World of Warcraft rants

[KenM]

OK, I really like WoW, but some things annoy me about it.
1. I have 3 characters on 3 different servers. There is one server I keep getting kicked from, its the one character I really like to play. This morning I got disconnected 5 times in 15 minutes when I tryed to play. This is the only server I have trouble with.

2. The patch updater. It should not take someone with broadband 1.5 hours to download a 32 mb patch. They need to maker the updater more friendly.

3. After I download the patch, all the servers are down because they have to fix something. So I have to wait even longer to play the character I like. This comes with next to no notice that they would be down.

4. I should not have to wait on hold with tech support. If I am playing a pay to play game, I should get a tech support guy picking up the phone saying "I'm sorry, what can we do to fix it?". I'm a paying customer and when the customer is not happy, they need to try and fix it, not make the customer more angry by making him wait on hold and then getting cut off.

 

[WayneLigon]

After I got my machine back from the shop for a second time, I settled down to play WoW again. It's been two weeks and everything was working fine.

Until last night.

Just before I was getting ready to get off for the night, suddenly the game lags and freezes and the sound starts to crackle and repeat. No problem I think, the goddamn thing lags now and then but this is different. Unlike with normal lag, I can't do squat except wait there for the thing to unfreeze in tiny increments, all the while the sound is popping and crackling and stuttering. Finally I get the game shut down.

I go back into the game... and the lag is gone but sound is still crackling horribly.

I reboot. Suddenly, it's taking my machine several times longer than it normally did to reboot! The machine is noticably sluggish when it finally does come back. Go back into WoW. Same thing. Disgusted, I shut the thing down and run some machine diagnostics. Nothing shows up but I can't find how to find what's slowing the machine down.

I reboot again. STILL sluggish on reboot. Still noticeably slow. I do some writing, read some comics and go to bed.

This morning, then this afternoon. Still sluggish on reboot, so it's some kind of permanent problem until I can find it or pay someone else to find it. I have all new drivers, blah, blah, no need to defrag, no spyware, no virus, blah blah.

Of course the game and website have been down all morning because of the new patch and that always throws things for a total loop, unlike City of Heroes where they patch it and it's fine.

The website came back up by this afternoon so I downloaded the new patch. As always it takes me like 30 minutes to download it over broadband. I run the patch, fire it up and the sound still crackles. The tech boards have tons and tons of pages of people having problems like this introduced by the game and yet there are very, very few responses, and those are to the easy fixes. No serious time seems to go to the hard fixes that keep people from playing or cause actual machine-level problems.

I've almost had it. I'll try a couple more fixes and fiddle with it some, but I shouldn't damn have to. I'm sick to death of fiddling with my PC just to get a goddamn game to run. The second they ever come out with something like this for the XBox or whatever, I'm abandoning PC gaming forever. I could understand the game freezing, or even simply not being able to play it on my system. For it to actually go out and CAUSE system problems when the game ain't even running is totally wrong and I WILL find a way to get it fixed.

 

[Lasher Dragon]

Damn... there's those kinda issues with WoW? I really really really wanted to play WoW, but there is no way I am paying $15 a month, hell even $10 a month is too much to play a game that ya gotta spend $50 on in the first place. I'd consider $10 a month if the game itself was free. If it was WoS (Starcraft) I'd definitely play it, but I always liked Starcraft better.

I at first balked at continuing my xbox live account just because I wasn't sure if it was worth $50 a year to me (I know, $50 a year ain't nothin' really). It is, for now, but it is slowly getting less and less worth it. I've had Live for a few years now, and it seems to me that the farther we go, the crappier the games and the players get.

Anyway, you guys sure have a lot more patience than I, I must say. If I were paying $15 a month or however much it is and had issues such as you have posted, I do believe I might go postal!

If you haven't tried it, give Guild Wars a try. I know it's not a really truly MMORPG, but this fact appeals to me. I can deal with the general incredibly annoying public in town, or I can get out and explore without worrying about some uber-1337 kid trying to jack me or sell me some hacked crap.

 

[WayneLigon]

I have to say that in WoW (I play Icemane mainly, in the ENWorld guild on Feathermoon) I've never had a problem with or from other players. Just the game itself

 

[xmanii]

WoW ran decent on my ancient behemoth of a computer, but I quit cause it was too much eye candy, and after only playing a couple months, it just wasn't doing anything for me.

 

[Enforcer]

While I too have fallen victim to the server-side problems of World of Warcraft and agree that it takes waaay too long to download patches with my DSL connection I haven't had any problem whatsoever with WoW messing with my computer. Then again, I've got a Mac, so...

 

[KenM]

Also last night when I finnally got my into the server I wanted to play, lag was horrible, after playing for a half hour they decided to shut the server down again to fix it. This is only about an hour after they brought it up from shutting it down earlier.

 

[Nareau]

Yeah, I cancelled my account after playing for about 3 months. It was incredibly fun at first, but just got to be boring after about level 40. It got to the point where I had to commit 2-4 hours of time to get anything done, and even then it was mostly just gathering rat spleens and stuff.

I also go really, really sick of the other players. We had a pretty good guild, but man...so many immature people on there. I couldn't stand it. If you want to know what I mean, go check out the World of Warcraft forums...

Spider

 

[Aristotle]

The only "in game issue" I've ever had is the lag, and that is usually only particularly bad after some patches or in Iron Forge during peek hours (They need to put an auction house in Darnassus to help even that player load out for that).

I appreciate weekly downtime (the Tuesday server maintenance window) but I agree that the login server crashes (which have become much less frequent) and the number of server restarts (which have been more common recently) need to be minimized.

The patches do download slowly, especially if you use a firewall or don't have all the ports opened correctly on your router. I work in the afternoon, so I generally set my computer to download the patch before I leave for work, but yesterday's patch was downloaded in less than 5 minutes (I'd guess 3.5 minutes).

The forums are a horrible representation of almost any game's population. It's typically the most vocal, yet socially inept, percentage of the players. I've heard horror stories about the attitudes encountered on 'regular' and 'PvP' servers, but have encountered very few jerks on the 'RP' servers (which are less about playing in character and more about playing with mature people in my experience).

 

[TheLe]

WoW rocks.


Blizzard uses BIT TORRENT for their patch system. The essentially lets you get tiny chunks of the patch from all the other player's computers out there (and you are sharing little chunks too).

This is why the patch is so slow.

Also, around update time, you are going to run into a number of disconnects -- can't be helped. During the first few days of updates it is best to stay in safer areas, or just don't get on for a day or so.

I have played several other MMORPGs, and this is the best, hand's down. Sure, Wow has had it's server issues, but it is very rare (and even rarer compared to the early Ultima Online days).

Blizzard is also good with the apologies. I have about 3 weeks of "credit" on my account, because Blizzard gave them out due to server issues. And just a week and half ago, they gave out "Rest bonuses" for everyone... one full level worth.

Good stuff. I am in this for the long run.

~The Le, aka The Le Games
on Cenarion Circle as LE