$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.

/sigh

but 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.