Official World of Warcraft website

The official World of Warcraft website (link goes to the European version) is a strange beast. It just added a very useful talent calculator, and its game guide is a lot more useful than most official sites for other games. Another important feature is their account management part of the site, which works well. No "you have to call customer service on the phone to cancel your account" nonsense like in The Matrix Online.

The official WoW site is also graphically pleasing, and offers a lot of publicity stuff, like wallpapers, screenshots, fan art, and in-game movies. The "under development" part has a good record of only promising things that are then actually delivered. The site has all the usual features you would expect from the official site of a successful MMORPG, and then some. So all is well? Not quite!

You see, all that the official site reports well is non-news information. When it comes to reporting what is going on with the game right now, Blizzard is doing an abysmally bad job. As I already said yesterday, the Realm Status page is reporting servers as always up, but if you try to log into them, you will find that they aren't even listed on the server list. Runetotem was down the whole evening yesterday, with hundreds of people bombarding the forums, but the Realm Status page showed it up and running.

But the worst part of the official WoW site are the forums. Can you believe a multi-million dollar company running a forum on which the search function doesn't work? Furthermore most posts aren't archived longer than a couple of days, so even if you manage to find them on Google, the link will just lead you to a blank page. The WoW forums are linked to your game account, you are supposed to use your main character as avatar on the forums as well. So what happens when there is a problem with the servers? You can't log on into the forums, because the game login server is down. Furthermore the capacity of the forum servers is quite small. When there is a problem, and thousands of players look on the forum to find out what is going on, the forum servers simply can't cope, and deliver lots of error messages instead of useful information. Other games had forums which were often badly managed, but on the WoW forum it is mainly a problem of bad software on inadequate hardware. It is a mystery to me how Blizzard can allow them to continue like this.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link