Nethaera's smack down
by Adam Holisky 
Apr 2nd 2008 at 1:00PM
Nehthaera today wanted to let a lot of the naysayers out there know a thing or two about their April Fool's jokes and the issues with the servers. She tells us the obvious, more or less: the people who do the April Fool's work are completely separate from the people that do the server and development work.So these elaborate and well done jokes have exactly zero impact on the servers. They don't have anything to do with maintenance, with patch 2.4, or with Wrath of the Lich King (well, unless you actually believe there'll be a bard class). This means they could have done nothing for April Fool's, and things still would have been as difficult as they were yesterday.
I want to give Nethaera two thumbs up for her post. I really enjoy it lately when GMs and CMs lay the smack down about issues like this, especially to whiney forum posters.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Theserene Apr 2nd 2008 1:12PM
Good job too!
I really despise it when the technically illiterate decide that because they can play a computer game it makes them experts on very large scale server technology.
Naix Apr 2nd 2008 2:18PM
Yes good job. I was kinda excited to see the bard class announcement. Then I remembers it was April 1st. The bard class in eq was supper fun!
onetrueping Apr 2nd 2008 3:04PM
That's EQ for yah, making bards cooks instead of musicians.
Psychosis Apr 2nd 2008 1:13PM
the people who complained are the ones who were looking forward to the bard hero class and molten core game
gg idiots, gg
i don't really care either way if its the server maintenance guys or not, i think its good for companies like this to have a joke and screw around with their users
however, i would still like to be able to spec into rock'n'roll racing ^^
InsaneAssault Apr 2nd 2008 1:24PM
I just thread her comments and it seemed more like a polite warning than any sort of "smack down". I also noticed how there were no periods in her sentences. Guess she didn't want to trigger the April Fools' added words heh.
Dakira Apr 2nd 2008 1:34PM
Personally I like it when the wowinsider bloggers put the smack down on the silly comments.
Nethaera and the other CM's could learn some tips!
On a more serious note the stupidity of some of the 10 million subscribers always amazes me.
LanceG33 Apr 2nd 2008 1:41PM
I don't think anyone is arguing that the same people are doing the April Fools material as those doing Wrath or Customer Service. However, Blizzard is allocating payroll for people to work on some fluff that is not critical (or even necessary) to game development. So, I think it is more about how Blizzard has handled its payroll than anything.
If anything, I think Neth just simplified poorly argued cases to avoid the underlying point.
Dakira Apr 2nd 2008 1:49PM
The "fluff" could also be seen as Blizzards polish... what separates them from the competition.
Any company knows that that spending time on PR and money on advertising is important to growth. They'd be silly not to have people on there payroll who were doing things to get the company noticed.
Sure I and probably you would like them to spend every penny on game development, but the truth is without the fluff they wouldn't open themselves up to the general populous and ultimately not have as larger market share as they do... thus meaning less money for game development in the long run.
Linkage Apr 2nd 2008 1:55PM
This may surprise you to find out, but giving the server developers more money will not turn them into computer gods that can solve any problem with a snap of their fingers.
Time is always a factor when working with computer systems, and I do not see any practical way to bring that factor anywhere close to zero.
Gessilea Apr 2nd 2008 1:57PM
But... money fixes everything! Right? Right?
Adam Holisky Apr 2nd 2008 2:18PM
I don't think anyone here, unless you work for Blizzard, has any idea of how they handle payroll. I can say that in most businesses it is a confidential and closed process - only those directly involved in the application of it know the whole story.
This means that they might outsource the web page, it might be specifically contracted out, it might be done with in house employers, etc... we just don't have a clue, and probably never will.
And if my experience has taught me anything, it's that developers and server techs outnumber website editors by a very large factor. It's quite possible (read: speculation) that Blizzard may have 100 server and IT support people, and only 4 or 5 web development folks.
murphy Apr 2nd 2008 2:21PM
What exactly are you arguing here? That there's a team of people who spend all year an April Fool's that should be laid off, and the savings in firing this team could go to more programmers, since doubling the programming team would make WotLK come out twice as fast, or make the servers more stable? There's so many problems here I'm not sure where to begin. First off, the people doing the April Fool's material are almost certainly creative types who contribute to WoW in other very useful ways (cinematics and the website, for instance) but had a few cycles to burn on something to amuse and entertain their users (which, when you think about it, is Blizzard's job, and the key to their success). Secondly, cutting their budget and adding more to the technical side isn't likely to make the servers come up any faster - too many cooks spoil the broth, nine women combined can't make a baby in one month, and more programmers does not necessarily make a given programming task happen faster.
Naix Apr 2nd 2008 2:21PM
Money equates to time. The more money you have to throw at a problem the faster it gets fixed and the better it will run. If I were the IT admin at Blizzard I would run beefy vmware cluster for all the servers. Down time would be about 10 minutes.
They have the cash so why not?
Adam Holisky Apr 2nd 2008 2:25PM
vmWare clusters do not scale to the level of support needed to run 15,000 concurrent real time connections in a highly dynamic and complex database system.
Maybe if everything was static, but definitely not in cutting edge database use.
Dakira Apr 2nd 2008 2:30PM
I read in an interview with Blizzard that they don't outsource anything (currently) I'll try and find the link.
The official forums estimate that there are in excess for 2500 Blizz. employees worldwide... only a handful of them actually involved in the PR, advertising, web development etc.
Just take a look at there job board... as Adam says most of the hires they are looking for are technical/specialist skilled folks, for IT, database and artwork.
Naix Apr 2nd 2008 2:43PM
@Adam Holisky
I am not sure what version of Vmware your talking about. The VMware clusters I run scale very well in my dynamic and complex environment. Our database has 1000s of concurrent connections with pretty heavy hitting database requests and the vmware cluster has 0 problems handling it. We run 3 VMware servers accessing a high speed LUN on a beefy emc SAN. I can literally shutdown a server in the middle of the day for maintenance and everyone still gets access to their database data.
I would doubt that their databases are anything "cutting edge". In fact databases are pretty legacy architecture considering most corporate networks only used to be big iron IBM databases.
Theserene Apr 2nd 2008 3:47PM
I had someone like yourself apply for a job in our team (corporate application development and database administration). Thought they knew everything and had a 'quick fix' answer for every single problem which was whatever their pet favorite system was.
Thing was, like all people who claim to know everything, they had no idea of how to cope with a system that did things that were even slightly away from the normal standard.
Blizzard have a reputation for producing very high quality games with a richness of lore and humour. You do not get that by grinding out corporate monkeys and firing anyone who dares deviate from the company line. They produce innovative software that I daresay would not respond well to some 'put it all on this standard platform and abide by the rules' terminology.
So with all due respect to the people who reckon they could run Blizzards servers better and that they have all the answers? You talk very pretty but I doubt you could pull it off.
Verit Apr 2nd 2008 6:25PM
Naix:
From my experience VMWare clusters are perfect for some applications but have severe performance limitations in the area of I/O. I suspect downtime is related to database upsize issues - where new features of course require different database schemas - the database has to then be upgraded. When I did consulting for a company who delt with this stuff - usually that went well, but when it didn't, you were there all night.
I think considering their existing release cycles Blizzard actually does quite well.
Anyhow it was already stated that the community development people work on april fools events - and I think its what makes Blizzard unique. I wouldn't play their game if they weren't honest, forthright, and fun.
Trust me - what they do is way better that what Sony did with EQ. Imagine patches that came out where they would drastically change the stats on a weapon or something else equally as huge and never tell anyone.
Dready Apr 2nd 2008 7:21PM
Are you honestly telling Blizzard how to spend their money? .. Does your employer/the government tell you how to spend yours?
Naix Apr 3rd 2008 9:40AM
I don't claim to know everything or even have all the answers. When it comes to IT I know what works and what limitations can be over come in a large corporate network. Upgrading to a Vmware cluster is no quick fix by any stretch. An upgrade of this magnitude would take a few weeks to accomplish, but I am sure Blizzard could handle it. It would be well worth it.
Being an IT administrator you can never be satisfied how a network is run. It will change one day, and you must be ready for that change by trying new systems out. I am contently looking for improvement to network I have in place. Vmware is not my "pet system" and to deny vmware really taking over is like denying windows ever making it into the server room.
How does Blizzard servers differ from ANY servers? I seriously doubt it would not be that hard to manage/migrate.