Servers getting worse

[Hammer]

I swear they are getting worse. dropped 4 times tonight and twice lost money because of it. The need to address this soon.

[Riddick]

ya, i completed a quest and got xp but never got the reward.. Then I know damn well I accepted the quest after it but got dropped and came back in.. didnt think about checking to see if I had the quest and spent 40 mins fighting thru a cave system to the demon I needed to kill to find out I didnt fekking have it :bang:

[Figtoria]

On the up side, after I'd been kicked off for the sixth time, I gave up and watched the movie, "Holes." It was REALLY good.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311289/


Two Figs Up.

[MickeyFinn]

I saw that movie. I think it was a very good flick, but unfortunately I went to see it with a date. Not really a date movie, and ruined the story for myself by being the typical self centered ass that all men are by staring down my date's blouse :\

[Darko]

Everyone I know playing on the US servers is always telling me how horrible they are.

I'm playing on the largest Euro server with like an avg of 700 ppl queues on weekdays and I've seen it reach over 1k during weekends. As far as I know though the server has never, ever gone down except for patches and the weekly friday maintenance. I don't even lag in the AH during primetime and very rarely get any noticeable lag. The only thing I remember going wrong so far is the instance servers going down for about a couple of hours this weekend, that's about it.

I dunno if what I read and hear is highly exaggerated, but it seems like you have it pretty shitty on the US servers. Guess they learned from their mistakes with the US launch which resulted in a much smoother Euro service while the US playerbase continue to suffer?

Hope they manage to pull their pants up and fix the US server issues.

[Boom]

Didn't they use better equipment for the Euro servers or something? Seems like it anyway. The lag rumors are not exaggerated, its not every night, but it does seem to be happening more. Some nights its just really slow play, like you hit an instant spell and 15 sec later it goes off. Other nights, like last night, it just keeps booting tons of people and crashing.

Blaame, if you were self-centered, you would be staring down your own shirt. You were showing interest in your companion. That is a good thing.

[Hammer]

I know personally I have experienced rollbacks. Last night was the first time it ever cost me money. I lost 1g which isn't much, but I only had 2g, so you can see why it pissed me off. I think I lost the xp too for a quest I just finished too, but I can prove that. Lag doesn't bother too much I've gotten use to it. You know if you go to Org you're gonna lag like hell, it's just the way it is. The queue thing also sucks. It seems to be the main cure used to deal with server issues. My respect for Mythic is growing daily.

[spyder913]

EU may still have lower caps than the US servers, which would make them run smoother.

btw.. Holes was a weird movie. I doubt it's a one I would ever watch more than once.

[Murrie]

well the queue is gone... but instead we have random drops and lag...

all i know is blizzard needs to get something rolling to straighten this whole mess out

[MickeyFinn]

When I reactivate I may have to choose a completely new server, with lower population :\

[Coplann]

yeah, playing on one of the 2 german RP Servers and its pretty stable.

of course our main WoW data center is in Frankfurt which would mean its arround the block for US standards (e.g. Germany fits into Texas) . :)

[Darko]

EU may still have lower caps than the US servers, which would make them run smoother.


Could be....

According to Census there's around 1400-1600 horde online during primetime and the server is split 50/50 between horde and alliance so I assume there's about as many Alliance online during prime time. So that's around 2800-3200 online during prime time which puts the cap at around 1500 per realm I guess. I haven't taken any data myself for a while though so not absolutely sure.

What's the cap on the US servers? If it's way higher then it might explain the lousy performance. They might just have started out with lower caps in Europe than the US. But then again didn't someone say that even the lower pop servers are having issues?

[spyder913]

some points:

1) fact - when the US servers opened the caps were set VERY low (and it's not per side, it's per server)
2) fact - they have been tweaked around as they feel that performance has improved or degraded
3) observation - low population servers are likely to have problems because all the servers share stuff in the background like the database servers (lootlag on one in the set would be the same as on all)
4) theory - EU servers are still set with lower caps than US because it's still early and the population isn't as distributed
4) alternate theory - EU servers are beefier. Not likely IMO

[Murrie]

3) observation - low population servers are likely to have problems because all the servers share stuff in the background like the database servers (lootlag on one in the set would be the same as on all)

absolutely, servers are in clusters, and what problems effect one server effect all within the cluster. The problems are at a much lower level than simply moving people around would correct, that would lesson the pain and suffering but not correct the fundimental problems that they need to resolve.

[Darko]

some points:

1) fact - when the US servers opened the caps were set VERY low (and it's not per side, it's per server)

Yeah i know, i was just tired when I wrote that. :s


4) theory - EU servers are still set with lower caps than US because it's still early and the population isn't as distributed
4) alternate theory - EU servers are beefier. Not likely IMO


I have no idea, all I know is that players seem to have been complaining about the US servers from week one while I haven't had a single problem on the highest pop Euro server in its first month. I can't really tell you whether the caps are lower or not since I don't know how high they are on the US servers. The Euro servers seem to be capped at just over 3000 though, perhaps 3500, I'm not sure. My cluster most likely has nothing but some of the very highest pop servers on it though and it still doesn't have any problems, not even loot-lag.

I'm thinking they just fucked up with the US release and did something differently with the Euro release. The US and Euro playerbase is about as large as far as I know at least so the overall load on the servers and all the other stuff should be similar I'd think.

I dunno /shrug

[spyder913]

do you know how many EU servers there are?

[Boom]

Ahh, they are on clusters. No wonder they are having so many problems. Clusters always get fucked. Everyone knows that.

Can't they just throw more hardware at the problem? I mean if Stormbeaver is running off of 3 (just making up a number) top of line server box thingies, can't they just add more server boxes to it? Run it off 6 of em, or run it off 10 of em if that would help. They are probably making over 10 million dollars a month on this game, they can throw a million or two towards getting a ton more server box thingies and never even miss it.

[Riddick]

Clusters always get fucked.

Lol, that is awesome...

[spyder913]

10 mil a month? that's about right for almost 700k accounts.

but that's net, not profit. Their operating costs are probably HUGE not to mention paying for dev time

[spyder913]

on the other hand - the one thing I wish they WOULD throw hardware at is the login servers (and forums for that mater) since there aren't 80 of them

[Darko]

do you know how many EU servers there are?

Somewhere between 80 and 90.

[spyder913]

Somewhere between 80 and 90.
okay, so about the same as the US

[Boom]

Oh yeah, I totally picked that $10 mill number out of the air. But I think its probably right. $12-ish per account, 700k-ish accounts. What do you think their operating costs are? I can't believe that they would be 9 million a month. They gotta have enough profit to throw some money at the lag.

[spyder913]

lol boom it's $15 a month unless you're talking about the 6mo packages. average cost is probably close to $14

I would guess their operating costs are pretty high with 80+ realms. bandwidth alone would be a lot. Also don't forget the hundreds of GMs and support staff who all live in california (ie you can't pay them 20k a year).

I'm sure their #1 priority is stable servers as it is the biggest black mark on their game. If they aren't throwing as much money as they can at it I'd be surprised. It's not like the developers cashed all the money from our payments so far and are swimming around in it like Uncle Scrooge on Duck Tales.

[Riddick]

They outsource all there server stuff from what I read on there General forums today so probably costs them a pretty penny.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-general&T=2018567&P=1

Page 8 has the blue response.

[Hammer]

My guess is it's something fundamental to the application design that can't easily be addressed through faster hardware. If it was a simple hardware fix, it would have been addressed by now.

[MickeyFinn]

Yeah, it's gonna be something bad. Like the number of people online being greater than 10,000 when the software is programmed for a max of 9,999 and the digit rolls over. That would be bad.

[KnewfieJim]

I was thinking of getting WoW and a friend told me to check out wow on the lions forum.
Don't thinks mes getting it now.