Blizzard’s servers go nuts and the whole world whines in a concert. All over the mmorpg-communities and blogs everyone just talks about this. Nothing else. Obviously I’ll follow here but at least I’ll say something different.
It’s fun because Penny Arcade (no permalinks for a change…) called for Lum in a quote that you’ll find everywhere:
If this happened in Galaxies, or Dark Age, or AO, of course it’d be everybody everywhere piling on. But it’s Blizzard, and since they made a few good games years ago now they can do whatever the fuck they want to. Great policy, and it totally serves consumers. Good job. Where’s Lum The Mad when you need him.
I’m the only one considering this simply ridiculous? Cosmik comments:
My bet is on him being stored away behind the speech proof walls of a competitor. Rest assured though, there is a chance he is at least having a smile. Unless he plays World of Warcraft, that is.
Of course, not everyone believes Blizzard has been skipping down the garden path and giving everyone roses.
But hey, these people are no Lum. So why take any notice of them?
But Lum is alive and it’s not a case that he agrees with me:
HRose:
Calling Lum the Mad because the server is down? Haha.His point of view was actually here, by the way.
Lum:
And the article HRose linked to is still my view. For many of WoW’s players, this is their first MMO. If they learn that MMOs are unstable beasts that aren’t worth the effort thanks to technical difficulties, the ramifications of that will go beyond Blizzard. Believe me, no one in the MMO industry is dancing a jig over this.
And his direct opinion of what is happening today is exactly the main point that everyone is missing:
Believe me, if there was a knob they could turn, or even a giant vat they could throw money into to make things Better, I’m sure they would. Popularity can be a very sharp double-edged sword. Thus, the irony.
This is the answer, even if it’s not the type of taste you’d expect. This is why what is written on Penny Arcade is understandable from the players’ perspective but simply pointless to make things improve in some way. The truth is that Blizzard isn’t laughing and swimming in the money because “they can do whatever the fuck they want to”. The truth is that Blizzard is CLUELESS. That type of thing that YOU CANNOT BUY WITH MONEY.
It’s something that I wrote on this site too many times to count: Blizzard is able to do wonderful games and WoW is exactly a wonderful game. But they are clueless about the specific genre of a mmorpg and all the problems it brings along.
There are 88 servers. The hardware of all these servers is identic. There isn’t a server with a bigger capacity than another. Building an infrastructure like this one takes a lot of time and planning. They cannot “buy more powerful server”. It’s again NOT about the money. The only way to solve radically this problem is plan ahead. Not a case that I was anticipating all this when it was the time to underline this problem. Now? It’s too late. Blizzard cannot take down the servers for six months to replan the whole server structure.
The heart of the issue isn’t Blizzard or the servers now. It’s the community. This is fluff. Yeah, everyone is pissed off right now. Once the problems will be solved, instead, everyone will forget completely what is happening now.
So the point is: WoW is a good game, once the technical problems will be solved we will have the good game. In other examples both these aspects were bad and when the technical problems went away we still had bad games. If you don’t have patience you can jump to the other faction. SOE is the opposite of Blizzard, they know the genre but they don’t have a clue about building good games. You choose.
The fact is that “memory” isn’t a common quality. Aside a small group of jaded players noone remembers what happens. These topics are like some politics fluff, it is good to make peoples chat together for a day or a week but the actual effect is zero.
Nothing changes at all. We just need something for the chit chat, no matter what it is.