server-stability
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Warlords of Draenor's rocky launch saga and Reddit controversy continue
We've heard a lot of "it's a good problem to have" in regards to the struggles that World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor has faced this past week, as a huge influx of players have met laggy servers, lengthy queues, and DDoS attacks. But we're sure that Blizzard would prefer no problems, period, which is why the studio has been updating the community on an hourly basis regarding its efforts to stabilize the game. Blizzard says that it's currently monitoring the servers and has seen an improvement in performance around the world. In the past day, the studio has performed rolling restarts, hotfixes, and increased the population caps on various servers. Massively's own writers have had mixed experiences thus far; while we had to cancel Mike's Friday stream because of queues and the servers were down a large portion of Saturday, by Saturday night queues and lag issues were clearing up on some servers, like Bree's, no doubt thanks to increased capacity. But some gamers are taking their reaction to the extreme. The core moderator of the WoW subreddit shut that subreddit down last night in protest over his personal login difficulties. While the forums have since been restored with apologies from other Reddit mods, participants are still arguing over the events. "r/WoW shouldn't be a hostage," Blizzard bluename Zarhym admonished via Twitter.
Hotfixes for November 14 and realm stability update
Earlier this evening, community manager Bashiok provided an update on World of Warcraft's server stability issues. Warlords Launch Update We're making preparations for the Europe maintenance beginning in just an hour, and along with hardware upgrades we will be implementing some of the performance improvements we've been testing. One of these is a fairly large change to the way the game world is run by the servers-expanding the phasing tech used for the Tanaan intro experience to the entire continent of Draenor. This will allow us to run multiple copies of Draenor simultaneously, spreading out server population, while attempting to keep guilds and parties within the same copy. We're currently running tests of this tech on a few North American realms, and have found we're able to raise realm capacity by a significant amount. We'll continue to provide updates as we progress through the Europe maintenance, and prepare to apply the same changes on the Americas and Oceanic realms. source Running multiple instances of an overworld zone is a long-lived practice in MMO games in general, even dating back to games contemporary with the launch of WoW in 2004. Until now, Blizzard has tried to avoid implementing such a thing to preserve their philosophy of the game's social aspects -- the idea of a persistent world shared with other players. Now, for the sake of stability, Blizzard is finally implementing it. We could debate their philosophy given their implementation of phasing in questing, but that's not necessarily applicable when talking about instancing entire servers. Whether it's a temporary measure or not, time will tell. In addition, Blizzard has released a new round of hotfixes. Like yesterday's numerous hotfixes, many of these are aimed at questflow issues, and others at bugs in gameplay. You can find the hotfixes below.
Path of Exile developers discuss open beta success
Open betas are stressful for developers. Not just because it's the moment that the game is suddenly available for public discussion and evaluation, but also because it's time to see how well the infrastructure holds up under an onslaught of new players. Path of Exile's development team recently went through that stress, and in a new letter to the community, players and onlookers alike can see how the game weathered the transition. Here's the quick summary: Very well. At the time of the letter, the game's peak concurrency was at 56,700 players, more than had been expected but very close to what the servers could handle. The game struggled a bit with patch downloads due to the CDN system immediately after launch, and there have been some crashes with various realms, but by and large the team seems happy with how the game is going and with overall sales figures. If you want more of the hard details on what a 30-hour open beta launch day looks like, read the full letter. And then get back to clicking things for money and loot. [Thanks to tandarighttanon for the tip!]
Guild Wars 2 players suffer a server outage
Guild Wars 2 players were distressed last night to find themselves kicked from the game during loading screens and unable to log in. Shortly after the problems began, ArenaNet's community team started communicating about them via Twitter, saying that the issues were being looked into. Forum logins were also disabled. After about an hour of downtime, the game was once again accessible to all -- with a slight problem. Many players discovered that they'd lost the fruits of recent endeavors, including map exploration, items, experience, and gold. According to the Guild Wars 2 Twitter, the team is unable to restore progression or items due to the nature of the outage. Beyond updates as the issue was being resolved, no one from ArenaNet has given comment about the nature of the outage or how such problems will be avoided in the future.
Another day closer to release, another Guild Wars 2 stress test
If you're strained to the limit of your patience while you wait for the release of Guild Wars 2, you can alleviate the pressure just a little bit tomorrow. ArenaNet is running another stress test on the game on August 15th, open to all players who have pre-purchased the game and are eagerly anticipating the launch. Best of all, character information will not be wiped from the previous stress test, saving you the trouble of making a whole new batch of characters. The test will run from 3:00 p.m. EDT until 7:00 p.m. EDT. Development teams will be actively working on the game and the servers during the event, which may result in disconnections or login difficulties. The announcement emphasizes that these issues are indicative of the state of the stress test rather than the presumed state of the game on launch. So if you've got some free time tomorrow evening, you may want to get a nice little dose of Guild Wars 2 before the main event in two weeks.
GamersFirst kicks off APB's second open beta
In case you missed it, APB Reloaded's second beta phase kicked off yesterday. The version 1.5.2 update "contains the biggest changes to missions, matchmaking, skill rating, and district recommendation to date," according to the latest GamersFirst dev blog. Bjorn Book-Larsson has a few words of wisdom for residents of San Paro in terms of 15-minute patching-related disconnects. GamersFirst is working "round-the-clock" to isolate issues and come to terms with bugaboos that don't necessarily crop up prior to a large-scale player influx. The latest Reloaded dev diary also contains detailed info relative to all the matchmaking and threat level changes, as well as a bit about cheating statistics and upcoming Nvidia support. Finally, there's a blurb about future servers, and gamers in Russia, Hong Kong, and Australia can look forward to dedicated shards before long.
NCsoft extends a thank you to Aion players for their patience
Remember those server queues? Yeah you do. How could you forget the glorious two-hour-plus waits to get in to play NCsoft's Aion?Well, those times are in the past now. The Aion servers have settled down, leading to most people being able to log in immediately, even during peak hours. Queues have all but vanished, and the game is settling in for its long haul.However, NCsoft did want to give the Aion devoted a little gift for putting up with all of the hassle. While it may not entirely make up for the time spent waiting in line, it will certainly help speed your progression -- Lodas Amulets.These amulets, when used, will provide 20% bonus experience from monster kills for one hour. Every character has been given five of these unique items, meaning that pre-order customers will now have 10 of them, as they have already received five from their pre-order. Enjoy the weekend of adventuring!
70,000 Death Knights slaughtered in Great Server Downtime of 2009
It's been some time since I last looked at the Top Lists on the official World of Warcraft site. I only thought to glance at it since I stumbled upon my own post about it from December of last year, when Loken reigned supreme as the most dangerous mob in the game. These days, Yogg-Saron's other minions have taken his crown from him. Interestingly, the most dangerous mob bounces back and forth between the first boss of Ulduar and one of the last bosses of Ulduar. Flame Leviathan is apparently far more deadly than I'd ever have expected, and either there are more players than I thought fighting General Vezax and Yogg-Saron, or the few guilds on those two bosses really like wiping. I guarantee that my raid added a thousand deaths to the Guardian of Yogg-Saron tally a few of those nights.The correlation between Flame Leviathan being tops or Vezax being tops seems to be a matter of the day of the week. Monday night leading into Tuesday morning, Vezax and Yogg-Saron reign supreme. Wednesday and Thursday when everyone has a fresh Ulduar ID? Flame Leviathan is ahead significantly. Makes sense. 'Risen Ghoul' is consistently near the top, too. Nerf Death Knights plz k thx.The most interesting stat of all of these this time around is certainly not most dangerous mob, though. No sir. The Most Completed Quests section is hilarious. You can see the effects of this past Tuesday's lengthy downtime for certain battlegroups. How can you tell? Well, the date of the data is when it was uploaded to the site. It's the data from the day prior, however. The data listed for Wednesday (which is what happened Tuesday)? There are no daily quests in the Most Completed like there usually is, no sir. It's the entire Death Knight starter quest chain. Yes, that's right, you can actually see how many people on North American realms rerolled throw-away Death Knights on different realms because their server was down. The very first quest, In Service of the Lich King, was completed 64,152 times.
Winds of Change to blow through Warhammer
What's the worst case scenario for an MMO pitting hundreds of players against each other in epic large-scale RvR combat? Lag. Crashing. Rollbacks. Unfortunately, many Warhammer Online players have experienced all these issues while participating in open RvR. Mythic has been working on server stability since launch and now plan on taking a more aggressive stance by testing a new mechanic called The Winds of Change (WoC).The WoC will basically teleport certain players to the nearest PvE safe spot (warcamp or chapter hub) when the server determines it is under enough stress to soon buckle. If people do not voluntarily leave once the WoC message is broadcast across the zone, dead players in the effected area will be teleported first, followed by the severely wounded. On the plus side, at least those players who qualify will still have a chance at rolling for rewards.Some players believe the solution is not ideal because it forces people out of RvR, the game's bread and butter, but Mythic says the WoC only be a temporary fix until they can solve their server stability issues once and for all. One has to wonder if that is even possible given the game has been on the market for over 7 months already. Still, we remain cautiously optimistic. A more permanent solution may arrive with The Land of the Dead as we predict many players will flee the original open RvR campaign for RvR in the desert.Update #1 - Mythic has released a server maintenance announcement.Greetings!Today, 4/29/09, all North American and Oceanic servers will be brought offline at 9:00 AM EDT for an update. We anticipate all servers to be back online by 1:00 PM EDT. This update will improve City Instances and server stability; in addition the Winds of Change feature will be removed from Dark Crag during this downtime.Thank you and as always keep an eye on the Herald for the latest news and information during server updates!Update #2 - GOA's Nilax has released this statement on the official European forums."After reviewing the metrics and community feedback Mythic have removed the Winds of Change feature from Dark Crag. As they will continue to look at this or similar options to improve stability I will leave this thread open for now."
Server issues abounds this evening
Servers seem to be having all sorts of problems actually staying up tonight. A fair portion of the population is experiencing chronic server crashes, including my home server. A few of my guildmates canceled their 10-man raids as a result of players' inability to stay online. Even when the server isn't down, it's a real pain staying connected.We don't really have any information as far as clear upcoming fixes or how long the issue will last, but we here at WoW Insider most definitely know how you feel. Consider this a show of solidarity. It's lame, and hopefully it will go away soon. If you're just sitting down now to dig into your playtime for the night, expect some interruptions.What we do have is a little bit of information about possible upcoming realm transfers that will be opening up in the near future. Free transfers, of course. You can find Zarhym's list behind the cut below.
Server stability one month later
So, how are the servers treating everyone a month after the expansion release? Alleria's actually gotten (knock on wood) significantly better, with only one hard server disconnect last weekend. It seems that all of our instabilities are on weekends, last weekend's was Saturday, the weekend previous was on Sunday. There have also been no queues for the last two weeks, even during prime times, lag has been "acceptable" for me anyway. How are your servers treating you?
Patch 2.0.5 Issues
Apparently patch 2.0.5 came out overnight last night or early this morning. A lot of users are getting an "Unable to validate game version" error (pictured above) along with a myriad of other connection problems. The official forums are also down, or so slow as to be effectively down. I'm going to guess that perhaps your game version is fine and this will sort itself out in the next few hours as the patch gets distributed. Thanks to everyone for submitting this as a topic suggestion, there's too many of you to credit directly.UPDATE 10:54 from the in-game Breaking News:"The 2.0.5 client-side patch has caused issues with our authentication system. These issues can cause players to be suddenly disconnected from the game, as well as prevent them from logging in to the game. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible and will provide you with updates as soon as they are available."UPDATE 11:30 The realms are accessible, or at least mine is. The forums are also back online and usable.
Is Blizzard prepared?
The tagline for The Burning Crusade is "You Are Not Prepared." Based on what I saw tonight, Blizzard is not prepared for the expansion either. It took me awhile to grab a good screenshot, I started out at 583 in queue, 57 minutes. Post after post on the General forums complaining about long queue times. With the number of people coming back to the game for the expansion pack, what kind of queue times and problems can we expect? Oh well, it gave me time to get a few new raids scheduled. Hopefully people can get logged in when I want to start.
