I’m really not one to complain about server downtime in World of Warcraft. I truly do understand and sympathize with the networking engineers at Blizzard, who are dealing with problems of a scale no one has ever had to deal with before, in terms of having millions and millions of concurrent users in a real-time virtual environment.
But.
For the past three weeks, my guildies and I have been trying to do raids during the middle of the week. And each week, our very limited playtime has been compromised by server instability and lag that the game hasn’t seen since the very bad old days of late 2005.
And none of us is leaving for another game.
Why? It’s pretty simple. There’s nothing better and more stable. And it really cheeses me off that Blizzard can know that it has all the time in the world to fix these kinds of problems, because they really aren’t going to lose customers to such an extent that quality of service becomes a priority for them.
I wish they wanted to be better, not just be the best.
February 10, 2010 at 11:19 am
This has been one of my longstanding complaints with Blizzard and certain other companies with a dedicated fanbase (*cough* Apple *cough*). It’s not just that they get comfortable at the top, it’s the feeling that they’re milking their customers with just enough effort to keep them from moving on.
Part of the problem is the competition is trying to catch up. Rather than just make the best games they can, they’re too busy focusing on that target (even when they say they aren’t, it sure seems that way). Followers.
The less cynical in me wonders if they’re busy working on an expansion and they just tend to neglect the live servers when they’ve got their prime focus elsewhere. =)
February 10, 2010 at 11:55 am
[…] 10, 2010 by Syp I ask this, because several people have mentioned how bad WoW’s servers have been as of late and how sloppy they’ve been at fixing […]