-beats head against wall-Follow

Don't get me wrong I know its a 'beta' but seriously... how long does it really take to fix a lag issue?

And why is it everytime I want to play there is SOME issue that is causing me to be unable to. If not lag, its server's not working... and of course god forbid their be updates on the server status on the server status page in a timely matter.

It is a Saturday, which is in the US one of the biggest days for playing games, and since about 10 am EST a good chunk of servers have been down. I looked for an announcement of them knowing this and working on it and it didn't appear till hours later.

I hope at release they at the VERY least, get a better customer relation team together that can let us, the people who will be paying for the game, know what is going on more swiftly then I have seen so far.

-_-

You guys are also probably playing on one of the high population servers like test 4 or some of the others. Personally i play on a pvp server in the central server region and have almost no lag at all.

sry I got "LAG"

You better believe it. You should have seen it. I was attacking a troll, then had four on my back end. Well, I did the smart thing and beat a tactical withdrawal. For those who don't know what that is, I turned tail and ran! LOL! Funny thing was, I kept watching my hp drop. By the time I got back to the village. I dropped dead right in front of everyone. Yet the trolls were no where near me. Talking about *(#%ed up.

When I first joined Test 4 it said "low", now it doesn't even "show" on the "Change Realm" button.. damn..

I too am on central 27 and i have almost no lag at all.

They really should restrict the number of players on their servers. If you've noticed, there are plenty of medium servers in most areas and they never turn high, because people for some odd reason think it's a great idea to join a high population server. Eventually, these high population servers are overloaded with people and break. The players on these servers say "OMG BLIZZARD YOU SUCK!" and then join one of the medium population servers, bringing them all the way up to high and breaking that server.

Then when Blizzard shut down East and Central today, EVERYONE flooded to West and all the working servers in West are all high population and very lagged. East and Central are back up and they're all at medium too now... but they're not bothering to check, I bet.

Hrm, I never saw this as maintenance. Maintenance is planned. Getting crashed server back online isn't maintenance, it's downright repair.

I know what you mean about the populations, but I'm on a Low-pop server and I'm down so :P Test 7 was just "medium" and it got ultra laggy as soon as open beta started. I think bliz upped the pop values for "medium" and "high" when they started OB.

The Hardware

For those who are unfamiliar, most MMO's use Oracle Databaes, for those who don't know what Oracle data bases are, they are basically HUGE databases that can process thousands of data requests per second. The SERVERS that everyone talks about are usually clusters of many smaller servers tied together with software to basically make a "small" supercomputer. Each "node" Holds xxy number of servers in this case Realms.

What can go wrong

Well obviously a mulitiude of things, but most of the time it is a problem of the database having to serve up WAY to many files at one time. As included in the blue post http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=599926&p=1&tmp=1#post599926 This Data is related to everything from LOGIN, to LOOT, to NPC spawns, etc. IF the database becomes too logged, it can cause the servers to "lag" in the areas it is responsible for. In this case loot, NPC's in areas, missions etc. When the database becomes too logged or bogged down, there are failsafes coded into it to "make" it go down. The reason for this is to preserve YOUR data. Data corrupts very easily and it is not taken lightly by the admins to have to loose data.

How they fix it

Most of the time it requires taking the servers down and "rebuilding" the database. This is usually done during normal maintainence, but in cases of trouble, it is required they do it immediately. However THEY MUST FIND THE BUG TO ELMINATE IT BEFORE THEY CAN START THE PROCESS.
So, I would imagine that Bliz has been hard at work today finding the suspect bug, and attempting to eliminate it, rebuilding the DB's and steadily putting servers back online.

What doesn't help

Overtaxing the Database. This is a simple but ignored common sense rule. Most of the time the Login server is not "down" Bliz takes it offline because people attempt to login 90000000 times after they KNOW its down. This puts unecessary strain on an already problematic area.

What can I do

Nothing per say, however in my experience, whining never helped. Honestly we had community reps like Cay and Ty come in and show us posts they locked and ill thought respones, we would laugh, so would they. Why? Because it just TAKES TIME for the servers and databases to get fixed. People on the inside know it, and TRY to help people on the outside understand. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Also understand that Blizzard, while close to a release date, has REAL people working and REAL people get tiered and burt out too. Think of your real life jobs and thier situations. Try to respect them and understand that these things will take time and it is unavoidable. Yes better now than in retail, and thats why the word beta is in place right now.

Post by Atoktha on the WoW Forum, CHEERS

Thanks for the technical background. Obviously one of the things that Beta will tell them is how many people can go on one server before it tends to get overloaded, and thus how many servers they need for it all to work well.

However, your post reads like "if there are a lot of people logged on, of COURSE its gonna crash, and its YOUR fault" which shifts the blame for everything to the testers, which isn't fair.

One obvious thing that they should be doing, is have a separate login server so it doesn't load the game system, OR have a server status screen which updates in realtime, come up BEFORE login, and have that served from a separate server.

Also Beta is about practicing good customer service procedures, and having them in place so that when there is a problem, the appropriate people know about it right away, and spend 5 minutes, maybe less, updating the community or the logon screen so that people know whats going on.

If people get thrown out of the game, try to login and fail, and by the time they get round to checking this forum and the WoW one, they find a post from Blizz saying "Servers crashed. Dont know why. Gonna rebuild the database. Might be an hour. Might be more." then it would give a MUCH better impression than it does now.

I know a MMORPG takes huge servers to run and is very complex. But thats not an excuse for not letting people know whats happening, nor for inviting server load by not telling people when to try to logon. You can't blame people for trying to log into the game when they haven't been told when it's likely to be back.

Take Care,
Cherreia.

Heh, nice Wolfsfable. I was gonna go get that post when I got done reading this thread, but it looks like I was beat. I was amazed that someone actually knew enough on the topic to explain it to the slower people.

By reading what Ordinn, I believe it was Ordinn... but anywho, what I got from reading the blizzard post on the lag issue it said that blizzard was trying to make them laggy so that they could find out how to stream them better when retail comes. They knew that lag or no lag people would still be trying to get on and play open beta. There are too many people that want to play it so bad that the lag is simply an annoyance that they put up with, they think nothing of it. Hopefully in reatail they will have most of the quirks worked out so that the servers run smoothly.

w00t, a week and three days until it is in stores. ^_^