death of wow
 

feel it coming anyone? the forums are flooded with reports of widespread crashes.. i myself are in this boat..

now tell me.. why to i have to take 2 of my 3 512mb sticks of ram out to install wow? then the game wont work with all 1.5gb in? works fine with just 512mb.. hmm yet all my other games work fine..

if you get a listed #131, #132 and #0 error box good luck. we are getting the typical.. "read this " as they flip through the tech manual and try not to say "you want fries with that" sigh

most of this started after the tuesday down time..

Most of this started the day WoW was released in retail form =P

granted i agree but there is the snowball effect 8)

Nah. its not going away. Trust me I have played a lot of MMORPG and this is by far the best one I played yet. It does suck that we have these freq downtimes. But look at it again and say "Man they just gave me 7 free days!!!!"

or like my friend in the guild.. swg gave him "free 75,000" credits for being a long term customer.. pfft you can get that in two missions on dant.

MMO's attract drama like a pile of crap draws flies. For every disgruntled poster on Blizzard's forums who is saying they're fed up and going to quit there are 100 people who are perfectly happy.

I've got one of the crash issues myself (random black-screen lockup) that's been causing me a lot of grief for the last month, but even then I'm confident it will all get worked out eventually. Blizzard has been making good on the downtime by giving free subscription extensions and I respect the fact that they'll put their money where their mouth is to make things right. Other MMO companies haven't been so responsible.

It's not going to die, the sky isn't falling, and the game is still one hell of a lot of fun to me. :)

I'm glad I'm not playing this one, all the problems remind me of Shadowbane. Anyone still play that?

*shrug*

I've been playing it for over a month without probs. Sounds like a hardware issue to me.

I've been playing for about a month also with no troubles whatsoever. All the downtime they've had so far hasn't really been that big of a deal, at least compared to what Everquest was like it's first few months and after one of it's major expansions, Shadows of Luclin, was released. I'm sure they'll get things straightened out just like EQ did. MMO games are a lesson in frustration at some points. You get used to it.

The only crash I get is on exit. Which is cosmos just being buggy. My problem is that I am getting bored of the grind. This is my problem with mmogs. I play hardcore for a month or two and then get burned out. I usuall end up coming back a few months later though. I'll probably cancel my account this month and pick it up again down the road, maybe when they(or if ever) offer server transfers. It's starting to get nice out again and I got a list of things I want to do around the house...well the wife has the list...im just the peon.


More work????

If I remember correctly, Anarchy Online had a lot if problems at first, but after working out the bugs, ended up becoming pretty succesful. I expect there to be trouble here and there, but I am sure a company like Blizzard can get through it. So far, it is by far the best MMO I have ever played, so I can deal with outages and problems here and there for a while.

Death, nah, I dont see it dying, but it's gonna be morbid for a while.

You have to remember that this is still a new game.. and the largest release in history.. there is bound to be problems. They have so many people playing now that they are turning away customers ( pulled wow boxes from the shelpf until hardware is brought on par to subscriber numbers). If people quit, they'll just start selling boxes again and bring on new customers. WoW will not be going away for a loooong time I suspect.

I've played it on both my pokey Duron-850 w/256MB RAM and my 12" iBook w/512MB RAM and I haven't had any problems other than some lag. Which could be the server or my Qwest connection.

Not saying that you guys aren't having the problems you're having, or that Blizzard isn't to blame. Just that I draw computer problems like crap draws flies and I'm fine (knocks on wood). I'm not sure that the problems are as widespread as the outcry might make it seem like.

edit: The game crashing problems, not the server load problems. They have more people than their servers can handle obviously.

Compared to any other 2-month live MMOG, WoW is nearly flawless.

It's a very well made game and it's unfortunate that it's so well made that it's sold way more copies already than its designers thought it would sell in its lifetime. They've responded by opening many, many more servers than they ever indended to. This is a good thing, but they aren't doing much to contain the continual flood of players to the already overpopulated first few servers.

the problems encountered right now are from the fact that blizzard never expected for the game to be this friggin popular.

they just plain didn't have the $$$ to front up all the server power they needed to deal with this huge crowd, they expected to be able to go for a bit and after some revenue increases, upgrade. instead, the traffic overloads the servers they have now and it takes work on them to stabilize, instead of working to upgrade.

problems will go away soonish. so far the game's worth it to stick through.

I know I stopped playing it but I have to admit that the technical issues impacted my decision but a little (on a scale say 10-15%). Personally, my decision to stop playing mainly came from the fact that after a certain level you have to group to complete the quests and I am just not down with that. I mean my game name was The Eremite and the groups that I was in before I stopped playing were awful/frustrating experiences. Granted it was fun for the month I played but I have moved on to greener pastures. I am sure that WoW will have an incredibly long life/gamespan.

What Stompy said.

--jaded

No problems here. I think people need to buy better hardware or update their drivers.

Many of the problems with the WoW client locking or crashing have nothing to do with outdated hardware or drivers. If you followed the threads on the support forum (which obviously you have no reason to do if you're not crashing) you'd see that there are a huge variety of system configurations having problems.

Sadly, this one is some kind of esoteric programming error that will likely take months to track down. It reminds me of back when the Luclin expansion for EQ was released and tons of people had random lockups zoning into Shadowhaven. Months later they finally discovered a zone music file had an error and was causing all the trouble.

I gave up on WoW a few weeks ago, just too much downtime on the server I started on. And I did not feel like starting over.

I've never had much problems. I have more probs with our own internet service than the server lag.

The only problem they need to fix, outside of class balance (name one game that hasnt had this prob, though this is by far the most balanced), is the IF lag. Outside of that it's damn near flawless.

Did you play DAoC at release? Even given that there was little content at the time, the game had a very flawless client server code. There were none of these annoying problems...

Yeah I did. There was almost nothing to that game at release though. It's flaw was that there was nothing special or even interesting about it outside of RvR, and by the time I was able to head into the frontiers there were plenty of lvl 50s running around to gank me.

DAoC had the crappiest PvE of any MMO I've ever played. Its servers were stable but there was nothing to the game at release other than better graphics than EQ and a unique style system for melee's.

I haven't had any problems outside of lag on my end (damn roommates). My friend, however, has had serious issues getting his computer to stay stable while running WoW. I guess World of Warcraft doesn't like high-end 64-bit systems for some reason.

I love it so far and I'm going to keep on playing.

DAoC had no where near the number of people that WoW has. Things run great on the WoW low-population servers, it's the ones with 8-10k people that are experiencing problems.

Maybe FFXI had the right idea with world passes?

Irishsean:

Along with the thread of MMORPG Issues, could you tell me what you like about FFXI (if you play it?) I've had experience looking at a friend play it and it was simply amazing at the time (I didn't have a graphics card that could handle it at the time)... what can you tell us about it?

I played it for about 8 months before finally quitting, its a fun game, but its really grindy. It gets to be where its pointless to play except during certain hours where its easier to get groups, as you can't solo at all.

Our server has 30,000 players. I wake up screaming in a cold sweaty nightmare induced daze at night. Ok, I don't have nightmares about it but the lag is really, really bad at times.

-Lasereth

I've been playing 3 - 5 times a week for about 2 months and I've never had a problem. The only times I've had problems were when servers have come down or messed up. But nothing client side has screwed me thusfar. I played EQ for about 3 years, DAoC for a couple of months, and EQOA for a while. WoW has definitely had a very good release. I can remember going through EQ expansions and having so many problems to work out. WoW seems to have put together so many amazing elements to an MMORPG and done it extremely well. I don't see this game going anywhere for a long while... Hopefully most of the less mature annoying people will lose interest quickly. The only disappointment I have had with this game so far is with some of the playerbase. But for the mostpart my server has a lot of good people on it...

Played since Nov 23rd.. no probs besides alittle bit of downtime on Kil'Jaeden

If leveling is your concern, grouping is the worst thing you can do to yourself. This game is the most solo friendly game I've ever seen, any class can solo to 60 in 8-10 days played without much problem.

They are starting to lose their end game players, although most will never actually leave, the game is 3 months old and has had one real patch despite an outrageous number of game breaking bugs. I suspect that the reason they are not fixing anything content related is because they are working non stop on the server load issues. Hopefully they will start worrying about bugs that should have been weeded out in beta sometime soon.

While I do agree with your post, Blizzard does need some defense -- most of the problems in retail were never experienced in closed or open beta. I've been playing the game since March 2004 and I've never seen any of these issues with the game in closed beta or open beta. They just sort of spawned after the server load issues happened. Blizzard really does need to fix some of these gamebreaking flaws though (mainly the severe lag related with Ironforge).

-Lasereth

Onions. I have always in mmorpgs been notorious for neglecting gear, quests, friends, food, for the sake of hellaciously fast leveling. I just checked my played and I'm at 8 days and I'm only 43. I have noticed a severe slowdown in soloing at this point (Hunter). I was just wondering, how in the heck did you accomplish 60 so quickly?!

There was a few 60's in my old guild. They had around 20 days played on their characters...they simply played a ton. I don't guess I can make fun of them since I have 10 days each on my 40 priest and 40 warrior.

-Lasereth

Im just about 45 and have 10 days played. I am in no rush to get to 60 at all. I like to get the most out of what I am paying for and to me that is not always grinding the levels out. I like to run around and find new places(I love to level by discovering a new area..it's like a double bonus!) work on my tradeskills and go look for trouble.

Gabby - I was in that slump looking for a good grind spot at 43 and found the Badlands to be my best bet. There are a ton of ~40 humanoid camps you can tear through, as well as the elementals, which are great for vendor loot also. If you havent checked that place out I reccomend it.

Well, prior knowledge of the game is a large part of it, I must admit. I played beta so knew right off which quests to grab and which not to. The best places to level are usually caves of low ac, low damage creatures that respawn fast enough to be back by the time you've made a circle. Most of the ones I used in beta and early release have been changed but there are still decent spots out there.

Generally grinding results in 30-40k/hour depending on level and class. For 45 the traditional spots are ogres in tanaris and yetis in feralas, not sure if any of them have been changed recently. The best I've ever done questing is somewhere around 32k/hour for 2 hours but again, quests require a ton of prior knowledge to make them real efficient (though some might find questing more fun).

I would fall into that "some" category. I've played a lot, but I'm only up to 28 or so because I spend so much time wandering around doing whatever random thing comes to mind. In fact, that's one of the things that I'm liking so much about this game. I don't feel any compulsion to work hard on levels, because I know that when I want to, I can go grind for a few hours and make one. That leaves me lots of time to figure out quests and explore.

Heh, my guild is raiding Molten Core now and the high end content is rife with bugs. Well, I should say we're *trying* to raid MC, since we are getting fuckign raid instances split up into three different ones each week (i.e. fourty of us zone in, 2 are in their instance, 8 in another instance, 30 in the third instance). The PvP / honor system isn't even in yet, and Battlegrounds are not in a releasable state yet, though they were supposed to be usable in the closed beta. Blizzard released six months too early -- that's really the long and short of it.