World of Warcraft is arguably the most popular and doubtless the most profitable massively multiplayer game in history. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that the investment into technical and community support would be unsurpassed. Recent problems with the European server migrations however suggest otherwise.
Many of the 170 European servers ( source:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/serverstatus/ ) have been oversubscribed since launch, causing substantial queues to join the game, sometimes lasting up to an hour. Mismanagement of these issues, including the recommendation of full servers to new players and re-enabling character creation on oversubscribed servers has only compounded this problem.
As the leader of a guild on Bladefist, one of the original and most established servers, we have had over a year of problems that have finally taken their toll on our guild. Beyond the queues we’ve had frequent server instabilities where all or parts of the game world have crashed, sometimes for hours at a time. As a guild actively participating in the ‘end-game’ 40 person dungeons this poor performance can lead to whole evening events being cancelled or encounters becoming impossible to beat. The regularity of the disruption has been enough to drive many people from the game.
The answer to this problem has not been to upgrade the hardware of all the problematic servers, but instead offer migrations to new or low population servers. Our guild was previously much against fragmenting from our home and wider community, however with the most recently offered migrations decided enough was enough and voted to move. We weren’t alone in reaching this conclusion, indeed community research has shown over 50 large guilds across two servers are anticipating to move to the same brand new server with confirmed numbers of over 3000 people, probably closer to 5000 including guilds not submitting member counts and unguilded gamers ( source:
http://outland-wow.blogspot.com/2006...migration.html ). A second migration involving two other servers was also scheduled for the same time.
On to the crux of the matter…
World of Warcraft migrations are scheduled to run Monday to Friday (excluding Wednesday, server maintenance day) and run from 3am to 3pm CEST, presumably as these are not peak gaming hours. A question posed to Blizzard community managers prior to migration on whether it would support all the 5000 people indicating a desire to move elicited a response that migration may be closed early after an unspecified number of people had moved ( source:
http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thre...p=1#post965854 post 8 ). This lead to some panic amongst the community – if people didn’t migrate promptly we may be left with a situation where half a guild would be on the new server and half left on the old server, splitting up friendships and causing guilds to collapse.
On 12th April our migration scheduled for 17th was delayed 1 week due to technical problems. Come Monday 24th April our guild had convinced over half its active members to be awake ready to migrate at 3am CEST, many taking the Monday off work, to be sure that we could migrate successfully as a guild. At 3am the character move functionality on the website was still disabled. At 3.30am the pages were still disabled. A Blizzard community manager who had got up to check on the migration did post saying he was aware of the situation and it was being looked at. During the following hours several more posts were made by this community manager, all explaining the problem was being looked at, none giving any estimated fix time. Given the concern that we could miss migrating or have the guild split in two we stayed up, some all night, others grabbing a couple of hours sleep. It took until 9.30am for a decision to be made that migration was cancelled for Monday and would start again on Tuesday ( source:
http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thre...p=1#post967620 ). It took several hundred replies and complaints to this update before it was edited to add an apology for the inconvenience we had been given.
Come 3am on Tuesday we again arranged for many of our guild to be awake, others intending to rise early to migrate before having to go to work. Shockingly, despite posted assurances that the migration would be working it was again unavailable, only this time there were no representatives from Blizzard corresponding with the community to offer any news or updates on the situation. Until a technical support employee spotted the forum complaints at 8am there had been no news for 5 hours, causing many to miss a second night of sleep ( source:
http://blue.cardplace.com/cache/wow-...-en/970941.htm as original post deleted ). Those going to work before this update were largely panicked that they had missed the only opportunity to migrate with their guild if the website problems were resolved during the day.
At this point in time migration will probably now take place on Thursday 27th and may involve yet another sleepless night.
I personally find many aspects of this situation disgraceful, hence this email.
Firstly the fact that people who joined a server 14 months ago and have paid over £120 in ongoing subscriptions each are being forced to migrate by the mismanagement of server population levels.
Secondly that a migration could be launched to paying customers without adequate live environment testing to ensure the functionality works as advertised. Additionally that people were kept awake for over 6 hours with insubstantial information and false hope that it would be corrected.
Thirdly, and despite assurances that the problems were resolved, a second migration window was scheduled without any support staff on hand to monitor the situation or give feedback on the failures. Clearly insufficient testing was completed on the live systems prior to this rescheduling.
Fourthly the fact that Blizzard, who remember have forced us to migrate in the first place, prioritise the population levels of this new server above keeping the guilds that form the focus of this game intact ( source:
http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thre...p=1#post967620 final paragraph ). This means that they pay no regard to the fact that guilds will be split up and friends separated.
In total the estimated 5000 people looking to migrate from just two of the four servers involved in this fiasco pay Blizzard £540,000 per year. With this money you would think they could invest in system improvements to make a seamless migration process. Allowing a guild leader to migrate the whole guild with opt-out functionality for all members would remove a significant headache. Allowing pre-registration for migration would give Blizzard indication of the numbers involved and allow behind the scenes overnight batch migrations, the success or failure of which would be largely unnoticed to their subscribers – certainly not requiring them to forgo sleeping simply to guarantee continuing to play a game with their friends.
The lack of professionalism in handling this issue, particularly in terms of poor testing, inadequate customer communications and in keeping thousands of people up all night for two consecutive nights under fear of missing the migration and being stuck on poor hardware without their friends really should not go undocumented.
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Originally Posted by Noni
but as ive said before this cannot be helped) game environment.
Typical
