WoW server management

I couldn't play World of Warcraft yesterday, because most of the servers were down, and consequently the few servers that were up were overloaded. Runetotem and Bronzebeard were both down anyway.

The good news is that this downtime was done to reorganize the servers in the different datacenters, with the goal of improving performance. I don't know if the amount of data is growing with each patch, or if it was just more people playing, but performance on many of the older servers was bad in the last week, mainly noticeable in the city, mailbox, and auction house. By the way, you can reduce your personal WoW city lag by moving away from Orgrimmar and Ironforge into the other cities now. Since the 1.9.0 patch the other cities also have a linked auction house, but they are still a lot less populated, and thus less laggy. For the Horde I can recommend Thunderbluff, the AH, bank, and mailbox are very close together there.

Everybody whose server was down yesterday received 2 days of free WoW play, plus another 2 days if you had characters on one of the servers with performance problems. I don't know if the poor guys whose server was up but overloaded yesterday will receive any compensation.

Now of course performance problems are annoying, and a day of server downtime is even more so. Nevertheless getting hardware sorted out just one week after the patch causing the performance problems is remarkably fast. While some people will still be complaining, I find that fast reaction plus compensation is all that you can ask for in cases like these.

Where Blizzard scores less well is in having chosen such an antiquated design of unflexible servers with a limited number of players on each in the first place. It doesn't take much of a crystal ball to foresee massive problems when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out: Every server has lots of inactive players by now, and if many of them resubscribe for the expansion, the servers will be overloaded. On the other hand, if you don't allow new players to create characters on older servers, during times of low interest the server is underpopulated, and it gets hard to get other players together for groups, raids, or battlegrounds.

The fixed server model is as old as Everquest or Ultima Online. And if you think it works badly when the number of players is growing, you should see it fail completely when the number of players is shrinking. It is easier to open new servers than to combine old ones. At least Everquest offered the possibility to change server for a fee. Blizzard has a much more restrictive server move policy, where you can only move from one specific overloaded server to one specific less crowded one, and that only during a very short time. I do *not* recommend that for anyone active in a guild, because the system practically guarantees that half the guild will be left behind on the old server while the other half moves.

It is too late to do major changes to the server architecture of World of Warcraft. But a system where you could on your account management page move your character from one server to another, losing everything except soulbound items, for a fee of $10 or so, would be a big improvement over the current situation. As you could neither take money nor items you could sell, that wouldn't do any harm to the economy of the server you move to. And the cost and loss of virtual stuff would prevent people from using it except when really necessary.

For the Burning Crusade expansion release, I'd recommend to Blizzard to improve the hardware as much as possible, so the servers will be able to withstand the rush of renewed interest. But I don't even know how they will manage to get the expansion into the hands of 5+ million customers at the same time. I still hope for some download option, but even that would be problematic, with so many people wanting to download it at the same time.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link