The most successful MMO of all time has had its ups and downs just like any online game, yet recently things have taken a bit of a nosedive. Since last Wednesday's regular maintenance a large number of players had been experiencing internet lag of nightmarish proportions. For six days WoW was practically unplayable on a large number of the European servers. Frequent lag spikes were accompanied by sustained periods of astronomical latency with many players experiencing ping times well in excess of 15,000. Not only did this make for an incredibly frustrating gameplay experience but it also led to a large number of expensive in-game deaths and to the cancellation of almost all raiding activity in the game's high-end content. Many servers were temporarily shut down with barely any notice during this period and the number of disconnects reached what must have been an all time record.
On numerous nights the affected servers just disappeared from the realm lists, in effect ceasing to exist to the outside world because the lag was so bad that all communication with them timed out. Many other servers continued to function as normal, leading many players to abandon their normal characters to go off and play alternatives and have some fun with the now besieged local residents. A small number of players had become so disillusioned that they sought to cancel or suspend their accounts only to find out that the malaise extended to the billing section with many people locked out of the accounts page, unable to alter their subscription. This last problem is not in any way new; previously many players have been unable to renew their monthly subscription and earlier in the game's life every player was mysteriously charged the subscription fee by one of a number of European hotels, one of the more bizarre billing issues to beset WoW.
As of yesterday the lag problem has apparently been fixed. Blizzard had initially claimed victory against the evil forces of lag last Friday, citing a faulty piece of hardware as the cause of all the woes. Its replacement was meant to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. Unfortunately no such thing happened and players continued to be denied the service that they were paying their monthly subscription fees for. Blizzard then asked players experiencing problems to aid them by filling out a traceroute form. The more tech-savvy amongst the player community looked at these published reports and came to the conclusion that the problem lay with Telia, an ISP that Blizzard uses to provide the backbone from the Paris datacentre where the European realms are housed and the rest of the internet. Blizzard continued to offer up a range of other possible reasons, up to and including the proposition that it was individual player's internet or computer settings causing the difficulties even though entire servers were experiencing the lag. Any and all queries to Blizzard's technical support, either in-game via GMs or via the forums and telephone support lines were met with 'cut & paste' answers, none of which seemed to tally with the experience of tens of thousands of increasingly annoyed and angry players.
The goodwill that Blizzard has generated through providing such a wildly popular and much loved game has suffered greatly as a result of both the technical and support issues that have been so apparent this last week. WoW players are used to the occasional technical problems, although for a number of servers affected by the lag the effects of these issues have recently increased in frequency and scope. WoW players have been somewhat spoiled by the relatively high standard of connectivity and stability, with many players initially heralding WoW as the first MMO to be released to the public in non-beta form. Yet as the number of subscribers has sky-rocketed so the number of technical issues have also risen. Queues have become a major problem on a number of servers, with wait times just before the start of last week's lag often exceeding an hour on the more crowded realms.
None of these myriad technical and population issues are news to the tens of thousands of gamers who call these servers home. For months they have been informing and petitioning Blizzard to do something. And this is where things go from bad to worse. While it is understandable that MMO titles can and will suffer from technical problems and the occasional internet-related setback beyond the developers control, the relationship between the paying players and the game's support team is wholly determined by the efforts of that team. And it is here that Blizzard have been haemorrhaging support from the community. The responses on the official forums to previous problems have often been haphazard, with many posts being routinely ignored while other more trivial posts get the hallowed 'blue' treatment (all posts from Blizzard employees are coloured blue). Calls to technical support lines are often answered with the same lack of care and attention and when these problems extend to sensitive areas like billing and accounts the general consensus is that Blizzard's high command needs to do something, and quickly.Yet it is at the official forums where things have become even more tragic. This central hub of communication between the players and Blizzard descended into absolute farce during the last seven days. Almost every single thread created asking about the lag problem was ignored or answered with the most derisory cut & paste 'answers' which only left the poster more confused and despondent than before. A large number of inoffensive posts (many others did descend into childish name calling) were locked or deleted while the level of anger and despair swelled like floodwater. Some posters even found themselves banned for daring to suggest that gamers should try and work together to make their dissatisfaction with Blizzard well known. Blizzard's European moderators are now willing to break their own forum guidelines to try and silence dissent.
After six days of obfuscation, outright falsity and denials Blizzard finally made an offer to all European players of WoW. Even though the lag problems were confined to a small fraction of the total number of European servers Blizzard decided to give every player two days compensation in addition to a day and half of rest-bonus XP. The latter is one of WoW's more endearing features as it allows players to build up periods of double experience by not playing the game, so when they log back in with their character they crawl towards the next level at twice the normal pace. Unfortunately, the majority of players on the affected servers are at level 60, the game's current maximum where any rest bonus is 100% useless. So Blizzard's offer was a boon to level 40 players on servers that had been lag free but a spit in the face to the tens of thousands of level 60 players who had been denied a working game for six days in a row. True to recent form, Blizzard have ignored the howls of protest at this response which many players see as insulting, even if Blizzard are not obligated to compensate players for this kind of broken service, all thanks to the omnipotent power of the EULA (end user licence agreement).
World of Warcraft is the biggest success story on the PC of recent years and certainly the most successful MMO game of all time with over 4 million subscribers now logging into the worlds of Azeroth on a regular basis. There is really only one weakness in WoW's supremely playable formula and that is the lack of a persistent world where players can take on a fully functioning alternate identity and decide the fate of that world by their combined actions. Rather it relies on both high-end content and the enthusiasm of its community of players to keep people playing long after they have reached level 60. With the recent technical issues increasing in frequency and the debacle of the last week, the ability of level 60 players to engage in the game's high-end content has been seriously hampered. Not only is this frustrating for all concerned but as the amount of co-ordination between large groups of people required understandably means juggling in-game and real world commitments the disruption is more serious than some players being unable to farm epic loot. The behaviour and attitude of Blizzard's support staff, especially on the official forums, have taken a bad situation and made it immeasurably worse. While Blizzard knows that the majority of players are hopelessly addicted to WoW their recent behaviour has greatly shortened the length of time it will take for a large numbers of players to decide enough is enough and cancel their account.
Many think that Blizzard owes them a large apology for this last week's turn of events. The communication between the company and its players is in need of a serious overhaul and the speed with which it tackles technical issues cannot be allowed to settle at the pitiful levels recently experienced. The vast majority of players are happy enough to endure the occasional glitch as long as it is promptly addressed while the player base is kept well informed. Neither of these things have happened recently and although it is highly unlikely that Blizzard will destroy WoW by bungling it is unfortunate that for thousands of gamers the last week's events have irreparably tarnished the reputation of this mighty developer.
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