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by Adam Holisky 
Apr 13th 2008 at 4:00PM
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?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 4)
AusPhoenix Apr 14th 2008 1:07AM
Adam
I agree with most of your post, you have reported the issue with a level head but you should leave out comments such as:
"And feel free to disagree with me, but I'm pretty happy with Blizzard's response here."
We are disagreeing with you here and you can afford to be happy with their response since it doesn't affect you. When you move to Australia and have to put up with what we have had to then you can add comments like that.
I agree that there is not much more Blizzard can be currently doing to resolve the issue (apart from offering credit days). The problem is that the need to realise that it is a global game and they need to consider all timezones when they make a change, not just the US. This is why Australians are so angry, that once again we are the forgotten player base. I just wish that they would also forget to charge my credit card every so often as well.
Strangewayes Apr 13th 2008 8:41PM
I think people are just frustrated, Oceanic players feel Blizz forgot about us when they do some things "There are players on the other side of the world, playing on the US servers during maintinence and honor calc time? rofl".
The lag times mean anyone in the US still has an advantage over you in PVP, and it becomes incredibly frustrating with the constant dropouts during peak times.
Trying to find an instance group has become pointless, since when enough people are on to get a group going, you know you'll get some long lag spikes that WILL kill your group, prolly 3-5 times that night and if they decide to restart the server, all your hard work is wasted.
Trajah Apr 13th 2008 8:36PM
Adam. I did not say you should be less level headed? Where did I say that?
The Forums do not, and never will, reflect the majority of players and complainers will always rise to top of any discussion. If this happened to the US we’d still have the same hysteria but magnified by a factor of 20.
And this article isn’t about WoW Insider reporting ongoing faults with Ocenaics (which would have been nice), this is an article about a blue post slapping some Oceanic players down for being whiners you adding “too true”.
If we hadn't had that controversy would the problems on Oceanics been covered of WoW Insider?
BigBear Apr 13th 2008 9:00PM
Adam Holisky said: "So again I ask, besides a fix, what more can you ask of them?"
As I said in a previous comment - a refund/credit for the last 3 weeks of lost play time that we have paid for would be a good start.
While Blizzard has acknowledged their problem and have stated they are working on it - this is still the minimum one would expect from any customer service division. Since this problem is obviously not an "easy fix" and it has cost most of us almost a month in both wasted time and subscription fees, I would have expected someone with good customer service to be offering at least some type of incentive for their customers to not suspend their accounts (or worse) until they fix the problem.
RogerTI Apr 13th 2008 9:46PM
To those using the Pirates of the Burning Seas as an example of the ability to host servers in Australia, you are all wrong. If you would do some research the servers themselves are actually hosted in Seattle (i.e. The US).
I am frustrated with the state of Oceanic servers, especially when it get so bad we have to call a raid or wipe on a boss fight. I just hope they fix it sooner rather than later.
Bayard Randel Apr 13th 2008 9:58PM
Quoted from http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showpost.php?p=121359&postcount=50
"2) Hosting location - the actual servers are in Seattle. The only difference is that they're on a different authentication system, and so appear to be separate. I would have loved to have one combined server group, but merging two authentication systems would be a bug farm, and screwing that up leads to law suits and such. :-) The other reason that I don't want to combine the groups of servers is because I'm looking into hosting options in Australia. I'd like to bring the servers over here, but the deal came together so late that we really don't have the ability to do this for launch. One of the cool things about our data storage system is we can set up replication between the US and Australia, so we can run servers in the US for Oz, deploy new servers in Australia, and when we're ready to switch over, we can turn off the server, wait a few hours for the replication to catch up, and then turn the server back on again. Down time should be less than 6 hours."
While you are correct that the servers are currently hosted in Seattle, it appears that they are making preparations for a shift to locally hosted servers.
Also note that server maintenance for PoTBS AU is on off-peak hours.
Bayard Randel Apr 13th 2008 10:10PM
The more I read through this thread and your post Adam, the more I feel resentful for you trivialising the issues Oceanic players are having. Even your "dingo" caption is insulting, and does very little other than reinforce the stereotype that Americans are largely ignorant of the world outside their borders.
Oceania incidentally is comprised of Australia, New Zealand, part of Polynesia, and Southeast Asia.
Thanks for your complete lack of support. I won't be visiting this blog anymore.
MMO-Champion actually provides all the real news anyway, which you regurgitate in between your "fluff" pieces.
Sibe Apr 13th 2008 10:25PM
Adam Holisky,
You'd be pissed too if ALL guild progression on your server was completely stopped for over two weeks, without any sign of a fix. No doubt Blizzard did this themselves and they are cleaning up their mistakes.
Don't give us this shit that it's unfounded, I remember Americans being just as pissed at the start of WoW when servers went down all the time. This is actually the worst it's been since the start of WoW, I wouldn't be surprised if it is worst.
Just because you have the empathy of a one year old doesn't mean our anger is unfounded. Anyone would be pissed off if this happened to them, and they are of course paying for the game. I want my weeks refunded back to me.
Irv Apr 14th 2008 12:49AM
i see i'm not alone in this one...
i've been experiencing this one the entire week too. wow is incredibly laggy, but when i surf or download it's fast as always.
so it's blizz's problem. i almost thought of calling up my ISP and screaming at them. thank God i saw this thread.
i guess i'll be getting some little R&R until this is fixed...
Aelfinn Apr 14th 2008 1:01AM
I found this article a little condescending. As someone else pointed out above, the "dingo" title was also pathetic. Are all americans that shallow? God I hope not.
The "gist" that I got from this piece was "Americans aren't affected much and Oceanic players aren't as important as us... so stop complaining"
Years ago now, an old guild i was in was stopped from having our first Ragnaros kill time and time again due to honour rollovers etc at our prime time. If Blizzard can't learn to not introduce "processes" running in Oceanic prime time after ALL THIS TIME, then they deserve significant amounts of pissed-off people letting them know.
If it had affected US players it would have been resolved at least a week and a half ago.
Tisen Apr 14th 2008 1:31AM
Funniest thing ever? A person with a thick Chinese accent saying, "That Dingo ate my baby!" in an attempted Australian accent. True story.
Selly Apr 14th 2008 2:05AM
Why not place a data cluster in Hawaii for the Oceanic servers? Surely that wouldn't be impossible to do and it was certainly help our latency.
After all Australia just dragged a massive physical data Cable from Sydney all the way across the ocean floor to Hawaii, purely to increase bandwith/bottlencking. If they can do this, why can't blizzard move the Oceanic servers to Hawaii?
Trajah Apr 14th 2008 2:49AM
Because Oceanics are only 9 servers atm. And lumping their maintance in with 200 other US ones is always going to be cheeper than any idea we can throw at Blizzard.
Taking a look at www.warcraftrealms.com it says our daily average (not peek) player base is around: 23,000. But their are more of us than that. When you first install your game your defaut Sever will most likley be a US one. I fell into this trap and have a 70 on Duskwood. I've met other Australians on there from time to time, plus ALL Oceanic Zone PRers players on US Realms.
Anyway my point is, although local servers will solve allot of our problems, it will cause a few painful divorces as well.
Lath Apr 14th 2008 4:48AM
Adam
I understand that this website is really here just to provide some light commentary on WoW related issues however I really feel this article doesn't do you justice as an impartial reporter/commentator.
Aren't you meant to research topics before posting one sided view points? Next time would you kindly roll a toon on one of the affected servers, play in our peak times for an hour or so and experience the game play first hand before writing some pro Blizzard rubbish?
Oh and don't forget there is no point testing this on Tuesday because the servers will go down before you actually get to be on for more than 15 minutes!
Chri Apr 14th 2008 5:13AM
Thank you for posting this article on Wow Insider. Until today, I had assumed that all servers were experiencing serious server issues since the release of Patch 2.4. Now it turns out that only me and my fellow oceanic players are suffering.
Did nobody consider us when they decided to schedule demanding server processes during our peak play time? It sure feels like we were forgotten.
And I'm still deeply annoyed by Tuesday night server shutdown.
If cost is an issue, I would happily pay for more my subscription to have these kinds of server maintence/processes happen while I'm asleep - at 2am EST (Eastern Standard Time).
ps. There's nothing more disorienting than time-travelling to 5 minutes earlier as the server recovers from lag. Oh, and you can guarantee that whenever/wherever you end up, you'll have a spirit run to look forward to.
Chri Apr 14th 2008 5:35AM
LOL
Posted and went to log in to Wow. Server down within about 10 minutes. Go Barthilas!
Good thing my guild doesn't schedule raids on Monday or Tuesday
nights.
ps. Oh, and it's 7.30pm local/server time.
Michael Apr 14th 2008 7:20AM
This isnt a problem that is isolated to just Oceanic servers. This happens daily at 4am server time on Dark Iron. The problem clears up after about an hour or two.
Toliman Apr 14th 2008 8:52AM
The hard truth is, latency is vital to the entire experience of an MMO. if the experience becomes unbearable or changes too much, people just leave, they don't come back, e.g. see star wars galaxies. i can't see why Blizzard isn't doing more to address the problem itself, the experience is ultimately the whole point of returning to the game each and every time.
or it's the addiction, i can't recall.
Even with a 300ms to 500ms average ping on a regular server, people can cope with the casual half-second delay between action and reaction, much like drunken ping-pong can be an achievable sport in itself, or playing any significant physical sport while inebriated has that added challenge.
now, while drunken sports and gaming has it's merits, it still does not compare. much as oceanic user's gameplay does not equate to normal WoW gameplay due to the very same latency problem.
honestly, there's very little an MMO company can do for the tyrrany of distance, other than ignore all pertinent issues present, or present the guise of being a conscientious overseer, while still ignoring problems.
or as a third option, they could really try to find ways to set up territorial servers, near their territory, perhaps near Asia, or Europe, or Africa, or the Antarctic, or China, or anywhere closer than 5 thousand miles away.
however, i assume they've chosen the second option. it explains all the problems, all the selective attention, and all of the greater issues succinctly.
with 200 realms behind "the blizzard" of obscurity, there should be some other kind of metric involved other than population density, but apparently there isn't. Perhaps 2-3% of WoW's players are from Oceania, but that's still more than some MMO's hold internationally, and nothing to sneer at. (about the dingo thing - really not an issue)
now, i don't think a refund or credit of game time is going to make people genuinely happy, it will make them happier than they are now, but its a salve, not a solution. Though, WoW is all about the potions and salves to fix up those huge problems, maybe that is the only answer that makes sense.
the real fix is also obvious. Since blizzard support is often divorced from the problems and their resolution, to actually know that some poor peon has the soulcrushing miserable task of playing an online game with a second or more of lag and delay, and solely gets paid to try and fix it...
that i can genuinely sympathise with. anything or anyone else is window-dressing the problem.
StoNe Apr 14th 2008 10:40AM
What else can we ask for?
..Gee I don't know, local servers perhaps!
And @6 Mr.Gazoo. Stop being a fool, we did not get an option to vote:
A) a bunch of American servers called 'Oceanic' or
B) Oceanic servers.
I'd hate to break it to you you ignoramus but Oceanic WoW players are in the millions. Bugger, even China has hit the 1 Mil mark.
We need servers, put them in the East Coast of Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong I don't care!
We're giving millions of dollars to Blizz each month, we need a decent play environment.
Also, this is why I believe we can safely say an 'Oceanic first' is a valid record. You Americans should try playing wow where your dots are sometimes 10 second casts!!!
PS: Honour roll over in Oceanic time is at 8:00PM. Every night we had to make sure your char was in a safe place because at 8pm the server will freeze for a couple of minutes.
Fantomex Apr 14th 2008 5:30PM
Blizzard is too scared to make risky business decisions unlike their competitors. Sony makes these decisions all the time, economically not viable? How about taking a reduced profit in one area to support another area more thoroughly, even if you have to go into the red. The bottom line is the user base will grow, over time the losses will be recouped, and you have a better infrastructure for ALL your customers. Take some marketing genuis from other companies, sometimes you have to take a loss to get a profit.