I logged in, tried to check my mail. Could not get my mail - “Internal Mail Database Error”. Auction House not working. Cannot enter an instance. Cannot log out (had to Alt+F4 to get out).
Bah. Guess I’ll go out now and try playing later tonight.
Archive for January, 2005 Page 2 of 4
Well, he writes anyway:
I am sure that many of you are wondering what has been going on with the World of Warcraft servers, as there was another period of extended downtime during peak hours last night. I want to be as candid as possible with you, in the hopes that I can both shed light on the situation and reassure you that we are doing our utmost to ensure that these problems get fixed.
Last night, we took down 20 realms for emergency maintenance. The boat between Menethil Harbor and Auberdine was disappearing intermittently, dropping players into the ocean and crashing the servers. Passengers on this boat who were disconnected and tried to reconnect would crash the server yet again when trying to log on. We knew that this was unacceptable and immediately took down the servers when we discovered the problem in order to implement a fix. That occurred at 6 p.m. PST, but unfortunately, complications arose while we were testing our fix, and we were unable to bring those servers back up until more than a few hours later in the night.
Players on these same 20 realms also experienced service interruptions earlier in the week, following last Thursday�s extended server maintenance. While last night�s downtime was unrelated to the issues in the days prior, this is no consolation to those of you that were unable to play. Therefore, in addition to the three days already credited to these players as a result of the server issues earlier in the week, players on these realms will be receiving an additional four-day credit to their accounts. The credit will appear as a total of seven free days on your current billing statement (or on your trial period for those who recently purchased the game).
I want to take this opportunity to say that we will do everything possible to ensure that unexpected downtime like this does not occur in the future and that if it is necessary, we will do everything possible to give you better warning and keep you informed. In the future, we will avoid doing maintenance during peak hours, unless no other alternative presents itself. When complications occur that could impact your playing time, we will provide that information as well. We failed to do this last night, and I assure you that we are making changes to ensure that we do a better job of communicating with our players next time.
I want to extend my personal and heartfelt apology for the problems that some of you have been experiencing on our servers. We remain committed to delivering the best possible service for you and will continue to work around the clock to ensure that we provide an experience that you and I have to come to expect from Blizzard games.
Sincerely,
Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment
I know that levels have been a part of MMOGs for a good long while now, with a rare exception, but I am sick of them. I guess the devs think they need those small rewards to keep people playing. Everquest has levels and it was/is popular so all the rest of them have to copy it, I guess.
I logged into WoW last night after a few days away. I looked at my XP bar and noted that it was just barely into level 24. That means I have two levels before I get any new skills. I just did not want to get started again. I felt the treadmill weigh heavily upon my gaming soul. I started to think of playing the game as levelling and it made me sick. The magic was wearing thin.
Had a chat with an in-game friend and he put me focused back on the fun. He encouraged me to just pick a quest and “get into” solving it. Have some fun, forget about XP and your level, it does not really matter. So I decided to try one of the quests I had not yet done because it required I run into enemy lands and I just didn’t feel like it before.
I gave it a go, had some fun exploring and avoiding the other faction guards. Eventually I found the area I was looking for and after about 30 minutes of strategic pulling and killing and moving through the area I was able to reach my objective. My heart was pounding and I had a smile on my face.
I didn’t level (still 24) but I also did not look at my XP bar the whole time. I had fun, so that was all that mattered.
SOE has released an Everquest 2 offline character creator to the general public. I played around with it some last night and was mildy impressed. I felt the customization did not have a lot of obvious effect, but at least there were lots of races to choose from.
Still, better than the meager choices World of Warcraft gives you.
World of Warcraft has announced some details about the recent server upgrades. I have snipped the important stuff below.
Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.
In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.
The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.
They also announced a 48 hour free time extension:
We do appreciate your patience and enthusiasm about playing World of Warcraft, and we regret that you faced periods of high traffic this past weekend that caused some of you to have a poor game experience. So, due to the extended nature of the server issues, we will be providing a free 48-hour extension of play time. As with previous extensions, this will show up as free extra time on your current billing period (or on your trial period, for those of you who purchased the game recently). We hope you’ll bear with us as we continue to work hard on implementing changes for long-term stability.
This brings my free time up to 8 days.
Dungeons & Dragons Online has the January Producer Letter up. To sum up, beta will begin in the next month or two, stay tuned.
In other news, my Shaman eeked out level 24 tonight by finally doing Ragefire Chasm. Whew.
I must have earned about 10 new skills. I sort of wish they would divide them up so I could get some skills at every level instead of a bunch every other level. Oh well.
Part 2 of the Battlegrounds plan is up at the WoW site.
I just doesn’t stop today. Posted on the official WoW forums:
[Realm/Login]
All levels of the organization are working to address this. I would like to stress that real progress is being made on the issue behind the scenes, and again, we are all fans of the game and want as much to rid of these problems as much as our players. I know the perception is contrary to that, but there aren’t enough words to express how much dedication, from the president on down, is going into resolving these issues.[Character migration]
We plan to offer a 1 time migration from high population realms to low peopulation realms to ease the overcrowding. It is currently undergoing implementation/testing. More details to follow.
Both are very good news for the players. The sooner they implement these fixes, the better. As long as they *are* fixes.