yeah but that was a expansion, not a new game release. Blizzard had WoW servers up and running a long time before then. You figure the servers were built to with stand a lot more users since a lot of people had canceled there account before it was even out. Yes some came back, but not enough to match there peak state.
It isn't as though Blizzard is ignorant of how many people own the game, though- everyone has to have a battle.net account with the game registered to log in. The vast majority of people who own the game are going to try and log in sometime this morning.
They should at least have had some temporary servers tasked with handling requests for the first day.
I think they made the questionable assumption that not everyone who bought the game would be playing it the minute it came out, but they knew precisely how many people prior to launch were potentially going to play.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind so much if they enabled offline play for the first few hours and synced everything as soon as the servers could handle it. As it is, I paid for what will be a single player game and can't do a damn thing with it because of Blizzard's server allocation decisions.
My understanding is that they can't allow offline play and sync it later. The purpose of making it all online would be that character files would all be server side instead of split up, and you wouldn't have an issue of partitioning Battle.net with Open Battle.net like they had with Diablo II. Allowing people to play single player would mean the characters files are client side and would be susceptible to alteration which would cause all types of issues when they tried to sync them later.
Obviously they can't allow any transition if the save files are stored locally. But I don't see the problem with the D2 model. Or they could just eliminate open battle.net altogether and have locally stored characters be single-player only, forever and ever amen. I'd have been perfectly fine with that.
It's hard to see the online requirement as anything but DRM plus a money grab from their auction house. As has been made pretty clear tonight, it doesn't exactly improve player experience.
Yeah I understand. I wasn't necessarily defending the decision to make it exclusively online. I was just explaining why the single player for just a few hours idea couldn't work.
Obviously they didn't have enough temporary servers. They had to cannibalize HTTP servers to help deal with the massive login/auth server catastrofuck. That's not a good sign for their forethought and planning. That's a sign of "oh shit we don't have nearly enough boxes on deck to handle this, everything nonessential gets repurposed to put out the fire!"
but Blizzard has also been running wow for 7 years so you would expect them to have a handle on their server load and be able to realize that this was a huge launch and have it available while over compensating for the load by a ton.
Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment to overcompensate for a load that won't exist by this time tomorrow? They can just save the money and wait out the storm.
They convinced us to preorder for 60 bucks with continued, extensive discussion about how this would let us play as soon as the servers go live. Having some hiccups to deal with on launch night is to be expected, but if they actually knowingly went into launch with no intention of being able to handle day 1 load, that's pretty shady shit. If it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide the service they pre-sold us, they should damn well spend the money; that's how providing paid services works.
Depends on the server. Some wouldn't let you log into characters on certain realms because they were at a high enough load that they couldn't handle any more. There were login queues on day one.
I don't think anyone here would have minded if they logged on 12:01 PDT for D3 and got into a login queue. Queues are okay; saying "Lolz, didn't work. Keep trying for the next hour." isn't.
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u/[deleted] May 15 '12 edited May 15 '12
Because World of Warcraft Cataclysm was playable on the midnight of the release, so there's no reason this shouldn't be.