Character Creation Management System
by Elizabeth Harper 
Feb 16th 2006 at 1:00PM
All of us
have struggled with lag issues at some point or another in our Warcraft careers. Perhaps your server has a queue
to log in, or perhaps you frequently end up stuck at the loading characters screen, but we've all had a chance to see
what it's like. Blizzard has recently been coping with this by closing character creation on overcrowded servers,
and while this seems like more of a stop-gap measure than a real solution, they've decided to expand the practice.
Yesterday, community manager Eyonix announced an automated system that would close character creation (for players
without existing characters on the server) when there's a login queue. Filed under: Realm News, Realm Status, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
boneyard Feb 17th 2006 10:41AM
i don't really see it as a stop-gap measure , this does seem like a finished solution. and a fine one at that i think. what else is there to do?
Old Feb 17th 2006 4:29PM
Queues= This is the biggest problem Blizzard faces, it's breaking up guilds, ruining individual player's motivation, it's KILLIN me and my friends who have 2 and 3 hour playing segments, 30 - 45 mins of which are now used up waiting for the queue.
RE Their stop-gap measure - sure - fine - until ALL the servers fill up! I moved from Aleria (not even considered a problem server by Blizzard to Sen'Jin which was empty a month ago and now Sen'Jin is full.
This will break the game if fixing it is not made a priority. People ultimately will not want to play a game they pay monthly for to wait in line nightly for.
_0Ld
elizabeth Feb 17th 2006 4:43PM
I call it a stop-gap measure because it addresses the result of the problem and not the problem itself. The problem here is overcrowding on the servers, which leads to lag, queues, or inability to connect at all during peak hours. Limiting character creation during prime time does not change the fact that the current infrastructure is incapable of supporting the number of people who wish to play.
Also, people wishing to create new characters can still create them - and play during prime time - just now they have to be created during off-hours.
This just feels like a temporary fix to a much larger problem.
boneyard Feb 19th 2006 10:03AM
what exactly is the bigger problem then? and what do you propose for a fix?
elizabeth Feb 19th 2006 2:47PM
You can consider the larger problem to be either server overpopulation or the inability of current hardware to support the number of players who sometimes wish to play. Of course this not a simple solution that could be patched with a quick fix...
the Brightside Feb 19th 2006 5:16PM
Some of the hostility is striking when you talk about server problems and the overall miscalculation of game maintenance. While I'm sure there's a decent argument to be made that there aren't any MMOs of this size, and so Blizzard is treading new ground, at the same time, there are plenty of enterprises that deal with larger networks, and it seems like there are some general precedents available to help Blizz out when they're considering these kinds of issues.
I totally agree with Elizabeth--this is nothing more than a stopgap measure. Ok, so they've disabled character creation on heavily populated servers. Well, they're still selling more subscriptions, aren't they? Adding more players? Which means the servers you CAN create on will just fill up, and then what? Huh? The inability for anyone to create a character doesn't seem like a problem to some of you?
It is a symptom. The problem is that the current management system completely sucks. And Blizzard's current tools--the realm server status page, for instance, and the in-game server status log--are deceitful. The other day I was logging into Hakkar, and faced with a 500-person queue decided to swap out. So when I click "change realm," I notice that Hakkar's status is listed as "Low." So I alt-tab out and check the realm server page, and it tells me Hakkar's at medium.
When your problems are inescapably obvious, and yet the maintenance tools you've provided to subscribers are incompetent at best and outright lying at worst, then you do indeed have a bigger problem on your hands.