. I'll try then...

LOGON SERVER NOT RESPONDING.

Oh joy, here we are again! Let's see if the other realms are having trouble. We won't have the issues getting realm status like we did before. They took them down for several hours this week to upgrad.

OOPS!! CAN'T CHECK REALM STATUS EITHER!

Ah.

The good news: Empire Earth II is shipping this month. That should get me by until Doom III expansion and so forth..

My days of giving blizzard my money are numbered because they are clearly begging me to quit. I'm trying to think of what else they could do to ensure that they lose me as a customer. Hmm.

bye bye!~ thank god...

tomorrow we'll hear how bad Doom3 expansion crashes and hell complain about that...

 

[n0cmonkey]

When is it reasonable to be upset about a product not living up to the expectation?

 

[Acanthus]

I know you people playing are defending it, but i know a TON of people leaving the game because of downtime, bugs, imbalance, and them dragging their feet hardcore on a pvp system that was supposed to be in the original beta of WoW.

 

[Gurck]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
When is it reasonable to be upset about a product not living up to the expectation?

Hello again, you sure have a hell of a gripe with a genre you don't even play, don't you? Or is there something we don't know about? Anyway, expectation varies by person. A lot of us, especially those who've dealt with SOE (Sony) games, think Blizzard's doing a damn fine job in comparison. Further, the game itself is awesome - lag and such is a seperate issue.

I'm not saying people have to like it, but I just find it baffling that people come on a forum - especially AT's sofware forum and not their official one, to bitch and moan about it when all they need to do to save themselves the frustration they apparently feel is to quit.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Gurck

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
When is it reasonable to be upset about a product not living up to the expectation?

Hello again, you sure have a hell of a gripe with a genre you don't even play, don't you? Or is there something we don't know about?

I was molested by an Orc.

This was a legitimate question. If someone doesn't like the game you all give him hell instead of trying to solve the problem. You compare it to other games instead of addressing the problems. It doesn't make any sense to me.

Anyway, expectation varies by person. A lot of us, especially those who've dealt with SOE (Sony) games, think Blizzard's doing a damn fine job in comparison. Further, the game itself is awesome - lag and such is a seperate issue.

I'm not saying people have to like it, but I just find it baffling that people come on a forum - especially AT's sofware forum and not their official one, to bitch and moan about it when all they need to do to save themselves the frustration they apparently feel is to quit.

Isn't this forum for discussion about software? He's obviously checking the official forums, so why not post and moan here too?

 

[torpid]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: torpid
OK, so do any of you have a bus pass? Do you get pissed when it's 3am and the bus route you want to take is not available?

No. I would be an idiot for standing there at 3am expecting a bus. It's not practical for a bus company to run 24/7. It's also not practical to run servers with absolutely zero scheduled downtime. It's *possible* with properly written software on clusters but often not truly practical with finite fiscal resources.

I'm not sure it is possible in all forms of software. In most forms it is, but these are very specific pieces of software with sophisticated algorithms that refer to timers (to prevent hacks and similar) and rely on extremely volatile data. Given both of those I don't think it's possible to have no maintenance window where you "tune up" the system to assure optimal performance.

Software on clusters is not really practical if the state of the data as a while is so volatile and requires instant synchronization between the clusters. Clustering works in a limited set of circumstances, where the connections of clients on different clusters do not require immediate and instant coordination with an ever-evolving set of data that by definition must be in memory and not JIT loaded from a database all the time. Ultimately the data has to be centralized in memory somewhere.

If you mean mirroring, this is virtually impossible in this scenario as well. The mirror could remain up while maintenance is done, but then after maintenance, which may drastically alter your data structure, you'd end up with downtime anyway and a possibly very complicated data conversion on any day with software changes or hot fixes.

By your explanation my gripe is legitimate.


I'm not griping because they said maintenance until 11am and I'm trying to play at 10:55am. I'm griping because:

1. Maintenance until 11am and it's 7pm and it's still not up
-or-
2. It's 11:30pm, right in the middle of primetime with no scheduled maintenance and it goes down (like it did last night).

I don't think anyone disagrees that blizzard has had a few bad spots in unexpected downtimes. But there is no way to prevent these unexpected downtimes, none at all. We are talking about software several orders of magniture more complex than ebay with far less mature architectural patterns in place.

 

[torpid]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I know you people playing are defending it, but i know a TON of people leaving the game because of downtime, bugs, imbalance, and them dragging their feet hardcore on a pvp system that was supposed to be in the original beta of WoW.

Those same people will leave ANY game for years to come until a solid set of patterns and understandings are in place. The MMORPG is a fairly new style of application. As with any fundamentally different type of software, it takes time for proper understandings of how things can and should work to evolve.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: torpid
I don't think anyone disagrees that blizzard has had a few bad spots in unexpected downtimes. But there is no way to prevent these unexpected downtimes, none at all. We are talking about software several orders of magniture more complex than ebay with far less mature architectural patterns in place.

Proper planning.
Proper testing.
Decent software.
Firing the idiots that refuse to meet the deadlines.

Proper planning and testing being the most important.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: torpid

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I know you people playing are defending it, but i know a TON of people leaving the game because of downtime, bugs, imbalance, and them dragging their feet hardcore on a pvp system that was supposed to be in the original beta of WoW.

Those same people will leave ANY game for years to come until a solid set of patterns and understandings are in place. The MMORPG is a fairly new style of application. As with any fundamentally different type of software, it takes time for proper understandings of how things can and should work to evolve.

These same people played dark age of camelot for 3 years.

 

[Gurck]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: torpid

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I know you people playing are defending it, but i know a TON of people leaving the game because of downtime, bugs, imbalance, and them dragging their feet hardcore on a pvp system that was supposed to be in the original beta of WoW.

Those same people will leave ANY game for years to come until a solid set of patterns and understandings are in place. The MMORPG is a fairly new style of application. As with any fundamentally different type of software, it takes time for proper understandings of how things can and should work to evolve.

These same people played dark age of camelot for 3 years.

I hope they find something they enjoy, we all deserve to. Personally, along with about 1.5 million other people, I'm really enjoying WoW...

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: CVSiN

bye bye!~ thank god...

tomorrow we'll hear how bad Doom3 expansion crashes and hell complain about that...

You're such a blizzard suck up. You know good and well it's got problems. Not a one of my complaints has been unjustified. You're just such an admitted WarCrack addict that you can't stand anyone saying, "Hey buddy, crack is baaad m'kay?". So go ahead and gripe at ME as if I'm the one in the wrong rather than facing up to your own problems. You can't be an addict without being a liar (mostly to yourself).

If the Doom3 expansion turns out to be a complete piece of unstable crap you can bet I gripe about it. I won't bust out my Carmack kneepads out of blind love for Doom. It just so happens that piss-poor application problems like this don't come along that often. I also cut these guys a fair amount of slack simply because what they do isn't simple.

For instance: Halflife 2 absolutely rocked. Awesome gameplay, graphics, sound, and just plain fun. Do you think this means I'm going to let them slide when I can't even play it on day one because they dropped the ball with steam authentication? EVERYONE gave Valve the whole nine yards over that catastrophy. They got the problems sorted out and everyone (myself included) went back to enjoying our new game. Now that things are worked out I have nothing but praise for them.

What did you do when Valve blew steam? "mmm, oh valve, you're the greatest valve, slap me around, mmm I love it, mmm here take my money valve, your graphics that I can't see are so awesome!!"

You must be the stupidest consumer on the planet.

I'm probably offending by now so feel free to take your own advice and apply it to this thread:

bye bye!~ thank god...

Everyone is tired of your "holier than thou, I'm the god of mmo" crap anyway.

 

[Gurck]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: CVSiN

bye bye!~ thank god...

tomorrow we'll hear how bad Doom3 expansion crashes and hell complain about that...

You're such a blizzard suck up. You know good and well it's got problems. Not a one of my complaints has been unjustified. You're just such an admitted WarCrack addict that you can't stand anyone saying, "Hey buddy, crack is baaad m'kay?". So go ahead and gripe at ME as if I'm the one in the wrong rather than facing up to your own problems. You can't be an addict without being a liar (mostly to yourself).

If the Doom3 expansion turns out to be a complete piece of unstable crap you can bet I gripe about it. I won't bust out my Carmack kneepads out of blind love for Doom. It just so happens that piss-poor application problems like this don't come along that often. I also cut these guys a fair amount of slack simply because what they do isn't simple.

For instance: Halflife 2 absolutely rocked. Awesome gameplay, graphics, sound, and just plain fun. Do you think this means I'm going to let them slide when I can't even play it on day one because they dropped the ball with steam authentication? EVERYONE gave Valve the whole nine yards over that catastrophy. They got the problems sorted out and everyone (myself included) went back to enjoying our new game. Now that things are worked out I have nothing but praise for them.

What did you do when Valve blew steam? "mmm, oh valve, you're the greatest valve, slap me around, mmm I love it, mmm here take my money valve, your graphics that I can't see are so awesome!!"

You must be the stupidest consumer on the planet.

I'm probably offending by now so feel free to take your own advice and apply it to this thread:

bye bye!~ thank god...

Everyone is tired of your "holier than thou, I'm the god of mmo" crap anyway.

Grow up...

 

[CVSiN]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I know you people playing are defending it, but i know a TON of people leaving the game because of downtime, bugs, imbalance, and them dragging their feet hardcore on a pvp system that was supposed to be in the original beta of WoW.

good less lag and less people whining on the boards...
they can spare 500k subscribers world wide and still be the biggest MMO on the market..

noone has ever had as many valid active subscriptions in MMO history... 1.7 million world wide in less than 6 months...

 

[ucdbiendog]

my rant has nothing to do with bittorrent (I payed fileplanet to avoid that mess) or tech problems. My rant is about the game itself, more specifically, the PVP. There is no point to it. So I can go around killing people, but my character gains nothing, and I get bored of it after 5 minutes. When i get killed, i dont care, since it is just a short walk from the graveyard back to my corpse. Even with their new honor system that is supposed to come out, PVP will still be subpar. It is a ssytem that rewards people who play all the time. It will equally rank a person who has 500 kills and 2 deaths with a person with 500 kills and 100000 deaths. Anyway, that is my two cents. Now that i am level 60 and being in a PVP guild, i find the game somewhat boring/monotonous just farming instances for a stupid piece of set armor.

 

[CVSiN]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: CVSiN

bye bye!~ thank god...

tomorrow we'll hear how bad Doom3 expansion crashes and hell complain about that...

You're such a blizzard suck up. You know good and well it's got problems. Not a one of my complaints has been unjustified. You're just such an admitted WarCrack addict that you can't stand anyone saying, "Hey buddy, crack is baaad m'kay?". So go ahead and gripe at ME as if I'm the one in the wrong rather than facing up to your own problems. You can't be an addict without being a liar (mostly to yourself).

If the Doom3 expansion turns out to be a complete piece of unstable crap you can bet I gripe about it. I won't bust out my Carmack kneepads out of blind love for Doom. It just so happens that piss-poor application problems like this don't come along that often. I also cut these guys a fair amount of slack simply because what they do isn't simple.

For instance: Halflife 2 absolutely rocked. Awesome gameplay, graphics, sound, and just plain fun. Do you think this means I'm going to let them slide when I can't even play it on day one because they dropped the ball with steam authentication? EVERYONE gave Valve the whole nine yards over that catastrophy. They got the problems sorted out and everyone (myself included) went back to enjoying our new game. Now that things are worked out I have nothing but praise for them.

What did you do when Valve blew steam? "mmm, oh valve, you're the greatest valve, slap me around, mmm I love it, mmm here take my money valve, your graphics that I can't see are so awesome!!"

You must be the stupidest consumer on the planet.

I'm probably offending by now so feel free to take your own advice and apply it to this thread:

bye bye!~ thank god...

Everyone is tired of your "holier than thou, I'm the god of mmo" crap anyway.

Good do you really think I care what you or anyone else thinks on the omfg intraweb~

I never have any problems on Gorefiend... we can log in when we want with no login problems.. no lag even in IF during peak hours...
we are able to do MC onxyia whenever we want with no lag or crashes...
what more do you want?
my server is up so much most of us are working on our 3rd L60 now...
some on thier 4ths...


there are 100s of thousands of satisfied customers.... only a very few like your self are bicthing and whining..

like I said ive played every single MMO to date and this launch is no differenet than any other one...

 

[astrosfan90]

Alrighty, lets see if I can do this without stepping on any toes. *dons flameproof suit*

As a former Diablo 2 junkie, I've come to accept the fact that Blizzard blows a lot of hot air, especially when it comes to telling us when they're going to come through with something. Version 1.10, anyone? That said, I've also come to learn that while Blizzard often takes amazingly longer than they say they will, they do usually come through with a fantastic product. It can never be perfect, at least as far as I'm concerned, and in my experience all online games have bugs.

Coming from Diablo, my major complaints were downtime between games (creating new "games" before the second ladder season took 10+ seconds, and often much much longer), the absolute rampancy of hacks, cheats, duped items, and immature kiddies flaming everyone they came across.

After playing D2 and its expansion for 3+ years, I was very reluctant to blow more money on WoW and pay the monthly fees. I was finally talked into it by some friends, and sucked it up. My first week with the game encountered a lot of problems. Among these was an inability to log in that had me steaming pissed. I called Blizzard absolutely incensed my second day with the game, as I was unable to log into my account at all. Expecting them to tell me that it was my fault or something I had done wrong, I was prepared to cancel my membership on the spot.

Instead, the tech support person was very helpful. She interviewed me about the problems I was having, and immediately helped me. She took over my account from where she was, fixed some things, issued me a new password, and within 5 minutes I was back on. I also had Blizzard representatives following up with me once a week for the next three weeks via email to ensure that the problems had not returned, which they had not.

Frankly, and perhaps my experience was a fluke, I was impressed. If only my cable company, phone company, or condo association was as responsive and helpful. Ha! When my phone was out Verizon wanted to charge me $150 to send someone out to look at it. Yeah, right. I no longer have a landline. Similarly, when a window literally detached itself from the wall in my home during a December storm and blew into my bedroom, the condo association wanted to wait 3 months to repair it. I had to raise hell all the way up to management to get someone there faster, and even then it took 6 weeks. Meanwhile my bedroom was on average 15 degrees colder than the rest of my house and my utilities nearly doubled for the time period. So to me, comparing WoW to a phone service or something similar is a bit of a red herring, not to mention the fact that these services aren't always 100% reliable.

Sorry for the long-windedness here, wrapping up.

All of that said, there are still a lot of very irritating bugs that I was disappointed not to see Blizzard correct with the patch. For instance, the infamous loot bug. How long have they known about that? I also still occasionally have the login problems noted here earlier (where I'm indefinetly "Connecting" and never connect--I generally just have to quit WoW and start it up again and it connects without issue), or encounter the quest turn-in dump or another fun one: if I forget to fix my monitor settings and leave my computer to go to the bathroom, for instance, and come back to find my monitor has shut off, when I wake it back up, the game is frozen. Not thrilled about this, but then again, its simple enough to avoid. I guess my position on it is annoyed, but patient. While a lot of this should have been remedied in the last patch, and frankly should have been ironed out in the beta, it hasn't been. Fine. They need to deal with it now, and I recognize that these things don't happen overnight. If, say, 2-3 months from now, some of these problems haven't started disappearing, I'm going to be reconsidering my renewal. But I think that if Blizzard continues to show that they're aware of the issues and are working to deal with them, for $12 a month, I can manage to let it slide.

 

[Kuch]

I think the important thing to understand (from both sides of this debate) is that not everyone is in the situation you are. Those complaining that Blizzard sucks and can't get anything running reliably, are probably on the problem servers (and most of us know that there are problem servers). I'm not on one, but from what I've read, if it was happening to me, I would be pissed too. However, these people have to remember that the vast majority of us are not experiencing these problems (at least no where near to your extent). There has been only a couple times in 4 months that I couldn't play due to some problem. Therefore, in our viewpoint, Blizzard is doing a great job. However, we should have some sympathy for those who drew the short stick and got on a crappy server. Sure they can move, but if you invested the time they did on their toon, would you? I know if I were in their shoes, I would be very unhappy. Sometimes it's just good to vent somewhere and read how others are having the same problems to know it's not just you. The rest of us that are not having these problems should thank our luck, and just ignore these rants instead of criticizing.

Kuch