Tom Sommer’s Weblog

Blizzard has decided not to release any more copies of World of Warcraft (so far only in the US), because they are unable to maintain server stability.

filefront has the story, but Penny Arcade tells the truth from a player point-of-view:

we hereby revoke 2004 Game of the Year status for Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft,” effective immediately.

I would not disagree with you if you said that the game was good – indeed, as delivered, I still maintain that in the Massive genre it provides the greatest reward for the least nuisance. It also succeeds in many ways corollary to that, but I’ve said plenty of things along those lines, and the puff piece phase is over – particularly with the European launch en route. Now is actually a good time to appraise their technology. It is, in a word, wanting.

I’m putting aside issues like class balance or Gamemaster abuse, because honestly those things are only a problem when the fucking server is up. They will no doubt be very interesting topics eventually, but it’s actually four and five times a week at this point that I can’t even log in to the game. It’s not like I’m sitting here trying to connect at odd hours so I can catch them in something, either – this is in prime time, or on a weekend. The mail system works when it is good and ready. The servers themselves appear to have other things on their mind.

Every week, there is some new calamity that necessitates some huge response on their part, servers are coming down, but if you think that the servers coming back up again will represent an improvement in the basic functionality of the game you’re mistaken. They took them down most of the day Thursday (and again for “emergency service” on Sunday), and when they came back up it should have been something supernatural but it was actually utterly imperceptible. It should have been like when the Genesis device hit and a lifeless rock became a fucking paradise. That didn’t happen. So, if I say, as I’m about to, that their emergency service amounts to parlor tricks, what evidence can they give to the contrary? Because near as I can tell they’ve been doing “emergency service” since release, only they used to credit people’s accounts for it.

Honestly Blizzard took on more than they could handle. They obviously don’t have the architecture to support such a large game. It’s pretty easy to see that the problem is not with the amount of servers they deploy, but rather the code itself. Their network code and server code is obviously not able to handle the load of an MMORPG. The signs were there during the open US beta, but Blizzard chose to ignore them. Now they have a serious problem because they can’t sustain a stable experience. Their system obviously doesn’t scale very well.

The issue of Gamemaster abuse is also a big problem, people getting banned and their name changed for virtually nothing.

I wonder if they are still going to release in the EU, fully knowing they are very likely to encounter the same problems. They have the opportunity to push back the deadline, since there have only been speculations as to when the EU release would occur.
In their defence, the EU beta is smooth so far, one could speculate that they have learned from the US release and changed their server setup or lowered the number of players per. server, the latter being the most likely and only raises another problem, nobody wants to play on an empty server.

Good luck Blizzard, it’s going to be interesting to see how you handle this.