[Infowarrior] - Problems plague World of Warcraft

[Richard Forno]

 Problems plague World of Warcraft
By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

Players are being left frustrated and angry by ongoing problems with online
game World of Warcraft.

Some are suffering long delays to get into the game, others report countless
small hold-ups during play and the disappearance of the interactive parts of
the Warcraft world.

Intermittent server crashes have thrown players out of the game at key
moments.

To answer criticisms, Warcraft maker Blizzard has posted a long explanation
of how it is tackling the glitches.

Game over

Since it launched in November 2004, World of Warcraft has proved hugely
popular and now boasts more than six million regular players around the
globe. The game lets players control different sorts of characters,
including warriors, warlocks, wizards, druids and rogues and take them
adventuring in the fantasy world of Azeroth.

However, some fear that this growth has come at a high price and the
playability of the game is suffering as Blizzard, the company behind WoW,
struggles to support those millions of players.

Greg Lastowka, a regular WoW player and an assistant professor of law at
Rutgers University in New Jersey, said in the most extreme cases huge queues
had formed to get into the Warcraft game world.

In one example, some members of the same guild as Mr Lastowka were attending
a conference together and arranged to play WoW via computers and a 50-inch
plasma screen at a local research lab.

"It sounds great, but the person with the plasma set got the pleasure of
staring at the log-in screen for an hour, waiting for the server to
authenticate," he said.

"It's extremely, extremely frustrating."

The login delays can be particularly bad for players that control high level
characters trying to complete some of the big dungeon areas in WoW. These
feature tough monsters, valuable treasure and take hours to play through.

Gathering enough players together to sack these dungeons takes huge amounts
of organisation - the biggest areas demand contributions from up to 40
people.

Mr Lastowka said his guild scheduled dungeon raids a week in advance but all
the planning often came to naught because of the stability problems.

One player contacted by the BBC News website said these delays were
particularly bad at battlegrounds where players take each other on in huge
brawls.

The delays meant people often waited hours to be in the game for only a few
minutes, said the player who uses the nickname Naunet in WoW.

Population boom

Jeff Woleslagle, a keen WoW player and editor at online game news site Ten
Ton Hammer, said the over-loading could cause all kinds of strange errors
when players got in the game.

Often, he said, loot grabbed from dead monsters took seconds to transfer
from the corpse to the backpack carried by characters.

Others have complained of "layer peeling" in which players find themselves
in an empty world as delays strip out the interactive elements of the game -
such as monsters, computer-controlled characters and gatherable resources -
which are not refreshed as characters explore.

These tiny delays often occured at the most inconvenient times, said Mr
Woleslagle. For instance, he said, they could mean that healing spells were
not cast in time and player-controlled characters got overwhelmed by foes.

"It's no secret that Blizzard's a victim of its own success," he said adding
that the game maker was "tight-lipped to the point of creepy" about the
problems.

Mr Woleslagle said some of the problems were caused by poor management of
the numbers of players on each server - each one of which is a copy of the
Warcraft world.

To answer the ongoing complaints, Shane Dabiri, lead producer on the World
of Warcraft development team, posted a lengthy document to the game's
official forums on 3 May.

In it he said Blizzard was "not happy" with the performance of the game's
336 realms in the US and Europe. Each realm is a copy of the Warcraft game
world.

He said Blizzard was adding 22 realms in North America and 30 in Europe to
help manage growth. Also ongoing were upgrades to hardware and software to
support existing copies of the world.

Blizzard also planned to start a migration scheme which would let players,
for a fee, move to a server so they can adventure with their friends.

Finally, he said, Blizzard was moving to improve the log-in system to reduce
delays. He said a new authentication system was being rolled out that should
be in place in the US and Europe by the end of May.

Mr Dabiri wrote: "We feel it's unacceptable when even one player can't enter
the game, gets unexpectedly disconnected at a key moment, or experiences any
other interruptions while playing."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4974456.stm

Published: 2006/05/05 09:59:17 GMT

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