f13.net

Since we're all about as cynical and jaded as you can get without unsubbing, we may as well put it to a vote.

I dont know.  Unless they really fuck something up, BC should be fairly stable "in general".  I think their biggest problem is going to be trying to deal with the issues that are going to occur due to the MASSIVE numbers of people that are going to be in Hellfire Peninsula / Bloode Elf / Draenie starting zones at the same time.

Couple of days tops, i think this last patch already dealt with a big chunk of the problems they might have had.

As I sit down and play beta I think to myself, "The two things they should have squared away are server stability and any loose graphics code. You know, since those things aren't any different really from live."

They don't.

This should be fun.

My (limited) experience with pre-expansion patches has always been bad. I'll be cautiously optimistic and think the majority of actual bugs will be sorted out.

Still though, Blizzard likes being victims of their own success so I'm not sure how well the new starting zones or Outland are going to cope (although their beta is pretty big).

At first I would have said that it might actually be okay, since they seem to be taking their time (relatively) pushing things to the PTR, going through the beta process, setting a release date that didn't seem forced. 

However, after reading our boards listening to Righ and Merusk, et al - eeeehhhh I dunno anymore.  I agree that WoW is a victim of it's own colossal momentum, but after the presto-change-o routine with the item database after 2.01 and all the other wackiness, I think it might take 3-4 weeks for the servers go back to completely normal.  I have no doubt they will be up and running.  But without these Bizzaro bugs that have appeared recently?  I really doubt it.  The sheer number of oddball little things wrong at this point of the game, much less post TBC makes me wonder how they are going to fix them all barring some sort of downtime with a serious rollback so they can reprop another build.

I think it'll be about a month before you can reliably get on without huge queues or constant restarts. Even with the 2.0X series of patches I expect a LOT of issues.

Also, who can honestly expect the servers to withstand 3/4ths of the server's entire population cramming into a single area the instant they go up? The dark portal opening will be a server crashing disaster of the likes you haven't seen since the opening of AQ.

2 weeks until all the fuckupedness is fully corrected.

I expect a lot of issues. 2 months worth at least. As the previous few patches show, they have really lost something since the launch. Either they've lost significant programming talent or have been pushing things through QA too fast. Each patch has been progressively worse, and this latest patch was a killer -- bag deletion? awesome.

I'm also surprised that no one has pointed out the most obvious thing that is going to happen (http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html) as everyone re-subs to try it out. Re-subbing is important, because they've already got their server picked out with their old characters on it. There's no shifting these people to launch servers.

I'm including massive queues in the poll's definition of "at least as reliable".  The servers might stay up but only because they have capped the number of people allowed in.  I say three plus months until you can, on average, actually get into the game within the same amount of time as you can now.

Unless they do something clever like announce twenty new servers the day BC launches...

I give it three weeks.

I am pretty sure Blizzard is aware of what is coming with the shitload of resubs, and the stress on some zones. Hellfire anyone?

Now the question is, have they done enough to prepare for it? We wont know. I predict that it will take a few days to fix the servers to playable level, and around a month to get it totally back to normal. Also, I predict their account managment page will crash, and not come back for at least a day.

That is an unfair question because the reliability and stability of WoW has severely degraded over the past months and I can't imagine that it would get much worse... So, how long after BC until the servers get back to where they are today? They could hook the server farm up to a couple gerbil's exercise wheels and be better off. 15 min queues at 9pm, every week extended downtimes, loot lag is back, escalation in random D/Cs, and the hits just keep on coming.

Color me bitter. And, only part of it is because another Tuesday vacation day is wasted with more downtime.

I'm seriously wondering how much churn is in their IT department.. probably very bitter that none of the money made it down to the hardworking backend folks, and they went off to find jobs elsewhere with "World of Warcaft" prominently displayed on their resumes.

I'd just like to bump this is pretty much say most of us were wrong. My server (high population, probably gonna be forced to split here sometime) was rather bad for about a week or so but it cleared up pretty fast. Go fig, GG Blizzard.

Yep, looks like they had been prepping this one for a long time.

They timed the realm splits scare just right, too. Got a lot of people to take the free transfers as a group.

Not that they wouldn't split the realms -- but by making sure everyone knew about it, it gave people a bigger incentive to move.

So true, the first chance to move didn't get hardly any effect for our server.  However, after the second time and the added "split" warning, the queues went from over 300 every night to nothing in just a few days.  I was actually shocked.

I think our issues stopped within two weeks of launch, but the issues weren't terrible either.  It was the normal queue issues most of the time.  The other issue was Outlands crashing while the other parts of the world didn't, but that died down by the 3rd day as the catasses worked their way through the other regions and into the instances.

Earthen Ring in Europe is STILL so bad that I have paid 14 quid to get my rogue the fuck off of there so that when it crashes, I have some other character to play.

But I don't think that's got sod all to do with the expansion:  We were always crap.