World of Warcraft rant

[myrdden]

They could open more auction houses, I suppose, all connected to the main one. But they probably would have done that already if they could.

I have both Alliance and Horde characters (on 2 different servers) and see a huge difference in lag between the AHs. Definitely a population problem, exacerbated by the fact there is a limited number of AH.

I have no idea how to solve the problem in a simple straightforward manner. It very much is a design glitch from the beginning.

 

[Chun-tzu]

One suggestion I've heard seems a little odd at first, but it makes a lot of sense. Make the AH an instance. When I'm going to the AH, I'm doing it to see what's up for auction, not to see who's hanging out there and what idiotic things they may be doing (like dueling in the front door, or standing in the fires). That said, I do not know how difficult that would be to implement.

 

[D+1]

OK, WoW is the first MMORPG I really want to try and get into, it might change my option of MMORPG's. But no store has it in stock, I heard Blizzard is holding them back to create demand. Anyone know if this is true? IMO they don't need to, from what I understand its very popular.

I kind of doubt that. Although finding the game is an exercise in severe frustration (even just ordering it over the net means an interminable wait for deliver, whereas looking in stores means looking EVERYWHERE for a 50 mile radius) I'm willing to believe Blizzards explanations. Their side of the story is that the demand for the game is extraordinary; the TONS of servers they do have are all overloaded and there isn't yet the ability to migrate characters from high-demand servers to low-demand servers so population levels don't even out naturally; The tons of servers they have were originally PLANNED to go into service in the first place but the unanticipated demand caused those future plans to be greatly accellerated. It makes far more sense that they were simply ignorant of what to expect than that there's some great plot afoot that ostensibly does them good by creating extreme demand that they then refuse to fill, thus piffing people off, and THAT somehow is GOOD for them to piff off their customers. It is, in fact, utterly silly that they would decide specifically to NOT sell them the game, NOT take their money every month for an account, but instead do themselves a favor and just create DEMAND... by not selling anyone ANYthing? Creating demand is good for business - but not if you don't FILL that demand as rapidly as possible.

They clearly have both code-related and service issues regarding lag. Even on a "lightly" populated server in non-peak hours I see server-wide lag, localized lag in places like Ironforge and moreso near the AH and bank, a choice of a massive number of servers (I count 88 right now) most of which it seems are very over-populated even without the design related lag issues and still they need more, maybe even half again as many - 120 or more.

I tried EQII for a few weeks and dumped it just prior to WOW. I got the sense that they made things more difficult than they had any right or reason to be, mostly in regards to tradeskills. I just found it to feel "elitist", as if maybe by not ever having played the original EQ I just wasn't the sort of player they desiged it for. Finding WHERE things were, how they worked, etc. just got to seem like too much work for very little reward. I nonetheless strongly suspected that if you HAD migrated from EQ to EQII you'd be right at home.

 

[driver8]

One suggestion I've heard seems a little odd at first, but it makes a lot of sense. Make the AH an instance. When I'm going to the AH, I'm doing it to see what's up for auction, not to see who's hanging out there and what idiotic things they may be doing (like dueling in the front door, or standing in the fires). That said, I do not know how difficult that would be to implement.

Even if you made the AH an instance, and didnt make it large (which would be inconvenient for players) you would have congestion and lag for the AH users.

There is no easy answer anywhere alot of players want to be for important stuff, theres going to be congestion. I can recall Asherons Calls "portal storms" in towns, which was an inelegant solution to say the least.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Blizzard didn't have time to do the architecture work to make auction houses linkable across servers (as different regions of the world, even on the same continent, are on different servers, this is required), and since multiple auction houses just ended up with everyone ignoring two of them per side anyway, they went with the current solution.

They ARE now working on setting up auction houses in each racial city that will be linked together. Once one can be in Stormwind or Darnassus and access the same auction house, I think we'll definitely see a decrease in the number of people there. In alpha and beta, people congregated in Stormwind rather than Ironforge, and once they have the option, I suspect some people will move there again. Darnassus is a different story, but having the city be more useful should still ensure that people adventuring in Kalimdor at any level will swing by there -- if Darnassus and the AH is a short flight away, suddenly it makes sense to bind your hearthstone to Everlook, for instance.

 

[Spatula]

5 new realms went live today. How long they remain relatively empty is anyone's guess. One 'normal', two PvP, and two RP.

For me, I am surprised at how Feathermoon (an RP server, that Enforcer started an alliance ENWorld guild on) went from being Low population in December to High now. After some... questionable grouping experiences, I'm thinking that a lot of non-RP players have moved over to the once-low population RP servers, just because there were relatively few people on them. Which is, as a result, no longer the case.

 

[Stormfalcon]

Even if you made the AH an instance, and didnt make it large (which would be inconvenient for players) you would have congestion and lag for the AH users.

They could borrow a page from Guild Wars in terms of how that game handles towns and outposts. Instead of making the AH one instance that everyone piles into in order to clear up traffic in the rest of the town, the AH would automatically split into multiple instances, putting incoming characters into a different instance when the current one fills up. For example, when the first instance reaches its predetermined capacity, a second one is automatically created and incoming characters get put into that one. When that one fills up, a third is created and so on. When an instance drops in population, characters get directed into that one until it reaches capacity again. Each instance is managable, and so is the hosting city in general.