I see that the drama queens at Penny Arcade have posted a hyperverbious condemnation of World of Warcraft because the servers aren’t up to their liking. (I’d post a link to the specific article, but ironically (if I’m using the word correctly), I can’t connect to their website right now).
I haven’t been playing WoW a lot by hardcore standards, but I’ve been on every other day or so for the past month or so, and haven’t run into any problems with lag, server downtime, etc. On the other hand, I’m still only at level 21 with my first character, while most of my cow-orkers are in their 30’s on their second or third chars, so maybe I’m not playing as often as I could be.
Are y’all having problems with stability or connection, or is this all much ado about nothing? I’d heard that there were a lot of hassles right after launch, but I have yet to see any of it.
When you choose a server on which to your character, as part of the character creation process, it lists the traffic/population of each. They’re ranked low/medium/high, and you’re encouraged to take a “low” one. IIRC, Blizzard introduced a waiting-list system if you try to get on a high-traffic server.
Of course, if your son is trying to play with his buddies, then he won’t have as much leeway in choosing a server unless they all decide up-front to pick a low-traffic server and start new characters from scratch. I suspect that’s a lot of the problem, actually – people want to play with their friends, so they choose a server that’s already high-traffic.
It sucks in a way. I’ve started over once already and I’ve getting sick of it. If I could move my character to another server with a low pop I’d do so in a heartbeat. But I can’t so I’m stuck with hour long queues to start the game.
Come play on Elune, never any queue to get online, and almost no other than routine maintenance down time, and other than in the cities or in raids, lag issues.
We also dont have many leftover b-net babbies or script kiddies annoying us=) and since it is PVE, no ganking, but we do have an active raid the other side culture, I have helped defend ashenvale 4 or 5 times so far=)
Yeah, I have pretty consistent connection problems. Depending on the time of day, there’s usually a pretty good chance that turning in a quest will disconnect me from my server. It usually takes about five minutes before I can log back in. Half the time, it fucks up my modem and/or router, requiring me to reset one or both if I want to get online at all. And it seems that my server (Hyjal) comes down for “unscheduled maintenance” more often than most others, but that’s probably just a “grass is always greener” sort of thing.
Oh, and at one point, on the list of servers, Hyjal stopped listing the number of characters I had. Since that’s how I rank the servers (I have other characters on Cenarion Circle and Earthen Ring), it dropped off the top of the list, and I thought the server was down. Took me three days before I realized I could just scroll down and log in. :smack: Once I’d logged in, it seemed to fix itself, and my characters were all intact.
Yeah, but my shaman just hit 34th level! I’m not abandoning him now!
There’re rumors that Blizzard might offer to export characters from high traffic servers to low traffic servers, one-way only. If that happens, I’ll probably take the opportunity. What server are you on again?
No, Blizzard wants to make sure their servers are in order before they ship more copies. Better to have intermittent problems than a catastrophic failure affecting everyone.
Actually, if Blizzard sucked, you’d be able to find a copy easily and cheaply. The game’s too good, and too many people want to play it. More than their servers can handle.
Well, for those who appreciate irony and seeing the smug put in their place: ever since I started this thread, I’ve had trouble connecting to the game. My server keeps going down for “maintenance.”
I shan’t be over-dramatically retracting any Game of the Year awards, though. (That still goes to Half-Life 2).
Gorgonnash. Only 0.98% of the population according to the site that Burrido linked to.