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

[Xyxox]

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.

That's a great idea as it would spike the traffic to the highest possible levels in the very beginning. If they don't crash during that, it'd be a good value to pay for the subscription because they would have obviously planned ahead for the rollout. And they'd have precise numbers to work with, too, as print runs have specific numbers attached to them.

 

[TerraDave]

ITS UP RIGHT NOW

And still at:

www.tsr.com

EDIT: AND IT IS GONE AGAIN

It was like a mirage

 

[Khairn]

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

Anybody, with only a D4 worth of brain cells firing should have been able to predict an incredible number of hits. WotC has been planning this moment for over a year.

And with that kind of lead time, this is the best they were able to accomplish?

Its a good thing WotC isn't promoting any kind of IT or technical support for the new edition, or this would be a little embaressing.

 

[Xyxox]

Its a good thing WotC isn't promoting any kind of IT or technical support for the new edition, or this would be a little embaressing.

Yeah. Fortunately we won't be spending hours upon hours creating campaign settings, maps, NPCs all on an online portal where we go to access for our online game session and get...

SERVICE UNAVAILABLE

 

[avin]

Wow main website was hell when The Burning Crusade was announced and again with Wotlk. Try the forums an tuesday...

 

[Pyrex]

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....

Blizzard is pulling in ~$15/mo from each of those 9 million players, a significant chunk of which goes towards keeping those servers operational. They've also been piling on more and more servers since launch.

WotC doesn't have that kind of subscriber-based revenue stream for their online site, and thus have a tiny fraction of the server capacity WoW does.

And I guarantee you that if traffic to WoW servers multiplied by 10x over the course of a single day, they'd topple just as fast.

 

[BadMojo]

Its a good thing WotC isn't promoting any kind of IT or technical support for the new edition, or this would be a little embaressing.

Yes. Very embarassing.

I would expect an announcement of this magnitude for the most well known pen and paper RPG ever would generate a lot of interest from internet and print media. It seems like Fark, /. and a million other websites would be all over this announcement...it's big, geeky news.

I'm surprised that marketing didn't plan on getting major coverage on at least one massive online news source and it's not like Hasbro doesn't have suitably deep pockets to make sure the launch goes smoothly.

 

[jaerdaph]

Because 2 million of us nerds are all hitting refresh at the same time?

Hold on a second, I have to hit refresh again, like I have been every 30 seconds for the last 18 hours.

 

[mxyzplk]

This is the biggest reason why I am extremely skeptical about the DI. Heck, in 4 years they haven't been able to get search working on their forums, let alone run anything even resembling a decent Web application. Without a massive and fundamental reinvestment in infrastructure, which appears from gleemax etc. to NOT be happening, they will never have anything worth using on the DI.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

I think we can all be upset with wizards because the website crashed. Maybe it was a marketing mistake. maybe it was the countdown so the page loaded on billions of computers simultaneously. maybe maybe, because because.

However, to truly criticize, i think that one should be prepared to say they could have done better. I mean truly have done better that the given situation and possibly even been in a similar situation themselves (job wise) and succeeded.

I'm not It so i don't know if I could have done better.

This doesen't mean we cant be displeased or want better service though. I just think the ultimate scrutiny is left to those with this skill to understand if this was wtc incompetency, or some how out of their hands.

It doesen't instill me with confidence in DI though... thats for sure.