Let me start off this little article by stating this: World of Warcraft is a good game. It really is. So far it's the best Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMPORG) I've ever played. It's incredibly easy to learn and unlike every other MMPORG I been into you can play most of the game single player if you want to, which is a huge bonus to me. WoW is breath of fresh air in the "Grind with a group for 25 hours a day 7 days a week to get anywhere" MMPORGs. (I'm looking at you EQ and DAOC!)

During the closed and open betas there were frequent disconnect and huge lag issues but it wasn't a big deal, after all that's why it's called a Beta. Then the game went into retail and on my server at least there weren't many major problems for the longest time.

However In the last few months my WoW honeymoon has ended. There's been huge problems with people disconnecting at random then finding that they can't get back on at all, or if they can they're sometimes waiting up to forty-five minutes to authenticate. The disconnects are especially annoying when you're in a dungeon with thirty nine other people and half of the raid ends up getting kicked for no apparent reason and the raid falls apart.

Go Blizzard! I'm getting used to seeing this screen for long periods of time. It's a good thing that modern monitors don't get burn in easily.

Everything seems fine until around 7:00 PM EST, then.. Huge logon delays, auction house, and mail lag. I was sitting at authenticating one night for twenty minutes, trying to get in constantly when I thought to myself "What the hell are you doing you idiot? Go do something else." so I went and played Oblivion for a few hours and had a blast.

I attempted to contact Blizzard multiple times about these odd issues. I knew it wasn't just me, as the forums were full of other people with similar issues. The final straw for me came in two parts. The first was when I saw an announcement from Blizzard bragging that they'd reached five million subscribers world wide. That's great, as long as you've got the infrastructure to support your current users. The second was when I got a reply back from Blizzard regarding my inquiries into the lag issues that read "Due to privacy concerns we cannot reply to you." I love form mail replies, especially when it clearly shows you they didn't read the damned email you sent in in the first place.

Things like this: "Thank you for taking the time to contact us in game about {describe issue reported}." Er.......... WTF. I mean really? After sending a large number of increasingly polite and brittle emails to Blizzard, especially after I got a "We understand your situation" generic reply, over a period of a few weeks someone at Blizzard named Einaethar FINALLY sent me this Feb 22/06.

Greetings Dave,

Petition: For the last few months most people playing the game (at least those on my server (Eonar) have been having problems logging in. Long, LONG waits. We also have disconnect issues. It's not just me, it's tons of people. Last night during the Silithus event we had dozens of people getting kicked constantly and having long wait times to log back in. I would like to know what is being done by Blizzard to fix and solve these issues. I don't think it's much for you to give me a simple reply. "We understand your situation, and appreciate your concern in making World of Warcraft a better game. " is not an acceptable answer. My situation is that I'm growing increasingly upset with the network issues at your end, and your casual form letter replies are not helping me feel any better about them. This is an issue that has been happening on and off for hundreds of people, for months now.

Answer: We wanted to let you know that we are aware of the performance issues some players have been experiencing recently, including: realm queues, slow character-list retrieval, authentication delays, and loot lag, and keep you informed of the steps we're taking to alleviate the problems. During the holiday season, thousands of new players created accounts and many players reactivated their dormant accounts, pushing our daily concurrency to the highest levels we have seen since World of Warcraft launched. This increase in concurrency increased pressure on our systems, causing the issues listed above.

We began preparing for this increase in players prior to the holidays, and we would like to share our plans with you. The first step is to target some of our ongoing code improvements specifically at decreasing pressure on World of Warcraft's system infrastructure. We have been making and will continue to make code improvements throughout the life of the game, but our goal with these specific changes will be to help streamline how item creation impacts the database, which will help mitigate some of the issues. The second and more impactful step will be to add new hardware to increase performance. This increase will significantly improve the current level of performance, and, combined with the code improvements, should alleviate the issues listed above.

In order to accommodate the further growth of our player base, we have plans in motion to open a new World of Warcraft site a few months from now. This will allow us to bring a large number of new realms online for the new players, as well as any players who join in anticipation of The Burning Crusade. In addition, we will begin to replace our current systems with the newest top-of-the-line components, with the goal of further increasing performance across all realms.

As always, we remain committed to delivering the best possible service for you, and we will do everything necessary to ensure that World of Warcraft continues to provide an experience that you have to come to expect from all Blizzard games. We appreciate your patience as we work to make the changes discussed here over the weeks and months ahead.

Should you require further assistance, please submit another help request the next time you are online. We hope you continue to enjoy your experience in World of Warcraft!

For any game play questions, please refer to our site at http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowgm/

*** Please do not respond to this email as all conversations on this matter would be best handled online. ***

Regards,

Einaethar
Game Master
Blizzard Entertainment
WWW.WorldofWarcraft.com

That's really all I wanted from Blizzard. Acknowledgement that there was a problem, and what they were doing to fix it. Was that so very hard? Unfortunately the issue s that I was complaining about continued to be a problem and steadily got worse throughout February and March. In April the long anticipated 1.10 patch was released and basically took World of Warcraft completely offline in the evenings for at least two days.

My guildies and I also had an interesting experience after 1.10 where Onyxia (one of the major bosses) was bugged for us and after an evening of fighting, we didn't get any loot for downing her. We're hoping that Blizzard is going to investigate this and give us the loot but so far nothing. It's apparently a pretty common problem after 1.10, they broke a large number of things with a patch that was in beta for a month or so. GG Blizzard. I'm not sure how that's possible. (Ed. Note: As of April 17th we got our Onyxia loot from Blizzard.)

Blizzard has said they're migrating some of their servers to new hardware, and during/after the Easter weekend the delays with logging on seem to be much better even during peak times, so maybe they've finally gotten their rears in gear and fixed things. We'll see how things work over the next week or so. At the moment I'm still annoyed, and Blizzard can kiss my ass. I know at least a few people, including Protocal, Orville and Skotos who've simply given up on the game and let their accounts lapse or Ebayed them due to the poor customer service from Blizzard and the many issues that detract from their enjoyment of the game and I know that level of frustration is growing in the community in general.

I've been told by quite a few people that the issues with World of Warcraft are nothing when compared to the problems that Everquest and some of the other MMPORGs have experienced and I should just thank my lucky stars that I'm playing WoW. Now to me this seems like rather poor logic. I'm getting told by people that just because Blizzard's crappy level of service is above other companies crappy service I should be happy? That's like telling me I should be happy that my new car only breaks down 10% of the time, because my old one broke down 20% of the time. Neither is acceptable as far as I'm concerned.

I understand that an MMPORG is an incredibly huge undertaking, and I have some basic understanding of the technology behind the whole things, and I comprehend that the infrastructure that's required for these sorts of games is scary in it's scale.

Know what though? I don't really care, and it's not my problem.

Like most people out there playing, I come home and night and want to play the game I'm paying a monthly fee to enjoy. Not being able to get on for days on end or wasting hours upon hours in a dungeon only to have my night spoiled when the servers go down AGAIN, or half of my raid party gets kicked off and can't get back on is unacceptable, especially when it happens over and over.

I understand there will be problems, server down time and such and I'm a very patient and forgiving sort. But when you're actually surprised that you got into the game without any issues there's something seriously wrong.

As I said, right now things seem okay but there's been stretches of up to a week in the last few months where the issues go away then make their return with a vengeance.

Just how far can repetative problems with a game push you before you finally just say "Hell with it", give up all the work and money you've put into it and pack it in? I'm not quite there with World of Warcraft, but sometimes I wonder just how much more of Blizzard caused frustrations I can take.

I think that Blizzard really has hit on something special with World of Warcraft, but if they can't get their implementation problems taken care of it's going to hurt them in the long run. I have a really good time when the game is up and running well, but it's incredibly frustrating when it's not and it's a problem that pops up constantly for months on end. And it certainly isn't helping when people with legitimate concerns get brushed off and treated like idiots by customer support representatives. Right now things seem to be working pretty well with WoW, and I'm hoping it'll continue. I think the only reason I'm still playing is that I enjoy playing with Ravenous (my guild) so so very much. Other than the social aspect of it I'd probably be off playing Obvlivion or IL2 every night.