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Some german gaming news sites have posted a blizzard press release stating that they have reached the 2,000,000 subscriber mark. I will supply a link as soon as the press release is posted on blizzards site

Yep, school is definitely out.  Not only are WoW's numbers up, but I have to be a lot more careful walking the dog.  I have noticed that teenage girl drivers are easily as bad as the boys.

http://www.blizzard.co.uk/press/050614.shtml

That doesn't even count the massive number of subscribers they are going to get from the China release that just went live (over 500K concurrent Beta users).

Last I'd heard, female drivers age 16-25 had finally overtaken male drivers of the same age group for most accidents/ problem drivers.  More aggressive, less careful and more easily distracted.  I can't remember where I heard it, though.  Anecdotal evidence has proven it true to me.  Every time I get someone 6" off my bumper when I'm doing 75-80 it's more often some young girl in a Neon than it is a guy. 

Edit: Oh yeah, on-topic, this hasn't expanded the market any. :p

I still chuckle when I see the Blizz #'s as I recall when it was thought SWG would be the first million+ US game, and speculation was that Bliz would be big, but not huge.  Time makes fools of us all.

So when are the insurance companies going to fix the rates to match the number and stop giving it to the male drivers up the ass.  Young male driver = very expensive insurance.   Young female drivers get away with much cheaper.
Of course instead of evening it out the pricks will just raise the females insurance.  Fucking insurance companies.



I guess with WOW hitting so many subscribers, we will see an even lower standard being set for customer service and even less bug fixes.

Thread derail at the first reply. This must be some kind of record even for f13 ;)

Haha thanks, I try.  I would be interested to see whether the summer push brings a noticeable change in player behavior.  We need graphs of bad behavior appeals, provided by secret insider contacts.  Sirbruce??

I think your definition of bad behaviour and SB's definition of bad behavior would differ greatly...

Yeah, bitches, it's that popular (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1118762039&archive=&start_from=&ucat=13&).

Apparently they still can't afford battlegrounds servers. Some things never change.

I'd say sometime around never.  I've got a co-worker whose fiancee works for one of the big insurance companies around here.  He goes apeshit over gay marriage, not on morality issues, but because it would throw-off all their precious charts and data that goes back to the early 1900's.  Teenage girls will have to be bad drivers for a long time before it affects the 'trending data' that they use in any significant way.  Thank your dad.  :-D

Today, the groundhog came out of his hole, saw huge piles money, and declared "5 more years of EQ clones!"

Figured I'd merge the topic and put it in PC/Console Gaming Hardware, as there may be more people reading that than the WoW boards.

2 million. Holy fucking moneyhats. I may have to cancel my subscription just to help curb Blizzard's march to take over the world.

Bums me out man.  I mean Wow is an okay game if you really like diablo, but as an mmog I found it substandard to average at best.  Maybe it is the PVP that is the draw?  I never really tried much of the PVP, but the PVE kinda sucked balls.

Hell, I like EQ2 a lot more than WoW.  For full disclosure I beta tested both games, am FAR from a power leveler (still playing EQ2 and have only gotten my main to 34 or something, but I have several 20+).  In wow I got 3 characters over 20, but didn't play at all past that point if the game changes.

I went for the station pass myself as I like planetside as well and find JTL fun in small quantities, too bad I hear the PVP is just a bunch of one shot kills.

Maybe I should be happy that the players I am least likely to like are all off playing some other game that I am not.  But the insane success of WoW guaruntees we will be seeing wow clones like CRAZY in a few years.

There is something fundamental I miss about blizzard games.  I have not really liked ANY of them.  Warcraft, starcraft, diablo, wow, all of them just left me pretty flat.  I still list my worst video game purchase ever as being the day I bought two copies of diablo 2 so my wife and I could play together.  I just HATED that game, and it was ugly as sin for the time it came out.

Meh, I should be just happy that 2 million people are happy... aw, fuck.  who am I kidding, playing an mmog does anything BUT make someone happy.  Especially with a SLOW liveteam like blizzard.  2 million grumpy pissed off people.  Now THAT kind of makes me a little happy.   :wink:

Emphasis mine. It's best to stay on your meds.

Bleh.  It will be 1,999,999 by Friday.  I'm done.

I love Diablo and right now ignore health and family to play Fate.  I can't see the comparison; WoW is much less fun.

I wish I understood why people like diablo.  I found the first one fun for a month or so, but the second one just did NOTHING for me.  And I tried HARD to like that game.

My wife and I played the first act, she said it was boring as all hell and ugly so she quit and gave her copy away.  I tried to push on, but just could NOT play anymore after about halfway through act 2.  Later on I picked it up again and got to act 3 but it was no fun whatsoever.  At that point I just deleted it and threw it away as nobody I knew wanted it even for free.   The pure brainless repitition just kills me.  I find mmos less boring than diablo 2.

Although I would probably go dig it up from the junkyard before playing lineage 2 or dungeon seige again.

My annoyance isn't so much that I hated the game (strong dislike is closer) but that so many people thought it was robot jesus.  The game was average AT BEST.

WoW is similar, but I don't hate or even strongly dislike WoW.  I was just mildly bored by it.  Must be just the blizzard fanbois or something...

Daiblo 1 and 2 were loot robot jesus. If there's ever an MMOG that perfects that exact same loot system, I'll be there so fast heads will spin.

If you didn't enjoy it, you simply don't care much about loot. I, for one, cared when my character got his Dirk Diggler - and now I'm done with the game. Until I want to play it again in a few months.

If you are obsessive-compulsive like me, you enjoy anything where you collect stuff.  For me, Diablo II LOD is a "fun" collection game since it forces me to not keep everything like a pack-rat, so I can just enjoy watching shinies pop out of monsters and sell it all for fat stacks of cash.  Random dungeons, random loot, can play for five minutes and feel like something was accomplished... it's fun to me.  Never enjoyed the battle.net, though.  I liked Dungeon Siege for the exact same reasons.  I take something like Animal Crossing much more seriously.  Also, what schild said.

must be the same thing that addicts my wife to the collection quests in EQ2 then I guess.  Those ground shinies are like digital crack to her.

I just don't have that kind of desire to keep hitting the bar for the pellet.

But it does not really explain the WoW phenom.  Wow does not have that kind of collection, neither does warcraft.

No it doesn't, and the game is less polished than City of Heroes. Which further supports my "It has the Blizzard Branding on it so everyone thinks it's good" theory. I'll admit, it's juvenile, but then most gamers have the mind of an ape.

Which is why I didn't see much stock in your preliminary assertion.  I don't think the same kind of player that likes Diablo necessarily translates into a gungho WoW player.

Right now, it's IMO the best EQ clone available.  I'd wager to say best MMORPG on the market.   Well, at least it's the most inclusive. It caters to soloers, it caters to raiders. It appeals to PVE people,  it appeals to PVPers.  It has a distinctive, well executed graphical  style that doesn't rape your computer.  It's a game designed to get as many people as possible playing it.  Only major group it didn't go after are the "gaming as a form of punishment" but EQ2 already went for that niche and Vanguard is looking to own it completely.

I don't see its success as even remotely unexpected.  This was a game built to succeed.

Less polished than CoH? I disagree. I just tried CoH about 6 weeks ago and couldn't get over how mundane everything was. Same shitty quests ( I played a few weeks at release, but my radiation defender was the first thing to get the axe, so I quit ) were still in place. Same shitty zones but now they're empty, with everyone flocking to the new one, which wasn't very interesting either.

I don't know, I just don't see the polish in CoH. The only thing they have going for them is the movement system. The combat is less involved and more systematic, etc.

Also, to enjoy Diablo2 I think you'll need more than 2 people. Each time it's reborn in #fpdoms we get 4-6 people and play tcp/ip games. It only starts to get real fun and challenging in act3/5 nightmare/hell. F those burning archers and quillrats in act5 hell.

I still have nightmares about the fire-breathing shamans in act 3 hell.  Great game, WoW could only hope to be half the fun D2 is/was.  If Diablo2 could hold 20-30 players per game, I doubt I'd play much else.  Ever.

Says it all for me... I lasted less than 2 weeks in WoW.  It appears, like many of you, that I may have to officially give up on mmog's for the rest of the decade.

I hope to hell that Auto Assault doesn't suck.   

I'd given up hope until I noticed Tactica Online. Niche games for the win and somethingsomething.

You're messing with me... aren't you?

No, sir.

Even if it does, it costs $10 less to find out than most of the others.

Of course, one has to wonder why they're only charging $40 or it instead of $50.

agreed.  Everyone at work and many here are fond of it and there's some definite improvements to the genre.  But I never got to lvl 10 -- hated the grind.  Cityscape stuff and running on foot killing muggers was too much.  Instanced missions had all the same map, more or less.  I hear past 15 there's more content and you get into some narrative.  I'm less patient these days and won't bother.  Kicks MxO's ass though -- now that was a boring game.  Instanced missions exactly the same map every time on low levels.

How is it that they are making this much money and are still so fucking slow with the content.  They haven't even announced a goddamn expansion yet.  I presume Vivendi is just soaking up all the money and not reinvesting any of it into WoW?

Come on, it's Blizzard.  I would not call that group "hard working".  The new wall-mounted swords for all employees have not been delivered yet, either.  And someone needs to work on the Diablo II 1.11 patch.

I was always one of the people saying that Blizzard's history of slow development would be WoW's Achilles heel.  Still, when you have 30 million a month pouring in, I thought even they would have an expansion in the works.

(As an aside, I think it's not so much that they don't work hard, it's that they don't work smart: I remember reading an article about the game where the writer stumbled upon some designers extensively debating about the style of columns to place in some ceiling area in some dungeon somewhere.  Then again, maybe you cannot get the great handcrafted feel without that kind of shit.  Either way, they need to hire more fucking people to design me some more creepy dungeons populated by larger bags of hit points from which I can take more even brighter glowing swords.)

I loved Diablo II because of the loot collection and randomized dungeons, which is something I think any hack-n-slash RPG requires in order to be fun. Sort of the same reason I loved PSO (best boss fights in any Online RPG ever), nevermind that there were sets of dungeon layouts rather than true randomization.

WoW doesn't feel like Diablo in the least outside of the "Blankety blank of the blank", color coded equipment and some of the graphical styling. That, and group dynamics didn't really mean shit in Diablo II, since it could be completed with pretty much any combination of character classes.

Also:

Probably it's going towards server pipe and hardware expansion. I feel sorry for the poor fuckers that have to do the DB and hardware maintenence. I'm glad my area of expertise isn't in databases, since every fucking place uses Oracle.

At least I'm not the only person who thinks CoH is just another also-ran MMO puttering along with 100k subs.  And tights.

Didn't they patch in capes? That was neat.

What I find telling is that those of you who disliked WoW are the same folks who dislike PvE in general.

I enjoy it for the PvE. It reminds me of early EQ without getting my ass pounded by "even-con" monsters.  It's also a lot faster than early EQ, so it's a win-win for the PvE'r in me.  Some folks like PvE some don't.  The majority here don't, so you don't enjoy WoW. Big shocker.

Then there's the PvP. The PvP is ok, if you can get a decent group and not get zerged or be a zerg with 'me too' ers jumping-in after 15-mins. (not likely)   I haven't tried the battlegrounds yet because I'm a Hunter and we're a dime a dozen, so I can't speak about it directly but I've heardit's fun.   It's definatly not the kind of PvP folks who had raging hard-ons for UO are going to enjoy. It's level-based, which means you have to get to 57+ to get anything out of it. If you don't like the PvE in the first place you're  never going to get there. Bad if you're designing a PvP game, not so much if you're doing a PvE game with a PvP endgame.

Whatever it is, it's definatly not Diablo 2.  I couldn't stand that game and to this date it's the only one I've ever not cared if I lost the CD or not.  My assessment of it is the same as Alluvian's wife.


They're not turning that money around into content. They're STILL overwhelmed by the beast they've created and MAYBE they're looking at dropping some of it into CS.  An expansion isn't even on their radar yet.  Hell, Hero classes, something they said they'd do prior to any expansion are still 6-9 months away from even entering playtesting according to the in-dev page (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/) 

They are not a business that makes games.  They're gamers running a business.  Good practices and intelligent, focused direction aren't going to be a part of their model.  This has shown in everything they've EVER done.  Yeah it makes for good game, but it means they're going to be slow as hell because having fun and a 'great working environment nobody thinks of leaving' is second to doing actual, y'know, work.

They were close to having rpg pvp that didn't suck ass, so close I stuck around hoping it would come to pass.  The changes they made in the way pvp is played for the BG's makes it obvious they see the weakness in their current system.  But unfortunately they were worrying about the bluebies and the raid guilds or whoever the fuck so they couldn't be bothered to improve the gameplay of contested zone pvp on pvp servers.  So I quit.  Fucking fix graveyards so I dont have to cope with bullshit spawn rush stupidity every fight and I'd still be playing I bet.

Nobody is going to make a better EQ clone then WoW so I am praying that they just stop trying to make EQ clones.

I can name at least 5 or 6 MMOG's that would kill for 100k subscriptions. Why the fuck is being profitable without being the biggest e-peen on the block a bad thing?

The link at the bottom of that page doesn't seem to be working.

Assuming that's true, my guess is that some of that is from them talking on their cell phones. Even with hands-free-kits talking on the phone is a distraction:

http://www.iii.org/media/hottopics/insurance/cellphones/

To me Diablo played like a top down shooter with loot. It had even more frantic action than a shooter like Doom with tons of monsters on the screen at once. MUD-derived MMORPGs have traditionally only had one-on-one or party-on-one action which is frankly quite boring, though CoH tried to break out of the mold a little (with taking on 4 or 5 at a time doable in situations). Hellgate seems to be taking a step backwards from Diablo in terms of the number of monsters you fight at once, at least from the few videos I've seen.

Maybe cause the bulk of the revenue for these games comes from the subscription fee. Plus NCSoft has the Lineage cash cows to subsidy the costs for their other games.

God should smite theese fuckers, all this money and they still can't fix the lootbug involving mining and herbalism?

THAT'S STILL NOT FIXED?!

Did you see how fast they rushed in Battlegrounds and the honorsystem? It was with speed not seen since Road Runner cartoons.

By god, they're competing with the Star Wars Galaxies team.

Hmm.  I haven't run into a mining lootbug in ages.  Completely anecdotal evidence - but to my eyes they're fine now...

The lootbugs are almost totally eliminated in my experience. However, they broke the boats in the process.

I hit one a month or so back.  Seems it's confined to copper and the low-level herbs.

I hit the lootbug today when grabbing some bruiseweed, and my guildmate got it when mining some mithril. Could be it's just on the Euro servers theese days, but I doubt it.

Ya. I took advantage of the free 4 days for old subscribers and logged in and played my scrapper a bit. Other than getting him a cape, and glowing eyes you couldn't see when he had instant healing up, not much else seemed to have changed. Mission difficulty setting was clunky, having to track down some npc somewhere to set your difficulty level rather than being able to set it at mission enter time was pretty annoying, but my scrapper still played the same as he did on release, totally overpowered and boring at the same time.

I have to say thank god WoW copied EQ's movement system for sidestepping. Having to use seperate keys in CoH was ass. Turning the turn left/right keys into sidestep left/right when the right mouse button is held down is just too convenient to leave out of a control system, and meleeing in CoH was a huge PiTA without it.

I played for a couple of hours when I found out about the free trial and was curious what had changed but really, not much has.

I bought the thesis espoused by Schilld, El Gallo et al. that they would be glacial on patches and new content.  I was not expecting Battlegrounds until next December.  Their ability to release it just before the summer, has quite surprised me.

The biggest problem for CoH, besides the fact Superhero genre may not be as large as DnD fantasy, is the similiarity of zones.  It's not really their fault, since the zones are urban.  But like real life, urban zones do look similar.  So many players don't get that feeling of "exploration" in CoH moving from one urban zone to another.  Some stand out - but most do not.
 

FixX0r3d. I forgot to change it when I merged the topics.

Absolute opposite for me.  I did purely pve in wow and found it 'okay' but not really that engaging.  It was kind of like when a friend brought over lego starwars the other day.  Sure it was kinda fun and goofy, but it had no depth and we completed it in 4 hours.

I never got into the PVP or crafting in wow, and that is probably where the depth is, but I don't personally find crafting interesting in mmos.

Again, this was with 2 people, myself and my wife.  I rarely play in groups bigger than 3 or 4, and always with people I know well.  I have not taken a single pickup group EVER in the last 5 years.

For whatever reasons I like EQ2 more.  I just found much more content for myself, my wife and her friend in our little 3 person group.  Now that is pretty much an optimal group just by accident.  Shaman (arguably the best eq2 healer type), monk (weak tank), and ranger (good damage when the mob is facing away and VERY good when you add in a good bow).  That said, we duo a lot as well, with just shaman and ranger.  That group should logically suck, but with careful aggro management we can bounce mobs back and forth between us to keep me getting the rear attacks while the damage is split (shaman can take a good beating in eq2, probably more than ranger).

Maybe we just picked bad classes when we played for a month grouped up in wow.  Or maybe 2 people isn't enough to have fun with in wow, but we went hunter and shaman and found it entertaining as a diversion but nowhere I would like to spend too much time.

All that said, I hardly play a lot of EQ2 or any mmog these days.  I play maybe once or twice a week for maybe 3-4 hours each day.  I have become the ultimate casual gamer.  And I still like EQ2 better, wow felt too easy.  We don't die in EQ2 much, and when we do the penalty is gone in 15 mins or less, but we get in a LOT more close calls where a few last second heroic opportunities and the instant cast emergency spells make the difference with everyone near death and out of power.

I don't see where EQ2 is some masochistic game.  I am super casual and find it quite fun.  I also EXCLUSIVELY play with competent people who I can practically communicate via ESP with.  People I have been gaming with for YEARS, so maybe it is just the really good teamwork that lets me find it fun.  By myself I would just not play ANY mmo.

To each his own, I think the poster who mentioned having everything under one roof is probably on the money for why wow is number 1.  Specifically the performance on low end machines.  I personally dislike the art direction, but it is VERY low polygon (with good animations) which allows it to run on very low systems.  The EQ1 crowd most likely migrated there as EQ2 has huge system requirements.  Our systems run it fine switching between 'high detail' and 'balanced' settings though.  Certain dungeons kill my system on high detail, but going to balanced and shutting off torches and shadows works fine for me (and bumping up the model detail because I like the nicer player textures).

It would be interesting if we had an alternate universe where wow was the same game but with much higher system requirements.  I wonder how popular it would be then?

I have not seen any mention in notes of the loot bug being fixed.  In my experience, it is far, far more common in the newbie areas, and moreso in Durotar than Tirisfal.  I assume that it has something to do with the number of people.  I have sort of reconsidered my position with WoW and think now I should just get back to my guildies on Silver Hand (RP) instead of fighting the bad fight on Crushridge, so I should find out eventually.

FWIW, the "loot bug" seems to be a database scaling and loading issue, from what I have heard.  So it's not really something that can be fixed, so much as managed and worked around.  Once again, Oracle turns out to not be the magic bullet of MMO DBMS needs (the problem seems to be a result of designing around the terms of the liscense for the DB servers).

--Dave

Is Oracle still licensing per-connection?  That was asinine 8 years ago.

If so, then this could possibly be fixed by throwing money at the problem... which is what we do at times.  Optimizing the read/write situation, SGA, redo log archiving, etc... it's a lot of damn work even without thinking about using fantasy hardware like load-balanced fibre channels to a EMC frame.  Not that SAP on Oracle on AIX is much like whatever they are using; I am not at all familiar with Oracle tuning on what I assume are Windows servers, but throwing RAM at it helps sometimes, or segregating the datafiles into hot/not-so-hot.  Will they drop the change on a performace-tuning team?  Doubtful, even if they have the money.

Well make that 1,998,000. I loved the PvE - personally i thought it was fun. For a while. But the PvP just hasn't gotten any better. At all. In fact it's gotten worse. So, meh, i'll resub when they've done something interesting in PvP.

Am half tempted to go back to SB...god why do i NEED to be subbed to at least 1 MMORPG at all times?

You had 2,000 subscriptions?  Holy crap.  They'll definitely notice that cancel.

Yes, the loot bug is alive and well and especially popular in copper veins and silverleaf bushes.

And it definitely occurs most in the human lands (in my experience). I just skate on my knees until I find another of the same, loot it and I'm back to normal.

I actually kind of like the way the character floats around instead of running after the loot bug hits....but I'm weird like that. I just start wondering how my rogue managed to pick up a couple levels of Elocator ^^

 :|

pwnt.

Actually, as the topic of the thread suggests, they probably wouldn't even blink at that.

I, personally, have enjoyed WoW greatly.  I feel it has the best atmosphere of any MMOG, and the best PvE.  The advance curve is perfect.  I also actually find myself enjoying the quest and the stories they construct for them (unlike EQ, which feels like all the quest are horribly written after thoughts).  It could be because I am a fan of the warcraft series though.  I have spent allot of time just exploring the game, going to see all the places in the past games first hand, which is kind of cool.  Its just allot of fun to explore in that game.  On top of all that, despite with how I hear you guys complaining about the low polys, I think the graphics are spectacular.  Looks better than any other mmog in that regard in my opinion, and the style of it makes it even better.  The graphical stats on some other games are better I guess, but the way Blizzard did the art work in the game made it look much better.

I guess YMMV however, heh.

The mining/harvesting "loot bug" is where you get stuck in the crouched position until you mining/harvest successfully or log out and log back in. It's specific to certain nodes and it's not just a random thing or a database performance issue. That's independent of the "loot lag" you can get because they are too busy playing with their money to get more database servers. I don't know if it's still true since I don't play anymore but Blizzard used to have the servers "clustered" so that 10 or so game servers would all share a common database server.

I'm not a master of database solutions (my line of work involves the hardware/OS end of things, and Windows/Linux on their own make me want to kill), but what else is there that can handle those kind of numbers?

DB2?

Some more details about the China release of WoW. (http://wow.azzor.com/203/azzor_visits_china.php)

Some interesting facts from the above:

Legend of Mir II, the most popular MMORPG in China, has over 20 million subscribers. The owner of the company that makes Legend2 is the richest man in China now.

There are 96 servers in China (the same number as there are in North America) with 32 more on the way.

China subscribers pay to play per minute at a cost of roughly $3.64 for 66 hours, 40 minutes of gameplay.

So what you're saying is I overpaid by $11.36 per month because I didn't play for more than 66 hours.

Communism really does work, kiddies.

Legend2 costs a little over $4 a month to play so WoW has to compete against that game in pricing.

So, what you're really saying is Everquest fucked us from the start.

Goddamn, just when I thought we were ahead of China in that whole capitalism thing.

Here's some fuzzy math.

Drop the price to a point where even the most casual player who can only play once every two weeks can afford, and you'll make more money hats.

$5 = more profit/subscribers.

I know, that's a very complicated equation. But $15 a month means people have to be invested in their character or it's a waste of cash. I'm beginning to like this whole China place.

Yes the company that makes Legends of Mir II has over 140 subscribers across all their games. 140 FRICKING MILLION!

Asheron's Call had a random loot generator that a lot of people liked.  It would create all sorts of different items with different colors and properties.  In the early game, the most uber items were the good ones from the random generator.

But the MUD wimping too care of that.

The largest dating website on the planet runs MySQL.

He's known as the "Bill Gates of China". The name of his company is Shanda, a name you better all start to remember because Shanda is on it's way to become the biggest player in the MMO market.

The reason is that just like in Korea on-line gaming, mainly from netcafes, is mainstream entertainment for the younger Chinese. The total number of Chinese internet users is (afaik) still below 100 million, but a high number of those play one or more online games. And the most important: this figure increases rapidly by the day. China is a dozen times Korea and a few times Japan in terms of potential market.

Also you can have part in Shanda's succes: it's one of the best performing equities on the Nasdaq.

Lastly: WoW will likely be an enormous succes in China. Again few seem to know this, but Blizzard is BIG in China. It's by far the most popular of all game companies, probably even more popular then Shanda itself.

MySQL has been doing a lot of stuff over the last couple of years to bring themselves up to enterprise levels.  Last time I looked though PostgreSQL was still better for high-end reliable DB ops as far as 'free' DB solutions go.

It doesn't matter in practice.  You just need a team that knows the DBMS (or a nice support contract).  We have somewhat-large databases, two of them nearing a terabyte on Oracle 9, one at least a terabyte on Teradata.  Our problem is performing the backups in less than 24 hours, not response time.

You do realise that if you lived in China the whole economy would be scaled at a different rate, and your job would pay you (probably) 1/3 of what it does now, but your costs (food, rent, etc) would be proportionate? It's the same reason many jobs get outsourced to India, yet the people there live comfortably. The same reason Indian people who live over where you are, or where I are working normal jobs can afford to send home money and essentially support their whole families on the side while having enough to live comfortably in the US/Uk/Aust/etc..

Or were you just deliberately being obtuse?  :roll:

Az

Everyone be sure to note that the word "comfortably" also scales down for India. =)

True, but in relation to the people who don't have a relative in the first world sending them money, the people who do live really nicely for over there.

But you know, in a place where a day's pay is the same amount of money as I pay for a can of coke, they're probably not going to be spending 15 day's pay on their WoW subscription. And being sent $50 a week from a son/daughter/etc working in a first-world country pretty much means you're living large, as far as the local scale goes.

From my limited technical knowledge, it's not the amount of data that is stored/indexed, but the number of simultaneous accesses of data. While I know that db tech has advanced beyond the 90's tech of "read-no lock, write-lock", there is still a huge bottleneck whenever a particular lock is established so the write can be performed--and if this isn't extremely carefully designed, a huge bottleneck could occur.

Oracale is most definitely not optimized from the technical perspective for handling hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections--and no db really is. Some dev's are actually reverting back to flat file implementations for highly accessed data because the db tech just isn't currently evolved to handle this type of scenario.

Yes, it can and it does.  We don't just keep enormous amounts of data gathering dust of course, we have thousands of concurrent users hitting these things 24x7.  We don't run this junk on Windows because of scalability.  Small, inconsequential DBs start with 4GB of RAM.  Our bigger ones have around 20GB of RAM, with a max of 1000 asynchronous I/O connections to hundreds of EMC disks.  Caching is the way to go, in the Oracle SGA, the AIX filesystem, and on the EMC frame itself.  I/O is the killer.  There is no fix for this other than to throw money at it, both for hardware and/or for smart people to run it.  Sometimes you just can't fix it, either.

That said, the fact that I have to relog in WoW after gathering from the wrong node is unacceptable.

I firmly agree wth the concept of proper multi-level caching of data, but this is a hugely complex design.

Keep in mind the article says that the average urban salary in China is around $1000 a month while the average rural salary is around $100 a month. So 66 hours of game play for $4 is pretty decent. If the average Chinese player played for 4 hours a night, that's over 16 nights of gameplay, which would make 30 days of gameplay around $8 a month. And with such a large and obviously accepting market for online games, somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 million or more, why wouldn't companies want to sell their game in China?

truly I am glad I am not teh Smed after this release.

those #'s for China+ are completely mindblowing.  However, getting an online service in China ain't easy. AOL tried-it/trying-it.  Not sure of connectivity and scaling issues (seems to be known issues), but CS support and Billing would be crippling if not solid on day0.

That's why you get a Chinese company like 9city or Shanda to do that shit work for you, so you can sit back in Irvine and count your money hats.

I'm on a US server.  Hit it again just last night.  Have ever since the patch.  It's not a database/netcode thing since a bugged node will always bug the player again regardless of when they re-attempt.

Blizzard is big in Korea too (Diablo and the 'craft games seem to be huge), but WoW is a relative flop there (300k or so, utterly dwarfed by Lineage I/II).  The conventional wisdom is that this is because WoW is not enough like the Lineage games (though I've heard people talk about some sort of distribution hitch or fight with cafe owners or somesuch as well).  Is Mir more like Lineage or more like WoW (I know nothing at all about Mir)? 

It's not a database problem in the sense of, it being a performance of the database issue.  If it were, then you'd see it on random nodes depending on how hard the database was getting hit at any given moment.  That's not how it occurs however.  It's consistently the same nodes.  If you loot the peacbloom node that's next to the zepplin tower in Trisfal, you get loot bugged by that peacebloom node.

It happens consistently, but only on some servers...other servers don't see this problem. So clearly that node has been cleaned up on certain servers, but not others.  The fact that they aren't all fixed boggles my brain, and i'm sure that there has to be SOME other thing going on, but still...

I don't know why it happens but it sucks cock.  It is the same node all the time, so no, not network.  Some update process gets hung somewhere... I don't get it.  Stop playbalancing and start fixing bugs, fuckers.

Or you could just avoid that node instead of letting it ruin your day. I'm just saying.

Which of course is what people do... now if the Gatherer plug-in just had a ring color to indicated bugged nodes.  Wouldn't surprise me if the spawn object is its own bit of code and so some are just obsolete scripts.

Nodes seem much more random to me these days.  I suspect Blizz dropped a bunch more spawn objects.  But they still spawn once until harvested and in the exact same spot.

What Blizz should do is attach a timer to spawned nodes and expire them, as well as change the spawn object to pop the new node instance within an area rather than on top of the object itself.  Something UO has done since 1997.  Over seven years ago I was writing code version checks in UO emu scripts to bootstrap to new script versions.  I imagine Blizz will do something similar one day.

If Blizz fixed the boats so i didn't fall in the deep sea and die, and also fixed the evade bug on mobs that happens a ton, I think I'd be cool with most of the things in game.

The evade bug is similar to the loot bug in that it has to do with specific parts of the map.  What it is (I suspect) is tears in their detection mesh that the creature 'falls' into.  When that happens, there is no pathing and LOS information getting passed appropriately, so even though technically you should be able to hit it, the information in the hit check is passing a null value at some point due to an error in the geometry, and the default result is an evasion (probably because in the code, the enum for hit possibilities has evade listed as 0).  For each of these cases, every time you come across one, you should log a ticket and/or post your coordinates in the bug fix forum. I've had a couple of the loot bugs fixed this way, although they seem to be a bit slow on the uptake these days.

True.  That requires remembering, and I suck at that.  It also really limits my node choices in some cases.

I used to run Cosmos, and then it was happy because I could mappin all the bugged nodes and have them show up as minimap icons...so I'd know right away if I shouldn't loot that one...but no more...

My serious DB-foo is a bit out of date these days, but when I was working on a ATM system for a bank in the late 90s (ie hole in the wall machine you get money out of) its database was heirarchical - IMS I think it was - on a IBM MVS machine.  I asked the guys why it wasn't running DB2 or something relational - and they told me that relational databases were too slow for hundreds/thousands of transactions per second - the niceness of using DB2 was offset by speed.  Is it still a similar problem with Oracle et al?  I vaguely remember someone saying years ago that Everquest didn't use no fancy shmancy relational database, it had a really simple system, that seemed to scale quite nicely with increased numbers.

As Zepp mentioned above, EQ1 used(and may still use) flatfile "databases" to store stuff on their servers.  WHich is part of why it requires the server to go down(or at least a few zones) for them to change relatively minor things, that WoW can change with little effort.

Alkiera

It also means Blizzard can run arbitrary reports on their data or hunt for exploits directly in the DB.

SELECT Player_id 'Farmer'
   FROM PlayerEquipment
   WHERE Rarity = 'Epic'
   GROUP BY Player_id
   HAVING COUNT(*) > 5

FTW.

Sheesh, I really sparked a debate here.. Look people, they key point here is that with 2 million users they should be able to garner enough cash to hire a programmer to fix the problem. IE I don't give a shit if your MySQL/Oracle is running fine, Blizzard needs to fix the bug.

Hats off for a very technical derail though.

Ultima Online uses the flat-file method as well.  Backups and game info are essentially one huge notepad file.

Hello everyone,

Been lurking for a while, but want to comment on WoW in China.  That article was reasonably accurate, but here are some phat figures:

Blizzard got a $3m license fee up front and will get at least $50m for the next four years.

Based on some stock analysis I read this means The9 (the comapny is US-listed) is expecting to rake in at least $50m in revenue from WoW a year just from China alone.

If you talk about relative amounts in the US, that's like expecting $200m box office receipts for the next four years for your $50m movie. Sh*t, movie studio exec. are scratching their head over this!

No wonder SOE and WBI is getting together.

Lastly, anyone heard anything about 404gaming (http://www.404gaming.com)?  They got a system to rapidly develop mutlipe games on the same infrastructure.  Their first game is some hip-hop game that's probably going get a lot of press on MTV.  They got lots of hip-hop artists assigned to the game.

What to hear your views on this.

Edit: fixed link

Money hats, indeed. Whoever owns Blizzard just bought themselves a Porshce, and are even now furiously masturbating in it.


404gaming... vaporware, gangsta-style.

Someone emailed me a while back about 404gaming.  I looked at the site and read the teeny bit of info they had available and found nothing to inspire me.   They had stated on their website that they would be at E3 but no one I know actually found them and someone mentioned to me that they weren't on the list of booths.  I looked at the site just a bit ago and there is still no real information.  I'm not even entirely sure they actually exist. 

And then cleaning themselves off afterwards using thousand dollar bills to wipe up no less.

A sewer company in France owns Blizzard.

Yeah, that's what I thought.  I'm gonna see how may suckers than can get to preorder.

Think lots of young wannabe gangsta are going to be scammed.

As for WoW and China: no EQ2 in China.

Even communists know EQ2 sucks.

It's what I strongly recommend for anything that requires speed as opposed to flexibility. DB tech has made great strides in the past 5 years and most of the newer MMGs use relational DBs for their data storage. Some have done well with that. Some haven't.

As a picky aside, in response to the various communist jokes throughout the thread, the USA is probably more communist than China at this point.  They got one whiff of capitalism and dropped that communist shit hard.

Vaporware is where the real money is at.  Actually releasing products is for suckers.

On an unrelated note, a $15 payment will guarantee you a beta slot in f.13's upcoming MMO.  I also hear that Schild is looking for investors for a new console he's designed.  Among other new features, this console will electro-shock you via wires attached to your testicles anytime you play a movie not personally approved by Schild himself.

Quick sign me up, depressing art fag pieces and asian moves tarentino ripped off. I cant wait.

Can someone please name a depressing art fag movie I enjoyed? Just to make the joke have some value. Cuz right now, I'm grasping at straws for one I enjoyed.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120669/)?

Are you really that much of a dumbshit? Or are you trying to make a funny? Cuz I don't get it.

So .. does that mean you didn't like the movie or that it's not artsy fartsy?

There's really nothing artsy fartsy about it. You want artsy fartsy? Go see High Art or Redupers.

You have to understand something, I HATE artsy fartsy. It's intolerable. Trying to be in the upper echelon of art almost always results in absolute shit. Like Pollock. A shitty movie about a ridiculously shitty artist. But everyone's all high-falutin about it because it was a desperate portrayal of a tormented "genius." That's artsy fartsy shit and if I had my way, everyone involved would be in a turkish prison.

The Thin Red Line is the one I hated the most, as far as artsy-fartsy movies go.

If that movie is either depressing or artsy fartsy, you need your humor gene checked. Stat.

THIS (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167059/) is artsy-fartsy. It also sucked ass. I was so disappointed.

PJ Harvey is an actress now?

You wouldn't think that if you watched the movie. Something happened to Hal Hartley in the last 6-7 years that turned him from promising indy director into shitty artsy-fartsy director.

Can "The Brown Bunny" be considered artsy fartsy or just plain bad?

Any movie that can induce a semi-famous actress to blow a guy onscreen is art in my opinion.

Anything by David Lynch may not be artsy-fartsy, but it all annoys the shit out of me.

Dune is the exception.  Everything else annoyed me. Especially Lost Highway.

What? Did Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway just not have enough tits for you guys? is that the problem?

Dune was terrible. And possibly his most Artsy Fartsy movie. Even moreso than Eraserhead, if that's possible.

You don't get to speak about movies anything anymore.

This I command!

You just like shitty sci-fi. It's not my fault.

Mulholland Drive had plenty of tits, which was the only reason I was able to make it through that shitty-ass movie. Lost Highway? UGH FUCKING UGH. It didn't have enough of ANYTHING to make it worthwhile. Ok, it had a great soundtrack. Other than that, total shit.

Dune? Too ambitious. Lynch was the wrong guy for that movie. But Wild at Heart and Fire Walk with Me? Near perfect.

Yes, everything associated with Twin Peaks was beyond Brilliant. I need more TV like that. I need more movies like that.

I like Dune, and I'm a pretty big fan of the books myself so I guess I like shitty sci-fi too.  I also like The Last Starfighter, for whatever the hell that's worth.

David Lynch really should stick to television series, because his movies are generally overly ambitious, cerebral thought pieces handled by a completely incapable film director.  That's my opinion, anyways.

Titler.

Argh, you got me! 45 Second quicktime web movies! How could I have left such a hole in my argument?!

Don't be an asshat.

 :-D

For head exploding drama:

Quentinjuice
Quentinjuice
Quentinjuice!