So, after work yesterday I rushed to GameStop to pick up my reserved copy of World of Warcraft. I hurried home and got down to business. By 5:30pm I was playing, and Hus and I had a good run up until about 11:15pm, when the game just fucking died. I mean, it died. Back in the DAOC days, there was lag from time to time, servers got rebooted, but nothing like this. The game just stopped working, and didn't work for an hour. Then they rebooted the servers. At about 1:00am, Hus and I got back on, and everyone had given up and gone to bed at that point, so things ran nicely. We played until 4:30am or so, which gives you an idea of how addictively fun the game can be when it's working properly, but at this point “working properly” is the one thing it's not. This has got to be the single worst release for an MMORPG in the history, which is a pretty big disappointment, considering how much potential the game has, and how sophisticated it looks to be, right out of the gate.
It's tough to imagine what the problem is that's bringing down the servers. I tend to think that the model Blizzard and other MMORPG providers use, as far as using named 'servers' is really just a simplification. I have to assume that a gamer interacts with multiple servers as he plays the game, and those servers probably communicate with numerous servers as well. Based on the few cogent words I could filter out from the infuriated shrieking, it sounds like there's some sort of issue with the databasing operations that relate to inventory and game items. That's a strange thing to consider, since that's such a standard component of MMORPG design. I'd assume that Blizzard is using some sort of technology that's similar to MSMQ, i.e. a message queuing system sitting on top of a database, as the lag issues have the appearance of queing going wrong. You do something, nothing happens, nothing happens, then five minutes later, a flurry of crap happens, and none of it makes much sense, cause it should have happened five minutes ago, and the game doesn't know what to make of it. In my experience working with and administering MSMQ, there's definitely a sort of feedback loop behavior, where the more backed up the queue gets, the more backed up the machine gets, and the slower it can do processing and pop the stack. The end result is that if things get backed up past a certain point, there's no turning back, it just clogs up and ultimately halts.
I certainly hope that Blizzard takes the millions of dollars it must have netted, just on 11/23 alone, and does what it takes to get the game running right. I guess it worked out fairly well that I'll be away for Thanksgiving, as it gives me a few days away from the temptation of trying to play the game in its current fucked up state. This game really is fun, they've got a lot of nice stuff in the game to recommend it, and none of it really creates a client-server programming challenge of the sort that would justify the kind of problems that Blizzard is having. At the end of the day, this game is still the same magnitude of complexity as Everquest was over 5 years ago. Inventory tracking, quest tracking, monsters move around, characters are saved, really nothing particularly amazing. All the big improvements WOW offers are client side things, like nicer graphics, better models, interface features, etc. Really, what makes the issues with WOW so scary, is that by their occurring in the first place, they suggest that Blizzard is already in so far beyond their depth that they lack the knowledge to fix things. In short, the kind of technical staff that would allow these sorts of problems to occur doesn't seem like the sort of technical staff that has the skills to fix them after the fact.
Come on Blizzard. Don't blow this, please. WOW's a great piece of client software, let's get the server side right too.