Trouble in the World of Warcraft
Technical and support 'issues' leave MMO fans raging
Yet it is at the official forums where things have become even more tragic. This central hub of communication between the players and Blizzard descended into absolute farce during the last seven days. Almost every single thread created asking about the lag problem was ignored or answered with the most derisory cut & paste 'answers' which only left the poster more confused and despondent than before. A large number of inoffensive posts (many others did descend into childish name calling) were locked or deleted while the level of anger and despair swelled like floodwater. Some posters even found themselves banned for daring to suggest that gamers should try and work together to make their dissatisfaction with Blizzard well known. Blizzard's European moderators are now willing to break their own forum guidelines to try and silence dissent.
After six days of obfuscation, outright falsity and denials Blizzard finally made an offer to all European players of WoW. Even though the lag problems were confined to a small fraction of the total number of European servers Blizzard decided to give every player two days compensation in addition to a day and half of rest-bonus XP. The latter is one of WoW's more endearing features as it allows players to build up periods of double experience by not playing the game, so when they log back in with their character they crawl towards the next level at twice the normal pace. Unfortunately, the majority of players on the affected servers are at level 60, the game's current maximum where any rest bonus is 100% useless. So Blizzard's offer was a boon to level 40 players on servers that had been lag free but a spit in the face to the tens of thousands of level 60 players who had been denied a working game for six days in a row. True to recent form, Blizzard have ignored the howls of protest at this response which many players see as insulting, even if Blizzard are not obligated to compensate players for this kind of broken service, all thanks to the omnipotent power of the EULA (end user licence agreement).
World of Warcraft is the biggest success story on the PC of recent years and certainly the most successful MMO game of all time with over 4 million subscribers now logging into the worlds of Azeroth on a regular basis. There is really only one weakness in WoW's supremely playable formula and that is the lack of a persistent world where players can take on a fully functioning alternate identity and decide the fate of that world by their combined actions. Rather it relies on both high-end content and the enthusiasm of its community of players to keep people playing long after they have reached level 60. With the recent technical issues increasing in frequency and the debacle of the last week, the ability of level 60 players to engage in the game's high-end content has been seriously hampered. Not only is this frustrating for all concerned but as the amount of co-ordination between large groups of people required understandably means juggling in-game and real world commitments the disruption is more serious than some players being unable to farm epic loot. The behaviour and attitude of Blizzard's support staff, especially on the official forums, have taken a bad situation and made it immeasurably worse. While Blizzard knows that the majority of players are hopelessly addicted to WoW their recent behaviour has greatly shortened the length of time it will take for a large numbers of players to decide enough is enough and cancel their account.
Many think that Blizzard owes them a large apology for this last week's turn of events. The communication between the company and its players is in need of a serious overhaul and the speed with which it tackles technical issues cannot be allowed to settle at the pitiful levels recently experienced. The vast majority of players are happy enough to endure the occasional glitch as long as it is promptly addressed while the player base is kept well informed. Neither of these things have happened recently and although it is highly unlikely that Blizzard will destroy WoW by bungling it is unfortunate that for thousands of gamers the last week's events have irreparably tarnished the reputation of this mighty developer.
Comments
"Unfortunately, the majority of players on the affected servers are at level 60"
Any evidence to back this statement up?
A quick /who at 2.15 this morning listed 50 players. 15 were not level 60. This is standard on my server.
Blizzard has stated that about 20% of all players have a level 60 char.
Of all players maybe. Not on the high population servers where many lower level characters are lvl 60's alts.
The fact reamins that for a hug chunk of these servers they are being discriminated against even though the lag has affected them a lot more then lower level charatcers.
Yeah 20% of players, BUT they count also alts into this, I have 2 lvl 60 chars and about 12 alts (I and my gf share accounts)
i dont care about the server Isue WoW suck its a pve game i mean wtf make instances people can pvp in??? and make it so only the players whit 24/7 no life can get the high warlord?? wtf WoW isn't a game for pvp'ers WoW is a game for carebears thats afraid of loosing stuff and die
damn pve'ers
An insightful and knowledgable post there. I'm sure if you were to drop Blizzard a line they would consider hiring you on to their corporate planning department.
At least right now the lag has been solved. Unfortunatley this is because the authentication server is down :D
A M E N
I'm glad Blizzard's WRETCHED customer service is no longer being met with praise.
dude i have it all the time ive met the requirements i still got i try to fix it still have it god its gona go on and on and on
dude i have it all the time ive met the requirements i still got i try to fix it still have it god its gona go on and on and on
Is their a sufficiently appropriate name for people like Mystic? I mean, who cares how people spend their time? Playing carebear video games pale by comparison to people with tubgirl activities. And yet, here's Mystic spitting white flecks of foam at his monitor in hopes his fury manifests physically into a bus and collides with passive RPG'ers.
Honestly, where does that kind of aggression come from? He seems frustrated that he can't pwnz0r teh careb34rz0rs whenever he feels like it. To me, it's just some angry goth boy who's mad at the world for all the lemonade toilet bowl swirlies he had to endure. So now he wants to get back at anyone, preferably obese MMO socialites who couldn't hit back with all the dangling jiggling flesh under their arms even if they were face to face. Bravo. WTG. You fail at life.
Mystic you are a sad individual... I bet you have a subscription to WoW, or is it that you got banned for macroing your Night Elf Hunter named RoXxOr 5uPoR 5tRlKe?
A'men to your article
es bacan
Lag problems by Telia are back since Friday afternoon, no answer from Blizzard yet, no answer from Telia yet. The only thing some "blue" said about it: "It's your ISP" (even when we are several players from several servers... different countries, ISPs, etc, etc)
Welcome to what the American servers have experienced since launch.
This is unplayable. Blizzard is stealing our money.
Well... a quick review of what has happened since last friday for all those of u that desire to know.
A lot of european wow players (mainly from Spain, but also affecting Italy, Portugal, Poland and England I believe) started having continous lag since last friday 30/09 in some realms (servers).
After reporting the problem to blizzard´s technical department (even giving trace routes) they told us that the problem was with our ISP provider. We doubted this since we could play without lag in other servers; If my connection is the problem I would have expected lag in all realms, not only a few of them. Anyway we contacted our ISP provider and in my case they checked line speed an all seems fine.
Then finally Blizzard announced in a post that they acknowledged the existence of a problem affecting spanish customers and that they were trying to solve this problem with their partners (I guess Telia).
Then today there is a new post that states "At the moment we are not aware of any connection problem" wich sounds like mockery on the hundreds of ppl that have been posting in the official forums trying to help their technicians.
Now things are the same that they were on friday with no information about what is happening, many of our posts being deleted from the forums, etc...
I hope that these problems start appearing on games magazines and start giving Blizzard the popularity they deserve...
Actualy the lag has only recently been fixed, on some servers WoW has been inaccessible for more than 2 weeks over-all.
About the statement that the majority of players are at lvl 60, it is true, based on the grounds that Blizzards statement concerning only 20% was lvl 60, is based on the total number of characters, and EVERYONE got a million lower leveled characters.
Blizzard really did lose a lot of their good reputation on WoW, specialy towards European players, and noone will ever buy another MMORPG from Blizzard without thinking twice.
I installed it ok and it loads up fast but when i play it its very slow even though the latencie is green, please help me, please.
Yeah, I agree whole-heartedly with this email. I've had periods where I can't get to the account section to manage my billing (for a week .... not days or even hours). This is happening more often than not. I'm really getting annoyed. I was told that I would have 4 weeks gametime added - which wasn't. Only to be told I have to re-activate my account (which I did and can't do again as the site is down).
What are they playing at? They've made millions so it's time to spend some sorting this horrible mess out. The game is great, the support sucks. Not even a small post on the US site (which always works fine for me) to say they're having problems. Yet again, the paying subscriber is left in the dark. They've had the best part of £100 from me over only a short term ... and what do I get? Grief. I hope they sort this soon otherwise I'll give up - and that means throwing away all those hours spent .... but that's a different matter.
..hmmm....i can only say i am happy i aint workin at Blizzard....or i would suffer from a major ulcer....;)
"WoW players have been somewhat spoiled by the relatively high standard of connectivity and stability" is absolute BS. I stopped playing WoW 5 months ago because of the terrible playing conditions and finally started again last week after being told by alot of my old guild mates that things had improved. I had one day of ok play and now its back to the usual lag spikes and blizzards normal denial of there being any problems. (Oh and the usual "Do a traceroute and post it on the forums" answer to all lag questions.)
If previous problems are anything to go by, this could take another 4 months to fix. Oh and my new character is lvl22 so its NOT limited to lvl60's. Rubbish statement.
To make things wors, even links to this article are deleted from official forums.
i need help to get my delete rogue back name alinne lvl 31 plz help blizzard
yeah, i still get really bad lag and i am starting to give up on the game now, the whole server is really badly affected
this sucks ass it has been down all this week c'mon man!!!!!!!!!!
Lag issues, cut and paste responses, lack of true information, paying customers being blamed for tech issues, lack of real customer support, blues answering trivial questions sometimes, and let's not forget a total banning from the forums if said customer dares to say anything against blizzard or W.O.W and esp if you should dare to compare it with another game on the market (which incidentally is still on the top ten list, while W.O.W has dropped off),....
sounds like the same thing americans have been having for some time now. Evidence shows blizz has gotten too big for it's britches, and they've made enough money, now with a movie deal in the works, that they don't really care if they loose even several customers. They think they'll bounce back with new ones and they believe the expansion will bring everyone who's quit, crawling back anyway. Same thing that Turbine did with Asheron's Call, and I'm sure Blizz will lie to themselves just the same and continue to feel they're doing a great job.
It won't get better, not until they loose more than half their customers and it actually hurts them, but then again....they just might say it's run it's course and close it all down, pat themselves on the back and begin anew with something else. Either way, welcome to WOW. I'm just glad to see it's not just us who's been having these problems.
major lag is back and no help from blizzard no suprise there
I pray this story travels around other news/gaming sites too. They shouldn't get away with this unbelievable arrogance/ignorance. I'll have a shot at getting it on digg.com/gamespot, I urge others to post it around too, whether you're effected by it or not. No company should think they're bigger than their customers.