Aerie Peak is Full

Like I was saying in AP chat a few days ago, Blizzard's server infrastructure is shit, which is why it always fucks up with expansion releases, and the massive influx of players.

Here's what current server technology allows (eg. Red5's FireFall):

  • You do not have realms that players are permanently assigned to, unless they pay for a tranfer to another home realm, instead you have a number of server instances, and players will be assigned to the one that has available space (althouth you will also be assigned to a server where your army or friends play), trying to keep the population on each instance at optimal.
  • When too many players join the game, extra instances of the game server are started up in the cloud, increasing the pool to which players can be assigned. Servers can be shut down when the player numbers drop too, without a server ending up with very low numbers over the course of a few month (if the number of players in a server drop below a threshold, they will log in somewhere else the next time they play, so a server can be offlined in 24 hours if it starts getting low player numbers).
  • When server maintenance happens that doesn't require players to download a patch, then you create a few new instances of the server, tell the players on the same number of servers that their server will shut down in X minutes, and then let them type /leavezone to transfer to the new, empty servers. No waiting for servers to come back online after the maintenance, or even for them to restart, just a loading screen.
  • When the game gets a patch, the patch will be applied in the same way, to a group of new servers. Once that's done people who log in will have to patch their client, and be assigned to the new servers. People who are currently playing the game though don't need to log out, because they are allowed to keep playing on servers running the old version.
  • The only thing that will require the whole server pool to go offline is an expansion level patch, but that will also require players to download several gigabytes, so they'd have to be offline anyway.

Now look at Blizzard, with their old methods:
  • You have to pay to transfer to another server, even if it's because the one you are on is too full, near empty, or if you're on a PvP server the factions are completely unbalanced. They haven't offered free transfers in years, and because there are separate named realms, they can't merge and create new servers on the fly to cope with these changes to player numbers. In fact merging groups of servers, or offlining ones that are empty and transferring their players elsewhere is likely to require serious downtime.

I guess they're loving those transfer fees too much to put any of their millions towards upgrading their server infrastructure, so that we don't get the same reccuring problem of 'buy expansion, can't log in' for thousands upon thousands of players.

I can just imagine some newish employee at Blizzard asking the question:

"Are we going to provision any new servers for the huge influx of players we're going to have, with all these sales of the expansion we've had?

And someone who's been there a lot longer:

"Fuck 'em, we've got their money."
 
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Yasueh said:
I guess they're loving those transfer fees too much to put any of their millions towards upgrading their server infrastructure, so that we don't get the same reccuring problem of 'buy expansion, can't log in' for thousands upon thousands of players.

I can just imagine some newish employee at Blizzard asking the question:

"Are we going to provision any new servers for the huge influx of players were going to have, with all these sale of the expansion we've had?

And someone who's been there a lot longer:

"Fuck 'em, we've got their money."
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It's kind of like the practice of "planned obsolescence", where a company will make a product knowing exactly what the shelf life is. Because they designed the product to fail so the consumer has to buy new. Or cell phone adapters never working on other phones. It's the consumer's fault for reinforcing bad business practice and not demanding quality lasting products imho.
 
Activate said:
It's kind of like the practice of "planned obsolescence", where a company will make a product knowing exactly what the shelf life is. Because they designed the product to fail so the consumer has to buy new. Or cell phone adapters never working on other phones. It's the consumer's fault for reinforcing bad business practice and not demanding quality lasting products imho.
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We've been demanding quality servers and gameplay experience for years.
 
Roboartist said:
We've been demanding quality servers and gameplay experience for years.
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Yes but has the majority? Like Yasueh said they're probably more than content with the transfer fees.
 
The problem is that for the most part Blizzard's servers work just fine and they aren't going to add new just for the few days or maybe a week that this will be a problem. This particular problem does crop up, about once every two years when a new expansion pops up, it makes zero business sense to upgrade your hardware for one weeks worth of stuff every two years.

Firefall's code allows for these types of server issues to be circumvented but I doubt Blizzard's does or they would probably have implemented something similar previous to this as it makes little sense for them not to. I'd imagine they are having huge headaches at corporate and at the server farms right now, lots of angry employees being told they have to stay late to fix this and such.

They've upgraded their hardware a few times over the years so the only thing I can think of is that the underlying software from the early 2000s either can't be modded for this sort of thing or it would require a rework of all the server code entirely, which might not be something they want to tackle. I mean, they can't even keep up promises of new content as regularly as they keep saying they want to, I doubt they'd go rewrite server code that works 90+% of the time.

It IS crap that they can't do something about it, even a tiny company like CCP, running EVE only does maintenance for about a half hour, granted it's every day but ALL their players (500,000 subscriptions) play on a single server (except China).

EDIT: Downtime to address issues tomorrow at 5am PST expected to last 4 hours. Source
 
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The kind of money WoW brings in, Blizzard could very easily rebuild and improve upon their server APIs to work on a cloud, if they ever saw any of that money. Trouble is WoW is corporate owned, so development is getting a lot less of the profits than it would in a less established game.

CCP are privately owned, so they don't have a bunch of shareholder scum sucking up all the profits, and the real majority investors (their subscribers) get to see a much better return on their investment, in terms of the game seeing a lot of development (fixes, upgrades and systems development, instead of just putting new content on top of old systems, like is pretty much all you see in WoW).
 
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Yasueh said:
The kind of money WoW brings in, Blizzard could very easily rebuild and improve upon their server APIs to work on a cloud, if they ever saw any of that money. Trouble is WoW is corporate owned, so development is getting a lot less of the profits than it would in a less established game.

CCP are privately owned, so they don't have a bunch of shareholder scum sucking up all the profits, and the real majority investors (their subscribers) get to see a much better return on their investment, in terms of the game seeing a lot of development (fixes, upgrades and systems development, instead of just putting new content on top of old systems, like is pretty much all you see in WoW).
Click to expand...

They have developed new systems, although alot of them are made with cutting costs in mind. Part of the issue with the bumpy launch last night was that we were being DDoS'd on top of the other launch bugs. It is beyond annoying that they went through the trouble of permanently merging realms that were "empty" only to find that you cant even log into most realms because they're full now that WoD has launched. I remember reading how CRZ'd realms/zones would automatically unlink from each other when they filled up, making room for each server. That seems more useful than merging servers imho.
 
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Juno0 said:
"We’re continuing to maintain a lowered realm population cap to help with the stability, which is resulting in increased queue times."

learn to read other WoW related sites than raging at "P2Ps" other how unfair it is you don't pay for this video game and stop spreading bollocks about "proitozing" p2ps, a queue is a queue.

F2P's always playing the victim card xD

peace.
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I sorry that you saw my post as trying complain and rage at p2p's. I was simply explaining to Naq about why his que position keeps climbing, I don't know why you are having a go at me. Also I was in que on both my f2p account and p2p account.
 
Lluyd said:
I don't know why you are having a go at me.
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He has a go at everyone, it's sort of his schtick. He's also barking up the wrong tree in this case, because it's a fact that F2Ps are put behind P2Ps when there's a login queue... anyone who plays F2P knows this. From his response, he clearly doesn't know this, and so his only assumption is that you're raging (you weren't) and his only response is to rage back.
 
Rollop said:
They have developed new systems, although alot of them are made with cutting costs in mind. Part of the issue with the bumpy launch last night was that we were being DDoS'd on top of the other launch bugs. It is beyond annoying that they went through the trouble of permanently merging realms that were "empty" only to find that you cant even log into most realms because they're full now that WoD has launched. I remember reading how CRZ'd realms/zones would automatically unlink from each other when they filled up, making room for each server. That seems more useful than merging servers imho.
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I think the Ddos is really just the large amount of players trying to login in and play.
 
Lluyd said:
I sorry that you saw my post as trying complain and rage at p2p's. I was simply explaining to Naq about why his que position keeps climbing, I don't know why you are having a go at me. Also I was in que on both my f2p account and p2p account.
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im not having ago at you bud, just having your own assumption how f2ps think they're are being victimised by being "lowered" in queue because P2Ps get prio and then start spreading it as fact seems absurd to me.
 
lmao i cant help but to laugh. Bought me a new laptop ready to play wow took a while to download now i have to wait in que for a estimated 58 min. smh.. is this only for ap?
 
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