Here's the situation: Many people are experiencing problems with Oceanic realms being offline, having heavy lag, or just general stability issues. These issues have principally appeared after patch 2.4 hit, and are a major pain for those playing over there. Players cannot loot items in a timely manner, they lag out during raids, and playing the new content (or any instance) is sometimes impossible.

Players have, for the most part, provided excellent documentation to Blizzard concerning the stability. They have done so in a massive thread over on the Customer Service Forums, and it is actively being monitored and commented on by Syndri, a Blizzard representative. The thread was started on March 31st, with the issues appearing a couple weeks before that, and is still active today.

The analysis: There is a lot of Blizzard hate going around about this issue. We've received numerous emails on the subject, and taking a look around the internet and the official forums show the same feelings. This is, in my opinion, unfounded.

Blizzard has came out and said that they know the issue is happening, that they're looking into it, isolating it, and attempting to fix it. They're well aware that people are having issues playing the game – and they want to fix that. It's in their best interest as a business, and as good people (the folks working there are good people, remember). However the acknowledgement by Blizzard doesn't seem to stop a horde of people from saying they're being ignored: they're not. Syndri even makes an appeal to the masses: "By all means, vent your concerns and experiences herein; that's what this thread is here for. But don't-and I do ask this sincerely-ignore the attention that this matter has truly received."

The often quoted line that the internet is a "series of tubes" isn't that far from the truth. It is a bunch of fiber optic cable strung around the globe, shooting particles of light this way and that way. One of Humanity's greatest technical accomplishments has been getting all these tubes to talk to each other. Every once in a while, something is going to go wrong, and there'll be some miscommunication. This can take a long time to fix; but fixed it will be.

Syndri has come out and said that after 12 days of lag and issues, there is still no fix. They are still working on it. That means that they have a team assigned to diagnose the problems and try to fix them. Syndri even acknowledges the severity of the situation, in that the issues are affecting hundreds of thousands of customers.

I'm interested to hear what some Oceanic customers think of this. And feel free to disagree with me, but I'm pretty happy with Blizzard's response here. They're active, acknowledging the problem, and are attempting to fix it. Besides the actual fix, what more can you ask for?

Tags: a-dingo-ate-my-baby, a-dingo-ate-my-server, austrillian, blizzard, dingo, ocean, oceanic, oceanic-realms, realm, realm-issue, stability, syndri, the-land-down-under

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Blizzard, News items