WoW had a rough weekend. The lack of stability has been so bad that Penny Arcade has decided to revoke their 2004 Game of the Year award. This, of course, comes on the heels of their concurrency announcement and amidst rumors that WoW is being pulled from shelves in order to limit growth.
With some shards having long queues and no method yet in place to transfer characters between them, I wonder how long it will be before WoW offers a "pay money to switch shards" option. Expect guild migration to quieter shards if that option appears before their scaling problems are solved.
One can almost hear Jessica Mulligan crying "It's a serviiiice, not a gaaaame... a serviiice, not a gaaame...a serviiice..."
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Jan 18, 2005 at 11:31
I found this comment to be extrememly telling: "I still maintain that in the Massive genre it provides the greatest reward for the least nuisance"
So many other related titles have been amazing masterpieces full of complex innerworkings and delicately balanced relationships. Sometimes, I feel that too much time and effort was put into the balancing and complexity... and not enough was put into minimizing user frustrations. SWG was an amazing expierience, a grand and lofty universe full of wonderful toys to play with. I eventually left the game because of minor (yet chaffing and repetitious) bugs and nuisances with the Bouty Hunter and Droid Engineer sub-systems. Even the delicious taste of spanking new content was dulled by the sourness of the ever-present pesky annoyances.
Could "Reward vs. Nuisance" be a new metric for which to measure predicted MMORPG success on?
Posted by: Yak | Jan 18, 2005 at 13:01
I'm a bit puzzled not by the stability issues but by increasing evidence of a communicative breakdown on Blizzard's part. They've become increasingly evasive about technical issues and problems: I'm starting to see some of the same problems I saw with SWG's official forums early on, where the developers except for Raph Koster would just kind of vanish as a communicative presence for weeks on end and leave Raph to stick his fingers desperately in the dike, often about questions that were at a level of design detail below what he was knowledgeable about.
Blizzard's live management are also beginning to fall into what I personally regard as the worst live management habit, which is making hasty changes to game mechanics in order to compel players to conform to their projected vision of how they would play rather than adapting game content in order to compensate for player tactics. When emergent patterns of gameplay stop being an expectation and start being a problem to be solved or controlled, you have an indirect signal that a live management team is getting in over their heads.
It's an especially peculiar thing in this case precisely because of this point about reward vs. nuisance. The entire design philosophy of WoW is to reward a wide variety of playstyles, streamline the mechanics, and be non-punitive about access to content. If the Blizzard live management team starts down the path of trying to pound round player pegs into square design holes through stealth nerfs and so on, they're really going to regret it. They could lose much of what they gained both in terms of the basic design principles of the game and in terms of customer goodwill.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Jan 18, 2005 at 14:40
"One can almost hear Jessica Mulligan crying "It's a serviiiice, not a gaaaame... a serviiice, not a gaaame...a serviiice...""
Ed, make that "...not *just* a gaaaame..." and I'm right there with you, :D.
Having been in their position, I have great sympathy for Blizzard. Since they are competitors, however, only a little.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Jan 18, 2005 at 14:49
On the availability issue when I was in the states over xmas I found WoW real difficult to get hold of. Game and Computer stores had all run out and had no idea when they were getting new stock. Eventually I found a copy cunningly hidden in the back of a Mac store – who knew one would find and MMO there!
Jessica > Having been in their position, I have great sympathy for Blizzard. Since they are competitors, however, only a little.
I know I’m taking this comment a little toooo seriously, but at this stage of the market isn’t it good that for the industry if new MMOs, particularly the big name ones, are good – that way n00bs are less likely to be put off and the total market expands.
Posted by: ren | Jan 18, 2005 at 15:02
From a post made by Blizzard on their forums:
[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.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-general&T=887946&P=1
(of course, as I type this, the Blizzard forums are down)
Posted by: stesmo | Jan 18, 2005 at 15:59
Blizzard has a much lengthier description of the current issues up now, and a 48-hour compensation to current players. So that's good: they seem to be waking up to their communication issues.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Jan 18, 2005 at 17:02
These weird "compensations" they keep coming up with really make no sense. THe game was almost completely unplayable for the first 2-3 weeks, and then they announced a tiered system of credits with the maximum being 3 days.
Wtf???
Now they have servers down for 4-24 hours at a time and only occasionally, and only for a few servers, do they give credits.
But here's a reality check: When 20 servers are down for some kind of problem, all those people flood the other servers causing enormous lag, mail stops functioning, the auction house stops functioning, etc. In short, everyone is affected.
Furthermore, it is well known that they wanted to release this game in 1/2Q but rushed it to meet the EQ2 release. Bearing that in mind, they should be happy that got the $30 million infusion in sales and be a lot more generous with the monthly fee credits until they have a fully functional game.
I tried to login this morning and it was down for another 4 hours. This is becoming an almost daily occurrence.
Emails about major issues (like being unable to login because the instance you went linkdead in somehow no longer exists) often go a week or more without being answered (that one happened to me).
They have some SEVERE problems that sadly seem to be getting worse, not better. As noted, their communication about these issues is almost non existent and their remedies are horriblely lacking.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 18, 2005 at 18:43
> Timothy Burke wrote:
> Blizzard's live management are also beginning to
> fall into what I personally regard as the worst live
> management habit, which is making hasty changes to
> game mechanics in order to compel players to conform
> to their projected vision of how they would play rather
> than adapting game content in order to compensate for
> player tactics. When emergent patterns of gameplay stop
> being an expectation and start being a problem to be
> solved or controlled, you have an indirect signal that
> a live management team is getting in over their heads.
Very well said. This is something that game developers always have to remind themselves. It is very, very tempting to "nerf" when you see someone beating an area or a challenge you created by a means you did not expect.
That temptation has to be beaten over the head with the heaviest object you can lift.
Yes, exploits have to be fixed. Yes, bugs have to be fixed. Yes, if something is unbalancing you have to take steps. No, you do not have to make the most heavy handed, hasty, quick fix possible.
I imagine you are referring to the recent "soothe/mind " spells that were nerfed. For those who don't play WoW, essentially there was one major dungeon (instance) where a druid or a priest could use an aggro range reduction power to get all the way to the final boss without having to fight anything. This would take about 15 minutes. Then, becuase of poor AI on that boss, a priest (in particular, but also other classes) could kill the boss solely with safely cast DoTs.
Of course, people would then farm this instance.
The problem was only occuring in this one zone. Instead of fixing the zone or fixing the boss, these abilities were nerfed to the point that they have virtually no reason to be used at all now.
This worries me because it reminds me of some of the ways they nerfed things in Diablo 2 which resulted in learning how to mod the game. D2 had no monthly fee and it was exceptionally easy to just make a new character. An MMORPG is not the same and should not be balanced in the same manner.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 18, 2005 at 18:52
ren: "I know I’m taking this comment a little toooo seriously, but at this stage of the market isn’t it good that for the industry if new MMOs, particularly the big name ones, are good – that way n00bs are less likely to be put off and the total market expands."
Yeah, you're taking it a little too seriously, (grin). I've said before that I hope they get 1 million subs in this country, because it is good for all of us.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Jan 18, 2005 at 20:35
They are just noobs in this genre. Eventually they'll catch up.
For now they managed to build a wonderful game and a poor mmorpg. With the time they may improve. Depending on their dedication.
Posted by: Abalieno | Jan 19, 2005 at 02:08
On the communication problem.
Before retail it was asked if they would be hiring central customer representatives to monitor the web boards and answer questions, aka a central mouth piece.
They said this would not be the case because policy was not to have a make popular a single person. Smart policy when you are not charging people for a service, but with a game where the community is a main item it just leads to poor communication.
Posted by: will dieterich | Jan 19, 2005 at 04:13
> [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.
Moving people off the overcrowded servers is obviously a good idea. But the devil is in the detail; moves are hard to get right. There is an obvious barrier to exit your old server: you lose most of your social network. Only if there is some obvious advantage of the destination server (like it being brand-new), are people tempted to move. Otherwise the risk is high that most people will just think that the crowding will get better by the *other* people moving, and in the end nothing happens.
Besides offering new servers instead of old, less-crowded ones, Blizzard also has to offer the possibility for guilds to move with all members to the same place. If there is no special command for guild moves, guilds will simply stay put. The risk of some people sleeping and missing the move, or being opposed to it, and then having the guild split over several servers, is just too big.
Posted by: Tobold | Jan 19, 2005 at 05:51
Did Blizzard hire many people on the WoW team that had experience making and running MMOGs before? The impression I got was they did a lot of it on their own, which if true, means it is not surprising that they made a bunch of the same mistakes everyone else does. On the other hand, it's also pretty remarkable that they put together such a good design.
Bruce
Posted by: SirBruce | Jan 19, 2005 at 07:03
I just don't understand it. Are all of these connectivity problems and lag problems happening just on the high population servers? I would consider myself a semi-casual player (/played 5 days in 3 weeks) and I have only experienced lag and disconnects on one or two occasions and they were always fixed when I logged back on. I play on a medium population server. Perhaps it is just the people on high pop servers who are getting the bad deal?
Posted by: Kolath | Jan 19, 2005 at 09:47
I thought my server (Argent Dawn) was one of the worst and I know it's highly populated, yet it wasn't one of the ones taken down for the 16-hour maintenance and I continually hear about other "high population servers." At the same time, occasionally we have horrible lag and connection problems. Horrible. I *wish* they'd taken our server down for 16 hours. You know it's bad when the players are upset that their server *wasn't* taken down and worked on for an extensive period of time.
IMO, Blizzard needs to do two things. First, more servers. Allowing players to shift around isn't going to help too much if, in the end, you're still going to be left with lots of "full" or "high population" servers. I for one am unwilling to transfer my character unless I know I'm moving to a lower-populated server that will remain lower-populated. Catch-22. Second, (obviously) Blizzard needs to work on stability and significant bugs. E.g. The gee-I-can't-swim-in-deep-waters-though-my-boat-dumped-me-here-as-I-was-trying-to-change-continents bug. Or the 5-minute rollbacks from server crashes that cost me 2 Blacksmith skillups.
If Blizzard can manage to stabilize WoW, the sky's the limit. Until that time, only bad press and reductions lie in their future.
Posted by: Alan | Jan 19, 2005 at 14:39
> IMO, Blizzard needs to do two things. First, more servers.
I wrote this on many message boards but it's a recurring topic: adding more servers INCREASES the problem, it doesn't reduce it.
There are two problems here (three actually). The first is what everyone sees and it's about servers too crowded. The second is less considered right now because it will become serious with the time. It's about servers too empty to be playable.
The problem is that the PvP servers are BOTH those too overcrowded and those completely empty of players. They are at the top of the list with an 800 player queue (when things are good) and at the bottom with 300 or so players logged in.
The point is that there are servers completely packed up and there are servers completely empty. It's obvious that the problem isn't *capacity*. The problem is the *balance*. Or better: how you spread uniformly the players on all the servers.
It's not a case that the PvP servers are or overcrowded or desolated. The players are more intelligent than Blizzard and they know that without a very active servers there's no fun. So they search where they can be sure that they'll find players in the long run. New players continue to pick the servers more popular becauser they are sure that they can find a valid community.
With the time the overcrowding problems will decrease and the balance will lean toward the second problems. There will be a 70% of the PvP servers completely obsolete and unplayable because there aren't enough players to group with and get involved in the PvP.
So, again, this is a *design* problem that Blizzard completely overlooked (because they are MMORPG-noobs). I suggested my personal solution but it's obvious that now it's too late.
The more time will pass and the more these problems will increase.
I won't discuss the third problem I hinted because it requires me to write more than I'd like to but I'll paste here a comment from Darniaq that starts to define it:
Have fun.
Posted by: Abalieno | Jan 19, 2005 at 15:21
I have been playing WoW since release day on the Silvermoon server. We didn't have all the problems that others have talked about. Launch was a dream for us. Only recently have we started to get some rough performance and odd world events due to it. The scheduled downtime has been the same as everyone else. I don't count scheduled downtime against them as much.
Note that Silvermoon was initally listed as a Low population server, now it's Medium.
How does one pick a server when presented with a 2 page list of them? I picked it based on timezone and the fact that it was listed as Low population. It seems to have worked. The lower population downside is that there are less people to buy and sell tradegoods with.
Posted by: Adam Miller | Jan 19, 2005 at 19:44
I have noticed that Adam is correct; most of the lag seems to be related to server pops. As the server that I play on has moved from Low to Medium in population density, the amount of lag that is seen has increased steadily as well. We are now experiencing about 1 to 2 lag spikes per hour where the game is unplayable for 1-3 minutes at a time. In my experience, the lag is directly tied to the item DB - any time items are being displayed (as in the Auction House or bag slots), added to (as in creation of soul shards or crafted objects) or deleted, chances are good that the lag will freeze you in place for a good chunk of time. Since other events are still transpiring in the world as you wait (mobs attacking, people chatting, etc.) this can be deadly "in the field". It is zone-wide too, as numerous people observe it at the same time.
The part of Blizzards design that mystifies me is how they have tied their login servers to their bulletin boards as well as all their servers. Consequently, when the login servers crash or are taken down (almost daily in the past 3 weeks), NOTHING is accessible and the problem can't even be reported.
Posted by: Iamblichos | Jan 20, 2005 at 14:21
A new round of maintenance has been inspired by boats, of all things. This link though is fourth series, though I can’t find the first one . I don’t know what sort of personnel or procedural shifts have happened at Blizzard. But within the past 48 hours, they have been more verbose and more detailed about these issues and their steps to correct than I’ve seen even during beta.
It’s good to see Blizzard catch up with the concepts of realtime community management in their service.
But the factional density issue remains, and will so for some time. I really don’t know why there’s so much more interest in Alliance than Horde. Many theories, but they’re all believable, even those that contradict each other. I do feel it's a combination of players wanting to back a winner, perpetuating the cycle, and the Alliance really feeling more content rich.
Posted by: Darniaq | Jan 20, 2005 at 22:17
I have a very cynical view about tying the login servers to the forums, but considering that there are community-relations experts in the MMOG field who've made this suggestion to other developers, I don't think it's unwarrented. Namely, it's deliberate: when the game crashes, you're trying to keep people off the boards. Why? So you don't get ten thousand negative postings that feed off of each other and create a bad impression for the outside world.
The alternative is ineptitude, since from a functionality standpoint, it is indeed a dumb thing to do. When the game is down, I wouldn't necessarily want to complain--I might just use that time to go onto the forums and ask questions, make suggestions, so on.
-----
Blizzard does seem to have gotten the message on communication. Good for them. We'll see if they can keep it up.
-----
Server migration, in my opinion, may turn out to be a disaster if they're not careful. If they just allow people to flee high-population servers for low-population ones, it's just going to shift deck chairs on the Titanic. Here's what I suspect could happen. You say to a high-pop server, "You can move to any one of the following ten low-population servers." The biggest guilds on the high pop server will debate for a while. They'll look for a server where they feel they can come in and displace whatever the dominant guild of the moment is. They'll look for a server where they feel they can completely shift the Horde-Alliance numerical relation. Then they'll pick a server and move. Word will get out of where they're moving to. Other guilds that have an established relationship to that big guild--rival, ally or enemy--will want to move with them. Suddenly bingo, low-pop server becomes high-pop servers AND the former inhabitants of the low-pop server are now incredibly angry and alienated because the culture of their server has been hugely transformed.
The alternative is you allow people to migrate but you don't allow them to choose where they'll go, or you do it through some kind of application process. This will be slow, unwieldy and appeal only to low-level players or high-levels who are unguilded.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Jan 21, 2005 at 10:27
Another issues is that guild sizes are increasing to the point that a guild may field 10-25% of the active players on a given server. Since the guilds are mostly either Alliance or Horde, the porportion gets higher per area.
The dynamic of this issues is much more complicated than what it appears on the surface. Nevertheless, silence is death in this case.
Posted by: magicback | Jan 22, 2005 at 11:35
> Darniaq wrote:
>
> But the factional density issue remains, and will
> so for some time. I really don’t know why there’s
> so much more interest in Alliance than Horde. Many
> theories, but they’re all believable, even those
> that contradict each other. I do feel it's a
> combination of players wanting to back a winner,
> perpetuating the cycle, and the Alliance really
> feeling more content rich.
I think it is a lot simpler than that. I believe there are two main reasons:
1) There are no "attractive" Horde races. There is a significant percentage of the population that likes to play attractive (aka "hot") characters. Horde has none. This is particularly true for the female character models. This deters a LOT of people from even considering Horde.
2) Horde has no tank. Warriors, frankly, stink. Alliance has the unique "paladin" class (Horde has "shaman" which is more of a ranged hybrid as a counter) which makes for an excellent tank. Thus, people who want to play a tank class only have one real option: ALLIANCE. I am sure I don't have to tell you that there are a lot of people who enjoy being tanks/melee fighters.
Make some attractive models for Horde and fix warriors and you take two HUGE steps towards fixing population balance.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 24, 2005 at 02:24