f13.net

Money money everywhere, but not a drop of competance.

This is the second straight night I have not been able to log in because Blizzard cannot seem to keep the damn Authentication server alive.

Someone who works in IT or something, can you explain Blizzard's utter incompetance? I know this shit would not fly in somewhere like a Hospital or Bank.

I'm on Australian time, working a 6am-2pm shift, so it's now 3pm and I'm home trying to log in. So far this week, it's gone:

Sunday - Server missing from list for 45 minutes, unable to log in
Tuesday - Server missing from list for 1hr45, unable to log in
Thursday - Authentication server down for 6 hours, unable to log in
Friday - Authentication server not working, unable to log in

Fuck this shit. I guess I'll play a little EVE, then go to sleep. I'll get to play for about 3 hours before work. YAY.


(fuckers)

My guild is learning Nef. We only just got a bunch of ony scales which will allow us to reasonably attempt him (new server, ony scales are actually a cockblock for us, fun shit). Too bad we haven't even hit razorgore this reset since we can't fricken log in enough people.

Very annoying.

Blizzard doesn't care as much about the network and server side of things as they do the actual gameplay. As long as the network stuff is working "good enough" they are satisified. This has been their philosophy since at least the dawn of B.Net which is a PoS. You can also see it in their BitTorrent client which is also a PoS, as is the WoW server architecture design and of course their login procedure. Here's my original login rant from Beta:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=1460.msg38097#msg38097

I thought it was funny and ironic last night.   When I went to login, the "Breaking News" section had some spiel about how they have seen drastic improvement in the Authentication Server, and login problems should go away.

I got to read an reread this message as I sat and waited nearly 15 minutes to Authenticate ........  nice .......

Astounding to me that this is still going on.

Still.

I'm about a month young in this game, and I'm flabbergasted at the amount of downtime I've seen.  I've played just about every MMOG (except for the sci-fi ones, AO, SWG, EVE), and even thinking back to the early days of UO, I can't remember any bullshit of this magnitude.  Granted, NO game has ever had in-game lag the likes of the early days of UO, which can be just as unplayable as the server actually being down.

Yeah, Blizz has some serious server problems and some even more serious customer service incompetence... but their game is like crack and they know it.  Any other game, and I'd probably be cancelling tonight before my first monthly charge goes through.  Sadly, I can't say the same about WoW.   :oops:

Wow... apparently the login servers are down again... on a Friday night...

I've given up. I'm tired of not being able to logon. I'm tired of getting disconnected in BWL. I'm tired of raiding. Add all this up and it's just not worth it anymore.

Not being able to login has given me time to re-evaluate my time and WOW isn't worth it anymore. If anything it makes my life more stressed. It's just a game. In five years the shiny won't matter. However, the time wasted playing WOW will be lost forever.

It's been fun (sort of)

Ahh well, good excuse to not go and rack up a 30 gold repair bill getting blenderized by the Twin Emps. I really dislike the precision this one particular encounter takes.  I don't think there's a single encounter in the game otherwise where you cannot recover at all from a main tank dying.  Once a tank bites it, WIPE.

Honestly, I hope they lose people over this crap.  Just not very cool.

:(

I like emps!  When you can pull them off.

Yeah, seems a lot of servers have been having fairly bad lag.  Mine has actually been in relatively decent shape, though I can't tell which is the more common experience.  I don't think Blizz cares overmuch; they seem to have more than enough willing to take the place of those who've left, judging from the recent addition of.. more servers.

After seeing what I thought was some gradual improvement it seems the bottom has completely fallen out the past two weeks. Tonight it looks like cascading disconnects across all realms and then anywhere between 10-45 minutes to authenticate.

What the fuck is going on over there? I can understand being a little overwhelmed with a game of this magnitude but this is completely out of hand.

My guess is they actually tried to improve their login architecture and totally botched it (not surprising) but didn't keep the old working system around to rollback to in case of something like this happened (somebody should be fired for that).

A guy posted that it's not the authentication server like they keep saying because it'll turn down a bad password in a hurry.

Well there's at least 6 distinct steps during the login process (at least there were during Beta) so even if you pass the "Authenticating" step you still have 4 more to go.

Yeah but Blizzard said it was the authentication server. Or the authenticating process. Or something. The whole fucking past week of playtime has been one big jumble of technical issues that's blending together.

I think I'm going to go buy Oblivion today to see what all the fuss is about.

I refuse to stare at screens waiting for a connection.

Last evening, after not being able to connect, I went and connected with my husband instead.  Far more fun.  (And no, you pervs, not in the way you are thinking at all - the kids were still up).

There's a new step that appeared last week.  I can't read it because it flips by too fast.

I believe it says "Sending non-specific system information", I read fast but I only catch a glimpse of it.

Experiencing same problems this evening as last and the one before and the one before.  Starting to just not care about any of my WoW toons.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Bought Oblivion but found out my Nvidia 5200 won't cut it.  Oh boy! New video card time!  .Newegg ftw; Nvidia 6800 GT better be good for the next year to 18 months.  So Oblivion will sit on the shelf for another 3-5 days.

Maybe I'll dig out Diablo2 again.  Or try to play Civ4 again.

Mmmmmm. Diablo 2.

So they have been tinkering with the login procedure -- no wonder it's all screwed up now.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it?

I guess they never heard that one.

The new step checks which third party plugins you're running to see if you've got OMG H@X!!111!!1eleven

Almost two years later, and the same kind of shit is still going on (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1100125293&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&)?

for the record:

3:22 pst, small patch today, still can't log in.

I don't know what the fuck's been going on the past month but it's as bad or worse than it has ever been. I mean it... I remember lots of crashes back in The Day but some realms are talking upwards of 48 hours of downtime over the past week.

They're combining a major server move with their normal patch day (even small patch) performance.  Resulting server stability is a well..  predictably shitty.

My server's not been moved. And it doesn't take a month, either.

Mt wife just started playing, the first game she's played since the original Legend of Zelda.  Her quote? "We pay for this?"

Well yah, I was just speaking for today.  I'm not sure if a major server move would effect non-participating realms, but hey.. this is Blizzard. Hey, at least the login servers were working last night.. that's progress.. right?  :-D

My wife tried to play EQ once.  She tried talking to a bunch of NPCs and then logged off in frustration in 5 minutes.

Yeah, my wife has her own account and is hooked. Even making me build a second computer. Maybe we'll talk or, I dunno... have sex or something since WoW is down.

She is probably too busy looking up quests on thottbot to be bothered.

She's eagerly anticipating training Soulstone.

So apparently there was some sort of hardware failure (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=7805960&p=1&tmp=1#post7805960) which brought down the authentication servers last week and now they are just sort of limping along for whatever reason. Which begs the question, why the fuck are those servers not at least quadruplely redundant? Blizzard credited everybody one day last week which means VU Games just ate at least $500,000 for that infrastructure fuckup (>1 million NA subscribers * ~0.50/day, I'm assuming Europe has their own auth servers). If they had just spent a fraction of that money on some failover authentication servers they wouldn't be in this mess.

I have no idea if it's true but I keep hearing that they contracted out server supply and maintenance to their ISP. It's unfathomable why a company would do this but with the way things are going it's looking more and more possible that it's the case.

Everything in this thread is why my wifes and my accounts have lapsed. Well add in because it's impossible to log in on Saturday and Sunday afternoons which is the main time we can play (whod'a thunk it?) and even if you manage to get on the game spends much of it's time shitting itself and being unplayable..

hooray.

Nobody plays WoW anymore, it's too crowded.

--GF

Not true. Or at least not totally true. My friend works on the servers, and he has been at work like 12-14 hours a day for the last 2 weeks. You can blame a lot of the problems on the original server architechure, that was handled by some one who knew very little about servers.

WoW has been having unanticipated server problems since launch.  How long would it take to completely redo the server side?  A year?

Sure would be nice if they did something about it, even if that doing something meant completely re-engineering that side of it.  A year and a half after launch and my server is still a miserable piece of shit that I cannot log into during primetime without spending at least 15 minutes working at it, and sometimes not even then.

(Yes, yes, I know, I can vote with my wallet, and I would if I only played primetime, but I'm usually about to log off then).

I wonder how many more subs they'd have if the servers were reliable?  A lot, I would wager.

You have to spend mone to make money, it seems.

I don't remember having authentication issues until the past month or so. it's all been server issues for me. Queues, loot lag, server stability, things like that are all server side issues. See "blizzard does something right" thread for reference, but long story short they upgraded my server hardware (which was the oldest, being one of the launch servers) and it's smooth as silk now.

They've been saying they are designing a new authentication mechanism; my guess was they didn't make the auth servers scalable enough, and it was designed for a maximum of probably half the load they have now, back before they realized the money shower they were expecting turned into a full scale money monsoon. You can handle the extra users by throwing more realms at the problem, but *everyone* has to go through the auth servers, so with every new purchase it gets slightly slower.  Add to that the apparent hardware failure(s) that they have and should have planned for, and blizzard's myopic architecture planning shows through and begins to impact their cashflow.

Also, from what I can gather the new auth mechanism FAILED MISERABLY two weeks ago when they tried it and they were forced to go back to the old one... hopefully their new auth solution will come out soon and all these problems will go away.

By now there is no reason why they could not have already upgraded every single one of the original launch servers.

Neither of the two I play on have been upgraded yet, at least not so I can tell by performance.  Crashes multiple times every night for the past week.  Mailbox and AH problems, loot lag, and so on, these problems have been better sometimes and worse sometimes, but they have always been present during primetime in some way or other.

I expect it to be bad at launch.  I don't expect it to be bad a year and a half after launch.

I agree with everything that Xanthippe said in the above post.

a lot.

The reason is incompetence.

Mixed with a whole lot of complacence.  I mean really, the masses have shown they're willing to put up with this kind of crap and pay $15 a month. Why change, why try to do better? Trying costs money.

I actually cancelled my account. Was an extremely heavy catass raider, made alot of friends in the game and enjoyed it quite a bit.
However being "older" now I am less willing to accept these login, lag (raiding aq was not enjoyable) after almost a year and a half of the game being online I was unwilling to deal with these issues.

So yeah I guess I took the advice of the forum fanboys and actually "quit" instead of ranting incessantly on the forums.

I just find it amazing how many people actually accept the 30-60 minute login ques, the lag, the authentication problems. I just didn't find it normal to mash the login button repeteadly when I could have been mashing potatoes, or something.

If it's almost raid time (8ish mon,weds,fri,sat) and I can't get in, I go do something else. The game's still a casual enough part of my life that I'm not a heroin junkie slamming the keyboard for my fix. I just post on the guild forums about not being able to log in and wander off.

Even quiting WoW is kind of fun, I saved the sad peon to my computer.

(https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/images/sadpeon.jpg)

I was more impressed with the EQ2 cancelling procedure.

1:35 am and the authentication servers are fucked again. For Bnet this shit was okay, for a premium subscription fee it's not.

It's pretty amazing that for all they've done right they are totally dropping the ball on simple technical issues.

They're used to BNet, and they don't seem to believe that WoW needs any higher a level of service. And it's only going to get worse. Very, very soon, the weekly maintenance is going to be a full, solid day. And keep  creeping. And it's not like maintenance is doing shit anymore either. By Wednesday night the game is chugging like a bitch. If Mythic can handle their maintenance on WAR half as well as they did with DAoC, they win. This shit is really starting to piss people off very badly.

I feel the same way.  I am so over the login problems and server downtimes. 

Due to hardware issues I wasn't even able to play any games on my computer for 3 weeks.  But my replacements came, and sure as shit the night I got my computer formatted, XP'd and updated I re-installed WoW to one of the nebulous server messages.  "We think something is wrong with the servers/login server/auth server.  We are working as fast as we blah blah blah, thanks for your understanding."  Balls.

I agree with Margalis.  WoW is a well made game overall, and Blizzard has marketted it successfully to a huge subscription-paying group of consumers.  But they can't make the servers run. 

My conspiracy theory is that Blizzard never expected to have to maintain server architechure for 5-6 million players.  Maybe some of the people helping to design the douchebag Blood Elves should have been replaced with network engineers.
 

How many servers? 128?

5-6 million accounts = the possibility of 128 x 10 chars per server (hypothetical, but I am sure farmers use quite a few) = 1280 chars.

1280 chars x 6 million = 7,680,000,000 possible characters. Banks, useless lewt, certain holidays with even more useless lewt to store, duping, overcrowded servers.

I have seen some large company server farms, for example Geico's that handle 6 million or so Insurance policies, that are housed in a pretty spectacular building, and is huge. I can't imagine what the Blizz server farm looks like.

5-6 million is Worldwide and definately not all on the same server farm. At release there were 2 seperate locations for servers. One on the West coast and on in Maryland or somewhere around there that handled East coast and Central timezone servers.

That said, the log in problems and general lack of any solid, timely fixes are pissing me off as well. If I'd run the servers under my control at the ISP I worked at with that kind of competance I'd have been fired post-haste, and likely my manager and his manager would have been as well.

LA and Washington DC were the two AT&T data centers used for the launch servers.

Their server architecture couldn't handle the 500K players during beta and it was obvious from the launch that the servers would continue to struggle until somebody over there got a clue (which they still haven't yet).

We track the exact location of every single piece of freight our company ships via GPS transmitters on our trucks, boxcars, and planes minute by minute. We handle 70% of the LTL freight in North America. Anyway, I had a big post thought out but changed my mind because I'm too lazy to type it. But I just have to ask, what the fuck are they doing that just jabbing the power button won't fix. Even when we have problems with one of the shitty blades in one of our shitty blade centers, it's a 20 minute fix. And there's no fucking way you can tell me that validating a username and password is more complicated or involved than the near real-time tracking via satelite of millions of packages.

General note to all - IBM high speed printers suck. Buy Oce if the decision ever comes up and you're involved in it.

I'll bet what happened and it's happened in countless other offices and corporations. They designed it to get it to work under a deadline, maybe not with enough scalability in mind. Then the guy quit and left behind three boxes of documentation and a ton of question marks and management was unwilling to bring in another architect and elected for a normal administrator.

They hired some people to take his place, but 'maintainers' don't get paid nor are  as skilled as 'creators'  (administrators and architects in this case) and because half of their stuff is custom, it's a nightmare to devlop on anyway. The guys come in and do the best they can to hold the crap together, AND develop a new solution in their spare time. Invariably the upper-management money-hats catch all the falling greenbacks and nothing trickles downward until it really starts affecting the bottom line.

Maybe last month someone threw a numbers sheet in front of a guy with enough power and he saw a lot of people were begining to leave, so he demanded they come up with something better and actually threw some money at the problem. Well, it takes more than a month to get something like that created, so maybe this shit will be actually fixed by fall.

Some people get documentation?  That must be nice....

Mostly manuals and install guides of products they may or may not be using...

Authentication Platform Update (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=8062328&p=1&tmp=1#post8062328)

From the boards:

DERAIL:

Small tip.  Start killing Ony every chance you get, and skin the bitch every chance you can.  If you are actually doing neff, and makeing serious attempts at it, EVERYONE in your raid MUST have an ony cloak equipped.  Anyone not wearing an ony cloak has a 95% chance to die when he goes dragon on your ass in phase 2.  He shadowflames the entire raid, and unless you are getting dedicated heals, you probably wont be able to pot through enough healing to live through the shadowflame dot.

If you are still working through starter bwl mobs, disregard the above

I haven't been playing, other than a little bit of auction house, for a month or more, which means I log on in the mornings.  Usually have no problems.

Sunday evening, trying to log in, and the log-in server is down.

This is still going on?  Unbelievable.