World Of Warcraft Discussion Thread

[Ithekro]

Draenor crashed and set everyone to their Hearth if it wasn't in Pandaria (which I think also crashed). People were able to get to the garrisons, but not outside them.

My Hearth was in Stormwind because Engineer. I got ways to get everywhere else.

[GDB]

At this point I just want to get in for 5-10minutes to do garrison missions on my 3 characters and call it a night. But I can't even get to the character select screen, and I'm on a freaking medium population server.

[Last Sinner]

Trump, one of the more popular Hearthstone streamers, has been streaming his WoW experiences after hsi Hearth sessions the last couple of days. He's somehow avoided most of the bugs and even his garrison isn't giving him much grief.

Shadowmoon Valley looks darn nice, I have to admit.

[Ithekro]

Shadowmoon Valley looks very nice compared to the last time we saw it...all fel, green, and on fire.

[Last Sinner]

Near the end of Trump's stream he had 2 uncommons turn into epics. His garrison also got a lot of level ups. So items turning into epics is possible apparently.

For the record, he was on Sargeras. It did have a good number of server downs and friends of his did get stuck in garrisons but somehow he avoided things like that.

These first couple of days just make me wonder whether Blizzard put enough effort into making sure WoD was ready for launch compared to announcing Goblins vs Gnomes for Hearthstone and their Overwatch reveal. I don't recall things being this bad on launch day since...funnily enough...Burning Crusade?

Aesthetics look fine - but mechnically things are making me glad I didn't come back. I'm hoping story-wise things amount to far better than the mess Pandaria generated.

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

A lot of the server connection issues seem to be because they were being DDoS'd. But after that first hour or so I haven't had an issue at all myself (outside the DDoS this morning). Have had a lot of good vibes of BC, ESO, SWTOR and a hint of Borderlands while leveling.

[GDB]

A combination of DDoS attacks and them stupidly not making a new class or race. The number of people who reroll the new stuff (either because they're interested or just to avoid the initial rush in the new zones) is pretty damned high. But instead, everyone's thrust into the same zone. And since Garrisons are so important, a large number of them are literally in the same spot, blowing up the zones.

And I'm a bit miffed right now since they have maintenance for the next 4 hours. I had 3 hours I could play before an interview, but now I can't try to avoid any rush. Way to fucking go, Blizzard. So I'll end up with maybe 2 hours to play now before the rush of kids and people off from work breaks the servers again like yesterday. And tomorrow and Sunday are obviously lost days, since they'll be even worse than yesterday and today.

[Mentar]

Originally Posted by Mr Hat and Clogs

A lot of the server connection issues seem to be because they were being DDoS'd. But after that first hour or so I haven't had an issue at all myself (outside the DDoS this morning). Have had a lot of good vibes of BC, ESO, SWTOR and a hint of Borderlands while leveling.

Very unlikely. No idea who started this DDoS rumor (I haven't seen any official Blizzard statements claiming this), but if that was the case, you wouldn't be able to log in at all. The problem is clearly that their instancing system is overloaded (and this is something that unless your infrastructure design is completely nuts can NOT be affected by an outside DDoS). This is causing trouble with ANYTHING that is connected to garrisons, and transition to other zones is also affected. NPCs don't show up, so you can't hand in quests either... the game is de facto down. And if anything, I would expect the load on the platform to massively _increase_ over the weekend, when the zealots are joined with the casual players.

So, after my elation over a very nice starting area, frustration is setting in with me. Whoever is doing capacity management for Blizzard should be fired. And once again, Blizzard is doing many avoidable mistakes which everyone with a 2-bit brain can recognize from earlier days. To top it off: Blizzard making ridiculous statements about "unexpected" load or player concentration, it makes me want to kill a kitten.

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/15271097043

While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.

Also when Aman'Thul went to crap only the instance server and garrisons were accessible, guildie talking to a GM was told it was DDoS.

I do agree that some of the phasing stuff is screwy though. Have seen some... odd... things. A couple guildies have had some really weird issues with Garrison, like being unable to leave (same with the Karabor scenario).

But Blizzard is never really ready for an expansion launch, but this was still better than vanilla on Proudmoore.

[GDB]

So they're better than they were 10 years ago when the technology was vastly worse and they had absolutely no experience?

That's not saying much.

[Awrya]

Logged out at the garrison, when I logged back in I was somewhere outside.

Anyone else got the problem that when they log in, they're instantly disconnected?
My druid logged out in the Stonefang Outpost, not the garrison.

Obviously couldn't continue with my druid, so I went to my pala, but couldn't finish the quest that completes the garrison because there were just too many.

Now all I can do is level up my 44 warrior because I can't get any quests done in Draenor.

[Mentar]

Originally Posted by Mr Hat and Clogs

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/15271097043

Also when Aman'Thul went to crap only the instance server and garrisons were accessible, guildie talking to a GM was told it was DDoS.

And I'm 99% sure that this is a flat-out lie (or a clueless GM - quite possible, too). Yes, maybe they had a little additional DDoS (and yes, these CAN lead to extra latency), but this is not the problem which is currently killing gameplay.

I'm a professional in these areas. DDoS attacks generally only affect the equipment handling outside internet-oriented connections. They can lead to latency, or general connection problems, but I never had trouble there. The client connects, and the authentication also works cleanly. And DDoS do not affect the "internal" systems - unless Blizz is a bunch of putzes who don't know how to organize a proper setup.

No, the error messages shown inside the game clearly indicate that their instancing system is unable to provide the player clients with the data they need. This is why so many players (including me) have multiple characters "in limbo" that they can't get out of anymore. Most likely a failure in capacity management - insufficient computing resources, and a failure in the application to properly deal with this kind of shortage.

What frustrates me exceptionally is that Blizzard obviously doesn't even seem to think that this situation merits hotfixes. It should be _trivial_ to code checks which identify if multiple player objects from the same Battlenet account are concurrently in the game, and to reset/log them out. But no, let's let them clog the game instead. Or they could remove the Garrison quest bottleneck, so that all subsequent quests in Shadowmoon valley can be started and picked up without the Garrison. TONS of things would be possible. And some friends of mine tell me that the very same issue was reported multiple times during Beta, too.

I just don't get it, sorry. This is exceptionally unprofessional.

[Last Sinner]

Originally Posted by Mentar

I just don't get it, sorry. This is exceptionally unprofessional.

This is fresh off the fiasco when Curse of Naxxramas went live in Hearthstone and then when people were buying access for wings if they didn't have the gold grinded for it, their bank transactions weren't being credited and had to wait weeks, if not months, for their purchases to be granted.

Blizzard are having a bad run of late. I had a feeling in the leadup to Blizzcon that something wasn't right with the prep for WoD and sadly it's gone that way. I really feel for my friends here in Oceania that came home tonight hoping to play, queued and within moments of them finally getting through, the maintenance happens. Also sorry to hear you guys got caught up in it too.

I'm pretty sure a core reason is that they merged a lot of lower population servers onto the same server and vice versa for other regions/sizes. That was always bound to be screwball come launch time.

[Mentar]

Originally Posted by Last Sinner

I'm pretty sure a core reason is that they merged a lot of lower population servers onto the same server and vice versa for other regions/sizes. That was always bound to be screwball come launch time.

It definitely is a matter of bad capacity management. Either they completely dropped the ball in the CPU resources department (which is weird, because nowadays competent hosting providers can offer huge VMware capacity on short notice), or - what I consider more likely - they have some central system (maybe the database clusters) which can't be easily extended which is currently overloaded. Which would mean a failure of load testing prior to release.

The main problem I see is that the start in the game is so totally linear that ALL players have to go through the bottleneck of the garrison. They have no alternative, nothing else to do. THIS is the shitty design. They need to allow people to continue playing WITHOUT the broken parts. And I can't for the life of me understand why the (censored) Blizzard isn't doing this.

As a service manager, if I would let a premium product like this go *boom* on one of my customers like this, I'd most likely lose my job.

[GDB]

It's definitely a load testing failure. It's the one thing they truly can't test in beta without inviting thousands of people, which then results in MoP testing (ie: nothing accomplished). And like you said, they bottlenecked progression. And like I said, they didn't introduce a new class/race to lessen the number of people going through that bottleneck.

The weirdest part isn't that this happened, but they MADE it happen. Like, garrisons weren't this integral to the questing before, but they made it like that later on on purpose to make them more important. And you used to be able to put your Garrison in any of the spots that are now outposts, which would've lessened the lag weight on Frostfire/Shadowmoon zones, but they scrapped that too and just made them outposts.

It's like they took things into consideration originally, and then changed it later after forgetting why they had it that way to begin with.

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

When those douche bag lizard squad guys were doing their thing the servers were behaving pretty much the same as they were yesterday though.

Funny thing also, when they mentioned AQ in the doco thing they said they'd never want that many people in one area again, but... (Although it is good that the garrison is on it's own server though, so I guess that's a thing.)

[yezhanquan]

Sounds like it really was a good idea for me to replay VC on the PC at this moment.

[Ithekro]

I was having fun in Shadowmoon last night. My guild ran a dungeon, but that might have messed up two of them as they had been in the starting area and could't get back. Nor go to Draenor.

I found that if the lag gets high around the garrison, go through it to the far side opposite where you entered. Get to just out of the garrison zone, then turn back and got back it. It seems to sort of jump start the instance/phasing.

[Hooves]

If they are in Stormwind/Orgrimmar. There's a mini Dark Portal where all the Cataclysm portals are.

[Ithekro]

They tried that, but it didn't seem to get them back to the starting instance before they go to Shadowmoon or Frostridge. The whole intro-epic storyline bit.