Blizzard is getting their communication act together

Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment, finally communicated a bit more with the players, on the
WoW General Discussion forum. He gave out another 1 free day for people who were affected by this weeks extended maintenance time on some of the US servers, plus they get full xp rest bonus as if they had logged out in an inn/city, even if they didn't. Nothing new there, Blizzard is a firm believer in recompensation for lost play time, we Europeans just got 2 free days for the extended Good Friday patch.

But what *was* new is that Mike gave more details on what the problem was, and how they are fixing it. The problem is, who would have guessed it, overpopulation. Several servers share the same backbone, and if all of these servers are relatively full, the backbone infrastructure begins to creak. First solution was offering server moves, where people could move to a less crowded server. That worked, but not for long, as WoW is still attracting lots of new customers. So (quote:)

Once it was shown that the character transfers did not sufficiently disperse the population, we began to modify the hardware backend for the affected realms. The most recent and substantial step of that process involved transferring the realm data to a new hardware setup. The goal of this procedure is to decrease the overall load on the infrastructure that the affected realms share.

The new hardware infrastructure was completed yesterday, and we are currently copying the character data from eight of these realms onto the new hardware. This transfer will significantly decrease the load on the current infrastructure, which should result in improved performance on all of the realms listed below. The data transfer is taking us longer than expected, but it is vital for providing stability to these realms.

We are totally committed to providing our players with the best play experience possible, and we will continue to streamline our code and add new hardware to our infrastructure until we accomplish that goal. We once again thank you for your patience during this time, and wish you continued good fortunes on your adventures in Azeroth!

Well, that gives me some hope for my European server, Runetotem, which has become a bit laggy recently as population increases. And communicating with the players this way is a big step forward by Blizzard, who risked to become known as "the MMORPG company that managed to have worse customer service than SOE".
- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link