Trouble in World of Warcraft

[GameBanshee News]

The folks at Ferrago have published a two-page article entitled "Trouble in World of Warcraft", in which they discuss recent lag, server, and billing issues that have plagued Blizzard's MMORPG. An excerpt to follow:

On numerous nights the affected servers just disappeared from the realm lists, in effect ceasing to exist to the outside world because the lag was so bad that all communication with them timed out. Many other servers continued to function as normal, leading many players to abandon their normal characters to go off and play alternatives and have some fun with the now besieged local residents. A small number of players had become so disillusioned that they sought to cancel or suspend their accounts only to find out that the malaise extended to the billing section with many people locked out of the accounts page, unable to alter their subscription. This last problem is not in any way new; previously many players have been unable to renew their monthly subscription and earlier in the game's life every player was mysteriously charged the subscription fee by one of a number of European hotels, one of the more bizarre billing issues to beset WoW.

[Xandax]

"Funnily" enough, but these problems have existed since gamelaunch.

Many of the peoples, that I played with, main gripe with WOW was(is?) with the poor customer support, and what is told by the community managers. Sure if they don't know - what can they say, but somewhere along the line there is a huge communication breach

It is something which have been said many many times via the forums since gamelaunch, people would be more sympathetic to the plight of Blizzard and their problems with running servers if they "just told people". Naturally - not all the techincal mumbojumbo.

However, what many people also forget is that many (if not all) MMORPGs are hit by lag and latency and faulty servers as people join forces together in huge numbers.
I had huge lag spikes in Dark Age of Camelot for all the 3 years I played, and some of this was due to memory leaks, poor graphics coding and what not, as well as problems with servers in the start - although servers themselves went on to be pretty stable. And supprot in DAoC (Europe) was all but non-existing withouth in-game communication possibilities, but only via the customer tool affectionally known as "RightNever" instad of the "RightNow" name it officially had.
In EVE-Online a common tactic of the "pirate corporations" was to dump cargo canisters where people would spawn in after jumping in after hyperspace, so the lag of loading the game would mean people couldn't react/respond to threats and was dead before the game had loaded.
Combined with the fact that EVE-Online was run on clusterservers which ment when a server broke down it was just a part of the universe and not the entier game.... also they brought the game down each day (don't know if they still do this though)

Anyways - I do find it strange that Blizzard hasn't been able to fix their hardware/software issues yet (well, they hadn't when I left the game, and this article hints at they still haven't).
They are a huge company with many ressources and they do infact rack up a nice amount of money from this game.

But perhaps it is what will plauge MMOGs for years to come still, because as developers tries to push the limits of the technology, they risk breaking much of it.