Dear Blizzard : Server issues

Dear Blizzard,

For whatever reason, your game has been experiencing multiple server related issues in the past few weeks. Many players have seen themselves offline an abnormal amount of time, and for no apparent reason. Some realms have been brought offline for emergency maintenance and stayed that way for nearly a day. Other realms are seeing themselves either reset or become sundered down with mass disconnects that make any serious play almost impossible.

Just the other night I was happily grouping with some friends over on Eldre'Thalas, when all of the sudden the server decided to boot me, and only me, from the game. Lo and behold, when trying to log back in I get stuck on authentication. My other two accounts would not work either. What makes this even better is that Eldre'Thalas wasn't even on the list of realms under emergency maintenance.

You've been giving us all this downtime lately, so I'm wondering, what are you going to do to fix it? Or baring a fix, at least make our $15 a month worth it.

I do hope that you can fix your servers. I'm not sure if it's your problem, or if the issues lies with AT&T or one of your other data center providers (because you've said that the PTR does not cause the issues... you were telling the truth, right?). Nonetheless, you can do something about this. When you start seeing thousands upon thousands of posts, you'd think that you would come out and say something about what you're doing to fix the issue, but no such luck. Perhaps you are fixing things behind the scenes and not telling all of us 10,000,000 subscribers. So please fix the servers, or at the very least, communicate with us. And communicate often.

Even if you do manage to fix the servers, I would ask that you do one other thing: give us some free game time. Maybe you can even call it "Free Game Tyme" to be cute in the way that only a large entertainment corporation can be cute. I'm sure that you can remember back in the day when you gave away a free day or two of game time when things weren't working. This would really be nice of you to do now, since so many of your loyal customers are getting quite upset with the constant disconnects.

I hope that you can find the time to address these issues. And hey, if you're a lowly Blizzard employee reading this letter, maybe forward this to your boss? There's an "Email This" link at the bottom of the post you can use, it's real quick and easy.

If you continue reading this online letter, I'm sure our readers, and your paying subscribers, have some very insightful solutions and comments on what they think you can do to fix the situation.

Yours truly,

Adam.