Why is Wizard's Site down at this critical time?!?

[BlackMoria]

Clearly you've Never played WoW.

Gosh, it shows. I confess, I never played it. But my son plays it constantly and he never complains about down servers.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that Blizzard can maintain SOME semblance of customer service for 9 million WOW players and that WOTC has fumbled the ball on this rather critical play....

 

[Xyxox]

Increasing the amount they can handle would mean buying more bandwidth and, more importantly, buying and setting up servers. If they contract out their server needs, the people they contract with still have to set up more servers for them. Setting up servers takes time.

Properly load balanced hosting services will have plenty of bandwidth for their customer needs, but will bill on utilization. they will also have large server farms where services can be moved throughout the environment dynamically and thus, more horsepower can be thrown at a single customer for a period of time in order to meet demand. These highly scalable environments exist and host hundreds, if not thousands of customer's content without having issues.

And yes, these sorts of environments can stand up to a /. or farking any time. In fact, they will do so on nearly daily bases as one customer or another ends up being /.ed or farked. They are able to take advantage of economy of scales to provide the service to their customers in ways that their individual customers cannot.

 

[Jedi_Solo]

What we don't know is how much prep-work the tech guys did.

(obviously: "not enough")

I keep seeing people speak as if they did nothing to prep the system for this. It is quite possable that they did some. Stuff like this happens quite a bit after major announcements; everyone hits their site at the same time and basically create a Denial of Service attack.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Gosh, it shows. I confess, I never played it. But my son plays it constantly and he never complains about down servers.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that Blizzard can maintain SOME semblance of customer service for 9 million WOW players and that WOTC has fumbled the ball on this rather critical play....

On the first day of the announcement.

Should be said that pretty much all MMOs crash to hell multiple times their first day, too.

And as for WoW, my server as just down for 48 hours this week...and then crashed over and over and over last night. It ain't perfect.

 

[Xyxox]

What we don't know is how much prep-work the tech guys did.

(obviously: "not enough")

I keep seeing people speak as if they did nothing to prep the system for this. It is quite possable that they did some. Stuff like this happens quite a bit after major announcements; everyone hits their site at the same time and basically create a Denial of Service attack.

As an IT guy, my guess would be that marketing dropped the ball by drastically underestimating what the demand would be after the announcement.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Blizzard can maintain servers for 9 million WOW players.

Though I agree that Wizards should've been more prepared, I don't think that's a very good comparison. Not to mention that when Blizzard released the game, they were totally unprepared as well. Server stability was not the worst I've seen, but I certainly wouldn't call it great, or even good.

 

[Jedi_Solo]

As an IT guy, my guess would be that marketing dropped the ball by drastically underestimating what the demand would be after the announcement.

As a tech guy myself (a programmer; so not IT; but still) I agree. Marketing problably told them to increase it by X amount and they got hit with X times 5 or something similar.

It likely won't be very stable until after the weekend (once everyone has had a decent chance to look at the new stuff).

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Gosh, it shows. I confess, I never played it. But my son plays it constantly and he never complains about down servers.

Your son must have a life them. Go ask blizzard cutomer about their service...

 

[Deadshot]

I have never had a service unavailable whenever I picked up my books and dice to play D&D. If they want people to embrace this DI, you can't have this stuff happening on day one. Bad form to start things off with. From the stuff I have seen from other sites, the DI stuff looks great and might just entice lapsed D&D'ers back from MMO's but if announcement day goes this poorly, not a lot of confidence is instilled in potential users.

However, I am not one to complain without offering a solution. To instill faith in potential customers I hereby submit that WotC offer a free month to month subscription during the time the core books are rolled out. Enter your purchase code for buying the book and get that month free. That way you have 3 months to test out/get hooked on the new DI and when it comes time to pony up your cash you will know if you can/cannot live without it.

 

[s.j. bagley]

i was on there for a few minutes (long enough to find the eberron article i wanted to read last night) but now it appears to be down again.
one thing that i find puzzling, is that in the d&dinsider login section, it wouldn't let me log in with my email address and just kept logging me in as 'guest.'