$150,000,000/month and they lose several dozen servers at prime time?

[elo]

I work in IT, so I know despite best efforts things happen. This is just a curious event. I haven't counted exactly but it looks like at least 2 dozen US servers are off-line. Clearly budget isn't the issue, or is it? Does Blizz shoestring their IT department like many corporations and this is the result? True they have pretty darn good uptime, at least by my standards, but it makes me wonder what it takes from a people and dollars perspective to obtain IT absolution?

Anyway, just musings.

[MaxD]

NO something happened to PVP (It Broke) so they took down the servers to FIX them

Edit as far as Blizzard trying to keep everything running. They cant produce enough machines fast enough. Dell has a department that only deals with making servers and helping keep WOW running for Blizzard and they run almost around the clock. (notice the new Laptops from blizzard) Cute right? Can they support Multi accounts of WOW? :)

A lot of people talk a lot of crap about Blizzard (not saying you are) but Yeah they make 150,000,000 a month but do you know what the electric bills alone cost? :P
You should see their hardware bills. They buy so much crap from Dell, and the Networks its crazy. They dont jsut profit they put a very large chunk of what they make each month to keep things running as smoothly as they do. 2.5 million Just in the US, thats a lot of people to keep happy

[Ellay]

There is also another large factor for Blizzard and that is they are owned by Vivendi, a parent company that most likely consumes a lot of the gross earned by Blizzard and spends the $ how they see fit.

[glo]

I think they did some kind of live patch last night, some time this morning instances(including bgs and arenas) started malfunctioning. The reason I think they did an unannounced patch was the NPC prigmon in front of ZA started giving out the rare pet 'mojo' just for walking up and /kiss him. Pretty sure this was not done intentionally.

[Furball]

$150,000,000/mon

Why, after three years, do people still make assinine comments like this?

learn2math / learn2bussinesexpensive / learn2figureout that asian WoW players pay a LOT less than USA / EU WoW players pay.

/sigh

[Ripper]

Only about 1/4 of the player base is in the U.S. A majority of the rest is in Asia. Either way, they make a lot of $$.

Think of all the traffic Blizzard gets on their network. There's no amount of money that will make it failure-proof 24/7/365, especially with millions of users. Hardware failures, software glitches, human errors are all inevitable. And believe it or not, Blizzard is a LOT better at handling technical problems these days. I remember when servers would be down for a whole week :(

[Rms]

Anytime the servers have malfunctioned for a significant period of time in the past Blizzard has always given a free day of play time to compensate. Was always sufficient for me.

[warcrime]

$150,000,000/mon

Why, after three years, do people still make assinine comments like this?

learn2math / learn2bussinesexpensive / learn2figureout that asian WoW players pay a LOT less than USA / EU WoW players pay.

/sighbut add in cd key sales, and allllll the merchandise sales also. i duno, i can see it happening. not that it's all profit.


But i remember back in the day with Asheron's Call, the servers only came down once a month for patching, and it was almost always new content. One january it took an extra day or something to get things back up smoothly, so everyone got gifts (stuffed animals ingame) and an extra day pushback on billing. Much less people, yes, but much less revenue also. Then again, they had M$ backing them.

[elo]

$150,000,000/mon

Why, after three years, do people still make assinine comments like this?

learn2math / learn2bussinesexpensive / learn2figureout that asian WoW players pay a LOT less than USA / EU WoW players pay.

/sigh

I'd appreciate it if you'd read the post and not immediately assume from the first line that I'm all QQ about losing an hour of play time. You made some points that I didn't know and that's what the post was for, but I don't understand why you had to be rude about it.

I'm curious of the entire operation and how it works. It's clearly a truly massive undertaking and I'd just like to know the logistics. I want to know as much as I can about it because it directly relates to my career. For instance I read that they've got some 2400 customer service reps and 130 developers dedicated to WoW. I'd really like to see how they handle the servers. What kinda hardware to they run on, how's load balancing performed, do they virtualize them or run on the bare hardware etc. Sure they keep most of this info close to their chest but from time to time they do let little tidbits out and that's what I'm interested in.

[warcrime]

And how is that game donig now? :P

Blizzard has to employ a HUGE customer service staff, 24/7, round the globe. And the hardware / badnwidth they pay for is probably astronomical.WoW will become old and boring too someday. Then WoW 2 will come out, but people won't like it because it was slightly different. Such is the nature of almost all computer games. But there is a big difference between the work of customer support staff and having developers that take time to talk with the community. Perhaps WoW is too big and serious for its own good with respect to developer/community interaction. And they're damn sure too slow at fixing obvious things like earth shields dispellability, and buffing druids after they were already so strong while not touching earth shield... Sometimes I'd just like to know that I'm throwing down 15-75$ a month for a fun game run by people with a clue of where they are going, not just a carrot on a string. ;)

[warcrime]

I'm sure to joe blow player its all about ZOMG FIX MAH CLASS YOU FAWKING N00BS! I'M GIVNG YOUS MAH MONIES!!!!!!!!!! - In reality you are extremely minor. They have a long list of bugs before you, and even longer list of projects before that, and above that investors to satify with there own agendas.

To address your specific Earth Sheild complaint - 8% of the ENTIRE player base is Shaman, the smallest in the game. I do not know how many of those are Resto, but even if you evenely split it, now you're talking about something like 2.6% of the player base. Ok, now how many of those guys PvP and are worried about the dispellability of Earth Shield....?

Every class has a bitch, but how do you fairly distribute your development staff to class "tweaks" ? And then all the other stuff going into the game - like new content to keep the other ~97% of your player base happy?without wanting to really bring the thread off topic... the thing with earth shield is that it is so easy to fix, they already have the mechanics in game. it's a 41 point talent, that costs almost 1k mana, and can be FULLY dispelled with 10 charges remaining by : shamans, priests, warlocks, mages, and now hunters (and prot warriors lol). shamans have no damage shields (priest/pally/druid) AND no HOTs (priest/druid). since BC has come out, pallys started off really strong, then priests/druids got buffed from strong to stronger, and even hunters got a dispel that hits like a truck, but NOTHING has been done with earth shield. no dispel resistance or charge based dispel has even been tried on a test realm to my knowledge. now they're talking about trying something in 2.4, which is who knows how long away. it's been over a year now, and it's not a bug (like my rogues vanish), and it's not a delicate balance issue (like tweaking my mages dps versus locks), it's a fundamental spec ability that was implemented carelessly, but more importantly, has still not been addressed.

1% of 10 million is still 100,000 paying customers. other spells already have charge based dispels, there are already dispel resistance mechanics in game too. picky any one of those, apply it to earth shield a year ago. how could this take more than even 8 man hours of coding? resto shamans aren't looking for a perfect instant fix, just a bone tossed after all this time.

now, i'm not one of those "i'm gonna cancel my account tomorrow if you don't do X" people, but how can you really play the devils advocate with the situation explained like this? we better be like, 2.0 lock OP after 2.4 comes out or i'll cry SO FUCKING HARD! ;( ;( ;( (lol)


/semiofftopic.

[thinus]

shamans have no damage shields

o rly?

[Stealthy]

$150,000,000/mon

Why, after three years, do people still make assinine comments like this?

learn2math / learn2bussinesexpensive / learn2figureout that asian WoW players pay a LOT less than USA / EU WoW players pay.

/sigh
Learn2math? Learn2bussinessexpensive? How about the fact that Blizzard posted a profit of $517Mil last year ($1.42Mil every day) and run a profit margin of 40%. I think blizz do an ok job at maintaining their servers, but they could be doing far better if they invested the money to do it. Here's a link to the SEC filings for those interested:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/718877/000110465907086657/a07-30510_6425.htm

You can argue that Asian players pay less to play WoW that USA / EU players, but compare the cost of living in the various regions and relatively speaking the cost still works out to be roughly the same. We also don't have limits on playing time of the govt regulation they do. I don't mind paying a bit more for this...

Cheers,

Stealthy

[thinus]

On a related note, if you want to really see server instability try playing on Thaurissan primte time. The server crashes almost on a daily basis. We suspect that there is a honor update that occurs during our prime time causing the problems.

Go to the Oceanic server page during Aus prime time, all you see is FULL, FULL, FULL, HIGH, FULL, FULL, HIGH... I can screenshot it for you if you think I am exaggerating.

Sometime during the evening the server will start lagging, you will get a few minutes of trying to loot and nothing happening. Eventually you will be disconnected. Connecting again will be ok for a few minutes and then it starts again. If you force quit (alt+F4), then you can't log in as you get a "Character already exists" message. I've had "Instance not found" errors trying to zone into instances.

During the holidays it seemed to work fine but now everyone is back to the daily schedule the server just seems unable to handle the load. The game becomes unplayable for at least an hour 3-4 nights a week excluding Tuesday night shutdowns which also happens prime time on Oceanic servers and I have yet to see any compensation for these instabilities.

[warcrime]

shamans have no damage shields

o rly?ya prolly. if you don't count the 41 point enh spec SR, which i don't because, i mean, it's 41 points of enh spec, lol.

you know i'm talkin bout bubbles and "reduces all damage by X%" stuff right? not actual sheilds?

[thinus]

shamans have no damage shields

o rly?ya prolly. if you don't count the 41 point enh spec SR, which i don't because, i mean, it's 41 points of enh spec, lol.

you know i'm talkin bout bubbles and "reduces all damage by X%" stuff right? not actual sheilds?

I understand "damage shield" as a shield that does damage aka Lightning Shield, Thorns, etc.

[warcrime]

shamans have no damage shields

o rly?ya prolly. if you don't count the 41 point enh spec SR, which i don't because, i mean, it's 41 points of enh spec, lol.

you know i'm talkin bout bubbles and "reduces all damage by X%" stuff right? not actual sheilds?

I understand "damage shield" as a shield that does damage aka Lightning Shield, Thorns, etc.o sry

[Tonuss]

I would like to add that just because a company has "money to burn", doesn't mean that they go all-out in spending. Especially on something like computer equipment, which becomes obsolete and requires upgrades and replacements relatively quickly. You don't purchase cheap junk, but you also do not splurge on the bleeding-edge. You try to find a workable middle ground.

And even the top-notch, bleeding-edge, super expensive stuff will have its problems now and then, it's the nature of the beast.

[warcrime]

I would like to add that just because a company has "money to burn", doesn't mean that they go all-out in spending. Especially on something like computer equipment, which becomes obsolete and requires upgrades and replacements relatively quickly. You don't purchase cheap junk, but you also do not splurge on the bleeding-edge. You try to find a workable middle ground.

And even the top-notch, bleeding-edge, super expensive stuff will have its problems now and then, it's the nature of the beast.sure, but when you are making that kind of bank, and your response to customers complaining about the super long 2v2 cue times is "play off hours or in another bracket" rather than "we will be doubling our instance serving capabilities right away", you are just being cheap bastards and imo, pretty rude to customers.