World of Warcraft Battleplan 3

WoW lead producer Shane Dabiri has posted the third battleplan for World of Warcraft, the things that the development team will focus on in the coming months. Due to the official forums annoying habit of not archiving such posts, I'll link to a mirror of his post on Video Game Generation.

There will be new content in World of Warcraft, but the next big content addition after patch 1.11 will be the Burning Crusade expansion, and more details of that will only be revealed during E3. Thus battleplan 3 is nearly totally free of announcements of added content.

Instead the whole text treats infrastructure, which is a refreshing change to what game developers usually announce. Arguably bad infrastructure is WoW's worst problem, and the development team is painfully aware of that and is promising to fix the problems. And they aren't just streamlining the code a bit, the announced improvements include buying a lot more hardware, and upgrading existing hardware to top-notch. In both Europe and North America new sites just opened, with a sixth site planned for America this month. Each site can hold up to 40 realms. By moving whole realms to the new sites, and by doing character transfers between realms, all servers should get a bit less load, and thus less lag and disconnects.

Upgraded hardware even on the old sites will allow Blizzard to raise the player cap per server by 25 percent when the Burning Crusade comes out and adds 25 percent of land mass to the World of Warcraft. Thus the player density, number of players per virtual square mile, should remain constant. Of course that is just the theoretical average, in practice everybody will be at the new places after the expansion, and the old places, especially the lower level ones, will be rather empty.

Also now officially announced is a paid character-transfer service for the summer. There will be some limitations, but neither the exact limitations nor the cost have yet been announced. Assuming the price isn't outrageous, paid character transfers will people help to escape overcrowded servers, or let them join a server on which friends of them are playing. I wonder whether they will allow transfers between PvP and normal servers. I still believe that on PvP servers there are a large number of players who chose this option without being totally aware of the implications, and who would like nothing better than change to a PvE server, where you have exactly the same consentual PvP options, and only lose the annoying ganking.

Interestingly Blizzard is also aware that their login servers, their website, and their forums are inadequate. When for some reason the game servers are down, and many people flock to the website and forums to find out what is going on, these break down as well. And when the realms are back up, and everybody tries to login, the login servers can't handle the load. Blizzard is designing and testing a more robust and scalable authentication system, which is supposed to go live in North America end of this month (and I hope not much later in Europe).

Shane Dabiri says "Resolving World of Warcrafts current performance issues and upgrading our current hardware in preparation for The Burning Crusade is Blizzards #1 priority. Were all World of Warcraft players too, and we know how frustrating it is when you experience loot lag, get disconnected fighting a boss, or miss the beginning of your 8:00 PM AQ raid because you cant log in. Weve been working around the clock to respond to the issues as they arise, and we will continue to do so for the life of the game." While you might think that this statement is blindingly obvious, I've lived through years of MMORPG with "performance issues" that were never addressed, and am quite pleased that this is Blizzard's current priority.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link