In preparation for the upcoming retail launch of World of Warcraft, we will be taking the North American open beta servers offline on Thursday, November 18.
I didn’t really expect them to go down this soon. I thought they’d be up at least until Sunday night.
Oh well. I was at level 35 and had saved up about half the money I needed to buy a pony, but once I heard the news I just gave everything away and logged off. And from what the rest of that news post says, I might as well not even bother to keep the client installed.
Am I the only person to think that I am being subtly encouraged to play one of Vivendi’s other products now?
Eh… the lag’s gotten somewhat better. I don’t think they were necessarily looking for a magic bullet as much as the magic number for load balancing though, anyway. Launch is going to be messy. No game has had a non-messy (in terms of lag, login issues, etc…) launch that I know of. But I doubt any part of it will be catastrophic. They assumably have been holding down some significant fraction of 500k players for the last couple of weeks with nuisance level issues, not game-breaking level ones.
I expect to see a lot of mid-high game patches coming through for the first few months from what I read though. Which is standard, yet ultimately disappointing.
A) Hrose is contractually obligated to post in every WoW thread with a mean time to response of one hour, enforced by a strict service level guarantee. He has no choice in the matter, so please pay him no regard.
Is there any allowance for grouping up with friends of significantly different levels (similar to CoH’s Sidekicks)? I know there wasn’t earlier, but they’d talked about adding it in later (post-launch, but I’m curious if it squeaked in at some point).
I only experienced character lag a few times, but I saw a good deal of the “looting” lag where you’d loot something and then run off and 1 minute later you’d actually get the graphic of it going into your bag.
In WoW’s defense, I didn’t have to sit at the corpse and wait… the loot actually magically transported into my bag. DId have a couple of lag deaths though, primarily where things would run away and I’d go after them and then lag, losing sight of them, and go into combat facing the wrong direction and get schooled. Oddly while I couldn’t see the enemy, I could see the damage numbers get applied. Was very odd.
The lag (which started in earnest around the time they opened up the beta to non-FP subscribers, imagine that) has steadily improved every day. I’m not worried about it.
And as mentioned above, it’s been mainly nuisance level stuff. The serious problems have been when the entire world server lags out, which for awhile resulted in a crash and then the gateway server being completely hosed, either due to hammering or some other bug. That’s been going away more quickly as well.
I dont get the prophecies of doom. Don’t like it? Don’t think it is ready? Cool, don’t buy it. See ya later. I personally don’t think it is “ready” either, but I don’t care, it’s “ready” enough for me to enjoy. And I will. And I’ll enjoy it later as well.
If there’s a dearth of high-level content post-launch, I’ll level up one of every class to 30 until there isn’t, and go back to playing whichever one I want to then. I fail to see how this is a problem. The point of a journey is not to arrive.
Yesterday was smooth on test 9, with no queue to get in, today was smooth as well, no queue, with a tiny bit of lag when crafting (like 2 seconds), but that’s it.
I think they probably added some hardware, figured out the load balancing on a hugely populated server, and now think they’re ready to go.
They may be right. I’ll probably be buying it ASAP anyway, since I want my name, so I won’t be able to wait and see.
I won’t be shocked if there are lag issues for the first week. Blizzard really has no idea of the load they’re going to get and how long players will play each day.
They did solve the lag problems on the servers I play on. They obviously have a handle on what causes the problem and what it takes to fix it. It might take them a few days or a week to adjust to the retail load, but I think they’ll get it.
It seems like they got a handle on the lag issues after last weekend, at least on the servers I was playing.
The non-response on the wipe/no-wipe issue got the better of me and I started a few new characters on one of the RP servers just for kicks. I kinda liked it there - thinking I’ll pick one at release, assuming they make a PvP one.
The last couple of days have been dramatically better for me, even on my server 4 characters that I had given up on because of how bad it was there. I think it will be a messy launch, but not AO-messy.
Test 1 has been pretty smooth for us since Sunday evening, and we haven’t had a queue for the last few nights either.
I’m not sure that the servers going up and down all weekend were so much from the load. They were obviously doing a lot of work over the weekend and I seem to recall one of the devs mentioning that they were ironing out some issues with the lag patch they were putting in. It’s that work which was probably causing the servers to go up and down.
The queue was instituted to see how the server fixes were doing at various load levels.
In WoW’s defense, I didn’t have to sit at the corpse and wait… the loot actually magically transported into my bag.
It may have transported itself to your bag, but while we were in that lag cycle we couldn’t do anything else other than move around in the world, and other characters still saw you kneeling over the corpse. I wasn’t able to initiate combat or do anything other than move until the db caught up with the requests.
HRose: You are just jaded because blizzard wont give you the time of day. You take every chance to bash them for the most trivial things.
As far as the horrable lag, the did some ‘magic’ patch last saturday that went live around 11pm EST and that made HUGE differance. Suddenly the lag was gone, completly.
However over the next few days there were some minor instances of lag here or there. However it is HARDLY the lag before that so-called magic patch.
In retail I do expect there to be some lag for months to come, but from what I hear about other games, such as EQ, it will be a lot less.
I also expect the lag to be slightly better in retail then beta simply because there will be less people per server AND the servers will be release builds, not debug builds.
