Probably the final straw for World of Warcraft for me

[Raedon]

They have started a "queue system" to get into you realm to play. Instead of buying more power bandwidth a server can only have so many people on a server at any time.

So if I want to play my characters on Kilrogg I have to wait for 402 people to log off. which is around an hour. Now when the server or zone crashes you out to the login.. you guest it.. you are at the back of the line.

What this will do to WoW is people just won't log off ever. They will just take a seat at an Inn and go to sleep or work.

You can read the backlash on the WoW forums. There is a good chance that the link won't work right now or you will have to wait a while as everything "blizzard" is hurting from bandwidth strain.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=865011&p=38


The thread got so big it crash the forum system so it's ongoing here.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=871674&p=1&tmp=1#post871674.

[Raedon]

http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

..and out comes the satire lol

[mr_jiggles_13]

good thing i didnt buy this game

[Dahne]

They're trying to encourage people to play on the less crowded servers, I think. See, servers fill up, so they make more, but people don't want to leave theirs. So you end up with lots of really crowded, laggy servers, and some that are practically abandoned.

I don't have a single complaint about Blizzard. I used to have to deal with Verant.

[Raedon]

They're trying to encourage people to play on the less crowded servers, I think. See, servers fill up, so they make more, but people don't want to leave theirs. So you end up with lots of really crowded, laggy servers, and some that are practically abandoned.

I don't have a single complaint about Blizzard. I used to have to deal with Verant.

I would agree with you but all the servers are listed as LOW to Medium capacity.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/serverstatus/

EDIT:

lol.. they just changed server status page to reflect the new limit. and although my server is at Medium I am 564 in queue right now.

As for Veriant.. never had a problem until SOE took over. at least EQ had a nice IRC type chat at the login area where you could get on even when everything was crashed out manned by a staff of GM's 24/7.

[djbeatmongrel]

*hugs his copy of City of Heroes*

[Ed Oscuro]

Hmm...have to ask the other WoW players I know about this.

Too bad about the trouble; WoW's a great game.

[nate1749]

http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

..and out comes the satire lol

I clicked back on it after a few minutes and it was at like a 1800 minute wait... I don't think it's that bad, but it is funny to read the posts that people are having trouble posting that the service is so slow.

Glad I didn't buy this!

[nate1749]

Why isn't World of Warcraft free?
World of Warcraft will require a fee to play. This fee will be used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that we are planning for World of Warcraft.


hahahahaha - I guess high-quality is pretty open for interpertation.

[Ed Oscuro]

On the Queue Dance thing, I let it cycle through...I saw it go down to 160 or so but as I'm not sitting there staring at the damn thing (you a super hot female! LOL ) I missed it get close to 0...not sure exactly what happens. When I went back it was at 18 and moving UPWARDS! LOL

Right now, my position's 94 and 6800+ minutes. ROFL

Well, I'll be doing whatever and see if it'll roll over again. Takes like half an hour though.

[Raedon]

Well, I will say that when EQ first came out there were a few times I remember some really severe outages and bugs. once EQ was down for an entire weekend and once a version updated caused a bug where no one could log in at all. lol

I like the world.. it's got some some nice open ended content to explore so I'll give Blizzard a month to work everything out but this last 16 hours down to fix all problems update just fixed some quests and added the queue back into the game that they said would be gone after Beta.

[blissfulnoise]

On another note, we called around in four different cities at every store we could think of today to get a copy for a friend of mine. No dice. Wal-Mart even told me the product showed "discontinued" in their system.

Back to point, Blizzard should have some experience with this stuff with their great battle.net experiment. I do have to say that as a paying customer, I am getting tired of these server issues, especially after such an extensive Beta run. I can only hope (and I don't really doubt) that Blizzard is working to get these issues fixed as soon as humanly possible.

I haven't agreed with your in game assessments yet Raedon, but I do have to chime in and say that this hold queue pretty much uncalled for. Though I've played twice tonight and experienced no hold queues (and I'm on a very heavy PvP server); if this really does drop the hammer on me by putting me in an hour long queue, I may be singing a different "toon" about recommending this game to others. I did just launch on my server and I had no wait what-so-ever, so we'll see how this goes going forward, at least for me.

That said, WoW is still a terriffic game and best of breed for MMOs in my opinion.

[-hellvin-]

Wow! (no pun intended)

I'm glad my friends didn't talk me into this.....game. I don't think I'd appreciate having to pay a monthly fee to play a game that I'd have to wait 2 hours to start playing. Especially with the multitudes of games I have in queue to play.

[Ed Oscuro]

About the queue...one of the guys in that LONG thread (which of course I didn't read all the way through...38 pages? yowza) said that the queue system never did go away, it just wasn't apparent most of the time. Apparently Blizzard lowered the server cap and that made the queue system apparent. Interesting though - it never went away, so there always was a cap.

[Raedon]

Yea.. I read that two while waiting.. I fonally got on but the queue is odd.. the number in queue went up sometimes and the last 3 minutes to 15.

I guess it can't be helped right now that Blizzard didn't expect the ammount of time a true MMORPG'er puts in on a game. It would have been nice if there was an option to transfer my friends and I to a dead server.

..and the game isn't bad.. with enough friends playing it's a real kick to just brute squad around and pick fights.

The game design lends itself to amazing lag a two points that a game designer should have seen. If every major city in the game had an Auction house the lag and kicks would drop. Every night Ironforge is so full of people that it's sometimes hard to even get to one of the three auctioneers available for everyone in Allience that the game drops you or when you click the auction NPC nothing happens or the window comes up but you can't scroll threw the auctions.. etc.

But not tonight.. so I guess the "fix" worked. I'll just keep the game windowed 24/7.

[SoulBlazer]

Well, this goes hand in hand with what we were saying eariler. Blizzard stopped selling the game and put limits on the servers (or enforced them) because they were'nt ready for the ammount of players and/or the time that someone sits playing.

Sure, we had to wait forever for FFXI to come out for the PC in the States, but I have'nt had ONE problem since I started playing that game. :hmm:

Goes to show.....

[Sylentwulf]

Haha, that's funny.

EQ2 had a server in UK that was too overcrowded. They made a new one AND let people from the overcrowded server MOVE their chars to the new server in tact. Took 2 hours of downtime, and everything went fine. Everyones happy.

[Raedon]

Haha, that's funny.

EQ2 had a server in UK that was too overcrowded. They made a new one AND let people from the overcrowded server MOVE their chars to the new server in tact. Took 2 hours of downtime, and everything went fine. Everyones happy.

I've been charged for a month and I'll give blizzard that time to work everything out but otherwise I'll see you in Norrath.

[Ed Oscuro]

What amazes me is how Blizzard's approval is going from really good to very much not good over this one thing. :P

[blissfulnoise]

I agree with the AH point. All 3 capitol cities on both sides need the AH, and they should be linked (since the mail system effectively does that anyway). I can attest that Orgrimmar is as laggy as Ironforge at any point during the day.

And the only kicks I've ever had off the server were from using the AH there.

I can also say I've never lagged out at any other part in the game, and never had a "lag death" though some of my fixed party folks have (lagged out on on boat back from Booty Bay with a 54 mage and a 40ish hunter trying to PK in there. That was exciting trying to protect him).

[brykasch]

Yeah the queues have been on the extreme higher end of the population servers. Never have had it on WHisperwind since day two of launch. THey will be allowing people to move charecters. Should be out in the next couple of days. I am not gonna try to convince anyone anything about this game. I enjoy it, and will continue too.

[Raedon]

It's funny how they offered up a solution many wanted, to move servers. So Blizzard offers that very thing today and they get backlash for it.

You just can't please everyone. lol

[Ed Oscuro]

So what's the deal with the AH? Is it like this gigantic mass orgy of medevil consumerism with hundreds of people swarming the auctioneers and from there going through a menu, SWG-style?

Man...and I thought Cantinas and Bazaars (to a lesser extent, but on big cities they could still be bad) lagged up the place like nobody's business in SWG.

[Raedon]

There are only three auction houses in WoW.. Allience, Horde, and a neutral one where I assume which ever group has powere uses. Apparently none are linked as far as I can tell..

In the years I played EQ you would auction by repeating what you had and maybe a price... over and over and over in a zone. Before Luclin and the Bazzar people would sit in the East Commons tunnel to N Ro Desert and spend hours shouting auctions trying to sell off everything.. it was such a huge part of the game that the term "Mules" was created. Crappy characters made just so you could lpass stuff on to it to sell when you coudn't find a group. horrible system.

WoW did it better but the problem is there are only 3 MPC's that auction for your group and not only are they in the same room but they are surrounded by fire pits in Ironforge so you just hear people getting burned spammed while 20-80 people click onto one NPC to dump their minor to slightly rare loot.

The really rare stuff never goes to auction because the auction houses are lagged with newbies who could use a 50+ lvl blue item and wouldn't have the gold anyway.

Now every city has a mailbox for you to get your auction stuff or whatever (even in game NPC's send you gifts or thanks! mail after saving them 3 levels ago.) If they had an auction house for every major city there wouldn't be a lag problem.

The game has such easy drops that are limited to level that finishing quests becomes silly when you can kill 10 bears, make 10 silver with the vendor drops and buy the best boots you can get at your level (early on anyway.) So you kill 10 bears and find some clothe pants with +3 int +3 agi that you would never use and you make enough to get new boots and a belt.. etc.

In EQ a +2 int robe would be worth something because you could take that and 1)twink a new character because the robe didn't have a level cap and 2) could sell it. Most of the items in WoW are Soulbound and once you put them on you can't sell them to a player only an NPC vendor taking said item off the game grid forever. It's good and bad..but it's really bad when these 3 silver items are auctioned all day that you would take forever looking for.

If you play Horde it isn't as much of a problem.. It seems there is a game ballance problem in that more people pick good then bad.