Today on Skywall, US server, BGs had a 25x normal BG queue time, along with many instances being down. Also, general lag in cities.

I used the time to get on top of IF to visit the IF airport, and the little farm on the slope of IF mountain.

3.0.2 was pushed out to stop the Warhammer bleed. It got people to pick up WoW again, respec and check out achievements, etc. The patch did its job, but I wonder if it didn't diminish its own standing in some weird way.

Warhammer isn't perfect, nor was it on start day. But Warhammer release was a lot smoother the first week than WoW 3.0.2. And WoW is 4 years old. WoW still remains more polished and more "friendly" than Warhammer. But how much of that is purely because of it being 4 years old?

Blizzard has a real competitor with Mythic. Blizzard better hope that Mythic isn't planning on competing with Blizzards next MMORPG at the start date. And no, I'm not a Mythic "fanboy", as I rarely play Warhammer now that WoW is "updated".

I'm just not blind.
 

Seeing that 3.0.2 caused so much chaos (last night i had to endure a 300 queve for the first time on my eu server) , one can only immagine how WoW will be on November the 13th.
I wonder how many people actually expect to play the game on that day - i for one am thinking about doing something else for a few days. Maybe I'll log on and see all the fuss , but unless blizz does some miracles and the servers will be up , I doubt I'll manage to play.
They can even make an achievement : manage to play for more than 30 minutes uninterupted on November the 13th.
 

Sounds like I'm not missing much.
 

It does seem like the population is thinning out a little on my server in WAR, now that the initial euphoria has died down.

I'm still having fun. Cheezy stealth stealing the flag in the Phoenix Gate ftw.
 

Glad my WAR servers are more stable then those WoW ones. Sounds like Blizzard is slipping up quite a bit lately. Are they distracted by looking over the shoulder too much perhaps?
 

it is as simple as that: many people are already bored with WAR or the hype wore off so they recognized that wow is a much better game and came back to wow with 3.0.
on azshara-eu we had a queue of 2200 people last night 8pm. so server lag is the result of that.
and yes that indicates that there will be lag and server problems with the release of wotlk in 3 weeks. but on the other hand i think it is a not so good sign for war.
 

It was indeed pretty bad - but I wouldn't blame a premature release on Blizzard's part or Warhammer worry. If people remember back, the exact same problems happened with the 2.0 patch prior to TBC. I remember rerolling alts on another server because our server would go down, raid instances being dumped, crazy lag - everything we're experiencing now. It's a huge pain, but it's not unexpected. The issue is basically that while Blizzard puts up a test server, nothing is ever going to get tested as hard on it as on live in terms of server load and human behavior.

I do think that Blizzard screwed up, in a way, by starting the HH event this weekend - it was an extra added load to the instance servers that probably could have been avoided.

Except I finally got my sinister squashling so I'm rather glad they didn't :p
 

Yesterday my WAR subscription ended.
After some consideration I will not resubscribe, but continue with WoW.

Why?
WAR is a good game for people who like to level. Since, for me, the main reason to play a RPG is to make a powerful character I was finished leveling a few days ago.
I really did read all quests that were worth reading and liked the single player experience. I definately didn't lvl with scenarios. I don't even understand how people can think that this is faster than questing.
With waiting times included it is MUCH slower.

However, the main point is:
At max lvl WAR is restricted to 25% of the content. It is actually extremely repetetive as you always raid the exactly same castles. Playing order, it is impossible to claim an area, without doing MASSIV (REALLY MASSIVE) amount of boring and meaningless low lvl PQs.

The whole game is not very challenging. On my Bright Wizard I just run around and do Detonates and Firerain. Record is 350k dmg in Serpent's Passage. More than any class is able to heal in the available time.

When capturing castles all I do is tyring to get a good Detonate in or cast Firerain through walls and ceilings.

The PvE content is very buggy and the PvE progrssion is silly with setbonuses you need to do the next dungeon, because the bonus is designed just and only to reduce dmg from the mobs in the next dungeon.

I may come back in a few months. Right now WAR has no endgame but just big (and laggy) battles that are always the same.

PvE Raiding is much more challening and much less repetetive than RvR for castles.
Finally the whole war in WAR does not feal epic, because castles change owners much too fast. Especially during the night.

Sorry for the long comment.
 

Makes me almost feel sorry for players on the more popular WoW servers. I wonder how many inactive accounts there are on Mal'Ganis (US) for example that will suddenly spring back to life on 11/13/08 and find an allready popping at the seems server.


Not to mention the quest mob extinction that will be going on as everyone hits Northrend. Perhaps one of the few good points about playing on a low population server.

Mount Hyjal? I never took you for a raider.
 

Mount Hyjal? I never took you for a raider.

Depends on how you define "raider". I'm very much a casual raider, happy to see new places, happy to help out my guild, but first in line to volunteer to leave the raid when the number of raid spots is limited. I've been to Mount Hyjal only twice, and never to BT or Sunwell. If the big nerf to raids enables me to see those places, I'd be happy to do a bit of tourism there.
 

Blizzard is very smart. By rolling out most of the changes for the expansion a month early, they are able to fix all the server, stability, talent, and achievement issues now.

When all the players and reviewers go buy a copy of Wrath of the Lich King on the 13th, they will only remember how smooth the WotLK launch went: no one will remember the period of instability and downtime the month before.
 

We had some server instability as well, but not as bad as you, Tobold.

A lot of folks are back into WoW to check out all the new goodies, myself included, but I also got some WAR in, too. I did not do a single scenario either. I'm looking forward to the Knights in December, and I am looking forward to Wrath.

I plan to continue playing both, and play them for different reasons. WAR is very easy to get into and out of, and there is still so much for me to see or do, but I don't feel like I need to rush it. I am planning on taking a much lighter approach to WoW now too, so WAR will keep me in check from spending hours doing things I didn't actually enjoy doing in WoW.

I am beginning to believe that one really can play two MMOs at the same time. They are different enough, and fullfil different enough interrests, that the diversity is actually very welcome.

Am I the only one that is enjoying both games?

I am seeing a whole lot of "bored with this, not playing it any more" type of stuff, as if one cannot eat more than one sort of food in ths same week, but, instead, have to eat burgers every day for months and years and then get grumpy when burgers bore them.
 

So much for Blizzard's vaunted polish and quality :p
 

We had some instance server problems on Scarlet Crusade-US. The instances were down half of the time as well as the BGs and arenas. It is quite irritating when you have a limited amount of time to play and you are further limited by server instability. Thanks headless horseman.
 

I know im having alot of an easier time than most being on Argent Dawn EU. I didnt notice Outland go down at all, and all restarts took about 2 minutes - even then at about 5am GMT.

However, at the end of the day - a new game has basically been layered ontop of two prior older ones on some machines who are as old as the game itself :P - to say nothing of the game servers themselves! Can we really expect something seamless and without unforseen incidents when dealing with things like this?

Whilst this isnt really aimed at you Tobold, as your not whining about it, just making comment on it - it just annoys me that a vocal minority do complain and seem to forget the hardware and software problems that are often unforseen due to the rather select/clean nature of the Beta, its Install, the relative "freshness" of the test servers, and again, the select install of the PTR client.

The same thing happened with 2.0, yet despite lag and issues therein for obvious enough reasons, the TBC launch day itself was one of THE smoothest launches ive ever witnessed, and people seem to completely forget this fact.

I know its frustrating when its YOUR server thats down, and i probably would be a bit more annoyed if it was, but my points above all still stand, especially the TBC launch day. Or at least = the TBC launch day for me and the servers i was playing on back then.
 

Sorry to hear about your server problems. On Zangarmarsh-US (medium pop), I've had no problems at all this past week. I've been selling herbs and leveling inscription, etc...
 

My sister and her boyfriend play WoW on the US servers and they've been having just as many problems. One server they played on crashed at least a dozen times in a couple hours, so they created some new characters on another server only to have it crash (not as frequently) as well. And in that case, they ended up having some rollbacks, which in one case sent them off into a place where upon logging in they discovered they had been killed.

Somebody really screwed up with the latest patch.
 

WOW still does something well like nobody's business and that is the leveling content. I wont be surprised by people coming back just for the 10 levels. I did it for TBC. I won't however being do it from WoTLK because I already know the ending of the story.

I'll stay with WAR where everything is still new. I won't be surprised if the people that return for their 10 levels go back to WAR afterward for all the same reasons non-raiders can become disenfranchised at max level. That part of WOW hasn't changed.

In my family that used to have 5 WOW accounts (my kids and nephews) no one has asked that I re-sub them for Wrath. Not a single one of us who played since release is interested in returning to WOW. We're not unique enough to be alone in that decision. :-)
 

Our gameplay time should be compensated.
Srsly man.
It's always happening.
p2p game man.. barh>!