I’ll second that. Would it have been so hard to put the things on 18 hour schedules so that time compression didn’t really seem to be happening, but over time you get to see daylight if you only play in the evenings?
Are there mobs/quests/whatnot that only occur during some point in the day? I have to say I can understand the desire for “realism” in games, but this particular decision just boggles me. It feels like “You know what’d be cool…” came down from the Boss’ nephew or something.
The real-time clock is about the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen built into the core design intentionally in a MMO. Fuck that thing.
It’s like a Verant decision… everybody hates it, there’s no reason for it to be there, and yet it persists for no apparent reason.
Hell, if time was a 2:1 ratio that would be fine. At least it would invert every 24 hours. Then I’d play a day of light, a day of dark during my usual 7pm-11pm time slot.
I got a free trial of everquest very late so I didn’t really see this, but now I too have seen 10 people camping one quest mob! (and griefers who don’t need to kill him but camp him anyway and laugh about it)
I recognize everquest in the gameplay though. And it’s boring me out of my skull. Back to planetside I guess! :)
I hate the real time clock too. Believe it or not though, in the closed beta, the for/against breakdown regarding it was close to 50/50. Blizzard never defended it beyond ‘We think its cool’. They also never answered the main point of the nay vote, that being ‘Its always dark/light when I play because I can only play during certain times’.
olaf
The question is - just how many people are in the open beta right now? I heard rumours of 400,000, but I could be wrong.
If that IS the case, then that’s bloody insane numbers, and no wonder everyone is seeing not much of anything. Personally I’m on PST 10 and I don’t have much trouble finding stuff to kill and that, though I’m lvl 22 now.
but again if the numbers are nearly as close to the 400,00 I heard mentioned, then I don’t think you would be expecting that many people in the opening weeks.
The visibility is the same for night and day. All that really changes is the coloring of the world in some small ways.
The WoW website is reporting they had more than 500,000 signups for the open beta. I wonder how many they would have had if they hadn’t capped it, and how many accounts they will have the first week.
My impression is that the langauge on the sitsuggests these are all new accounts, and don’t include the closed beta acccounts that were carried over; if that’s right then the number of active accounts is even higher. Does anyone know how many closed beta accounts there were?
Right now I see 42 US servers, and I think the upper bound they were shooting for is 5K/server, with 3k being more normal. So if they regulalry get 200K people online they will need more servers, what is the usual map from accounts to peak population?
I’m playing on Test 26 and the lag is not too bad. I had a stress test character on Test 5 and it was bad.
My problem is that I can’t seem to exit the program without a freeze. I can log out okay but whether I choose Quit from the character select screen or just Exit from the game either way it freezes and I have to either Alt-Tab out and end the process or just reboot my computer.
I’m new to MMORPG’s so, other than that, I’m having a blast.
The visibility is the same for night and day. All that really changes is the coloring of the world in some small ways.[/quote]
Dont get me wrong, I can see fine at night. There is a difference between night and day though. And it is annoying that it is night time in Azeroth 90% of the time for me.
olaf
Not a perfect solution, but if you are on the east coast, play on a pacific server. 3 extra hours of daylight, right? The other direction is pretty hosed, of course.
I agree with Olaf, there is a big difference between day and night in how it looks. Running around in Durotar during the daytime is almost like staring at the sun – but in a good way. At night it’s much different, even though the visibility is still “fine.”
Personally, I think the real-time clock is lame. :(
So does anyone have any info on the serious lag problem and server outages they are having? Is this all part of some testing master plan? Are they overwhelmed by the demand? All of the above?
I have to say, with commercial release only 9 days away, this level of instability and lag is troubling. Even if its intentional I have to think its a big marketing mistake: I mean you can patiently explain that it’s still beta, but with 500,000 participants it’s also a gigantic marketing/promo. And right now they are promoting lag, instability and a broken login.
As much as I have looked forward to this game, if these problems persist through the end of the open beta, I won’t have sufficient faith to buy the game on opening day. I don’t have a pre-order so I will just await news, unless the beta improves markedly in performance in the next week or so.
Dan
So? The title and the hype (and also the quality) is too high to care about this stuff.
If at the actual release they’ll do well the lag they have right now will be just a way to build the suspense.
A number of inquiries have come in about the lag issues on some of the servers, so we want to take some time to provide more in-depth information for you. Some of you might be surprised to learn that the lag you’re experiencing is an expected and necessary part of the open beta test. Contrary to what some of you might believe, the open beta test is intended as a massive stress test, and not just a free demo of the game prior to launch.
Having hundreds of thousands of testers playing the game at this time lets us analyze how well our server infrastructure – made up of the best, most up-to-date hardware available – can handle extremely large server populations. In fact, the open beta test is allowing us to simulate having an even greater number of testers spread across even more servers than we currently have up. In terms of concurrency, we’re already seeing servers with twice as much population as we had during the closed beta test, and our total overall concurrency, across all servers, is already rivaling that of the most popular MMORPGs currently available. Keep in mind, also, that this population is distributed across a relatively small number of servers – again, for the exact purpose of stress testing them.
from: World of Warcraft Forums
Yeah Sharpe. It’s exactly what you think. They’re saying this is to test the elasticity of their hardware and software right now. Whether they’re lieing or telling the truth we’ll know come retail.
I’ll probably buy the game opening day regardless (because I’m an unapologetic fanboy). I just might not play it that much if can’t clamp down on the lag issues while it’s costing me money. Hopefully they really are just testing. I need a good MMO, and WoW fits the bill.
It’s a lie. There were more players per server during the first stress test. Someone at blizzard screwed the pooch regarding the item database server.
Maybe. But I very seriously doubt that one “server” is actually one machine. So they could give a world more machines to reduce the lag. And come retail they probably will.
As a consumer, my test will be pretty simple: if this is just a large scale stress test and they can fix the lag at will, then they need to fix it for the last 3 or 4 days of the open beta. If they finish the beta with a few days of relative stability and reliability, then I’ll have enough faith to purchase and play immediately. If these problems persist through beta, then I will likely wait for actual feedback and not buy on opening day. If the problems persist after release, then I’ll have to make a hard choice. I want to play this game: I like almost everything about the game other than the painful lag, and I’ve been waiting for it for a long time. I also have friends who intend to play immediately.
But I’ve got to say, life is too short to play with the kind of lag and server login problems I’ve had for the last 4 days. There’s a lot of games out. Will I be disciplined enough to eschew a laggy WoW and play other, better performing games instead? Or I will give in to fanboy addiction and play anyway?
Regardless, if the game remains this laggy, then even if I play initially I will likely burn out swiftly and not remain a subscriber for long.
If this lag is not fixable, then Blizzard is banking on fanboy addiction. Which may be a safe bet in the short run for sales, but is an absolutely terrible bet for long term subscriptions.
The reason the lag bothers me so much is that I was in both stress tests and there was practically NO lag, nothing at all comparable to the last few days. And it was my impression that the number of players per server was in fact very very high (fewer players but far fewer servers) - in fact based on the number of players I see running around in zones, I’d say the current loading per server is no higher than the last stress test.
So what is causing this massive lag now? If its testing, why didn’t testing of this sort occur during the actual designated stress test period? The logical assumption is that in fact its not testing but is a problem of scale with 500K customers. And since they will likely sell 500K boxes in a few days, that bodes ill for release.
We’ll see. They could easily restore my confidence by finishing the beta with a stable product. If they persist in lag through the end of beta and use the excuse of “we’re still testing! everything will be fiiiiine on release! Ignore the man behind the curtain” then I’m going to be highly skeptical.
Dan
I wonder what their definition of ‘best most up to date hardware is’? I would love to know. I am sure there is a way I could find out, but I am too lazy. Anyone know offhand? I know they arent volunteering that info but it shouldnt be that hard to determine at least what kind of OS their front end is running.
The current stability situation is interesting. It seems likely to me that crazy demand is causing the problems…but I wonder if their backend item server is just a single ‘system’. If so, that was an assinine decision given all of the problems with the item server back when there was just ONE beta server. When I got into the beta in late March, there was loot lag on and off for weeks during peak playtimes.
olaf
Realm is full, position in queue: 15
At 7:35 on Sunday morning.
I don’t know how they’re spinning this on the forums yet, but I see it not going over well.
Isn’t one of the points of this open beta to stress the servers? Is it not in Blizzard’s interests to get and keep the servers as full as possible, at least for the duration of this test? If they believe the demand is really going to remain that high, might they not add more servers for the retail release?
I’m speculating here, I admit, but it just seems weird to me that people are complaining that the servers are running at or above capacity during the part of the development that is intended to stress the servers.