Blizzard Comments on Wrath Classic Server Population and Queue Issues

[SinR]

and queue the Armchair Engineers

[baseballfan]

The reason people flock to the fullest of the full servers are

1. When the game population inevitably dwindles, only a few servers will maintain a healthy population

and, stay with me here -

2. Blizzard is more than happy to free transfer you off, and let you pay to transfer back to a healthy server when your server dies

I cannot even begin to count the amount of posts I read over the years about completely dead servers, even including classic, where Blizzard does absolutely nothing, and still has the audacity to charge per character transfer off. It would still be garbage practice if they did implement a bulk transfer for less, but at least better than the money bilking that normally goes on.

Yes, I know some servers get merged or transferred to, but any action is usually way too little way too late, who wants to wait years on a dead server?

Address this Blizzard, instead of telling us it's fine right now on other servers. We know it's fine on other servers. Guarantee you'll be proactive about maintaining server pops or give people free transfers once a dead server hits a certain mau threshold and you won't have nearly as big of a problem.

This is 100% what is happening. anyone who has played the game the past year knows what happened and will know this will happen AGAIN. So this is just a huge money grab

[Greyvax]

"Free Transfer" is always, a 100% trap. The destination realms always end up dead, and blizzard ignores their pleas for help, and they are forced to spend $25 to transfer or else just quit.

[TobiasAmaranth]

This is why society is collapsing. Cities are being consolidated to the point of untenability. Instead of everyone being spread out in a natural way, we simply MUST be involved in THE BIGGEST POSSIBLE. It's causing issues with food logistics, service logistics, travel logistics, etc etc. It's interesting to look at this server situation through that lens.

[Alanious]

All excuses, people wont fall for the same excuse twice nice try smart ass

[Tiwack]

They could help ppl on dead servers by merging them etc and maybe ppl would be willing to accept the free transfers out of the full ones...

[Cæli]

So are you going to be paying to upgrade the servers for the 1 month it's needed until everyone bails like usual or are you just here to complain?

I sure as hell wouldn't pay for that if I was anyone from the company knowing the collapse of realms soon to come.

I'm not complaining, I'm just stating a fact, so that people know. as a company this scale you don't need a lot of money to handle millions of players. when you're low on ressources you add one server. one server can handle a large amount of players, and the cost of the server (which is a computer suited for enterprise level quality) is just a tiny percent of the generated revenue, since the game isn't free. they can have one megaserver for everyone if they wanted. load balancing is also a basic thing related to the subject. the person who wrote that was lying or is incompetent.

[getupkid55]

I really cannot believe this.

Either Blizzard has shit programmers (and we know that they don't) or their management is up their own asses (which we know is true).
I am learning Azure and AWS ...

Yeah, spare us. You're just starting to learn and you think you know better than people who've managed massive server farms for decades?

This isn't the same thing as horizontally scaling web services (which you probably don't even understand the back-end of) that serve static content. Maybe learn more first before commenting like the armchair server engineers in the OP.

[bloodykiller86]

I'm not complaining, I'm just stating a fact, so that people know. as a company this scale you don't need a lot of money to handle millions of players. when you're low on ressources you add one server. one server can handle a large amount of players, and the cost of the server (which is a computer suited for enterprise level quality) is just a tiny percent of the generated revenue, since the game isn't free. they can have one megaserver for everyone if they wanted. load balancing is also a basic thing related to the subject. the person who wrote that was lying or is incompetent.

its less so the server and the allowed peered connections connecting to it based on bandwidth and other network limitations it seems. One day i hope they adopt a true megaserver approach to alleviate these issues. Modern game doesnt have these issues because everyone technically lives on all servers whenever they hop around a battlegroup

[Cæli]

its less so the server and the allowed peered connections connecting to it based on bandwidth and other network limitations it seems. One day i hope they adopt a true megaserver approach to alleviate these issues. Modern game doesnt have these issues because everyone technically lives on all servers whenever they hop around a battlegroup

bandwith has nothing to do with it, the total bandwith required between blizzard and the internet is the same regardless of their number of servers. if one account equals one connection then there is no real limitations unless they run outdated hardware and software or make heavy use of proprietary systems billing them far more than what they should normally pay.

[SniperCT]

A number of years ago, the major interstate that crosses through las vegas was constantly jammed. They widened it, expecting it to take 10 years before they'd have to worry about it jamming that badly again.

It took 3.

Point being there's only so many concurrent connections and players a server can have before it chokes out.

Additionally, to people saying just spin up more servers, doesn't work like that in a game like WoW. Spinning up new servers means spinning up new realms. And if you set up too many realms you eventually end up with a bunch of dead realms in 6 months or less. We know this, we've seen this again and again. I can name other games that had too many servers, then when the player base normalized they were all ghost towns. This even happens with WoW. So adding additional servers always has that risk, which is why it's not the first thing they do. (add to that getting additional hardware is still not exactly the easiest thing to do right now, if they need additional hardware)

WoW simply has too many realms, too many players and too many characters to do some kind of ESO situation.

100,000 players on one wow realm? Give me a break.

[Cæli]

Spinning up new servers means spinning up new realms

spinning up new servers means adding more ressources to help balancing the load. 100k connections per server is okay in current year. if it "doesn't work like that" then first they were incompetent, second they need to correct that. it is possible. the only barrier is like I said competence. a regular server is not much for a company like blizzard. softwares they should use are FOSS, or they could do it themselves if they have good developers.

it's very clear that setting up new separate servers is a very easy and lazy solution which doesn't address server issues under load.

to me it just looks like the infrastructure has been badly designed or is overly complex and they're lagging behind over time because they weren't competent enough when they had to, and now it's a mess both in terms of salary and actual steps to solve their issue. servers issues that plagued the game since forever, including in smaller servers, seems to indicate that it's true.

[Celement]

Honestly this is a inherited problem from how poorly they dealt with realms historically. No one trusts them to be responsible with populations to the point they will wait hours to be on the good server now. Knowing the rest will be dead later.

[tomten]

I'm not complaining, I'm just stating a fact, so that people know. as a company this scale you don't need a lot of money to handle millions of players. when you're low on ressources you add one server. one server can handle a large amount of players, and the cost of the server (which is a computer suited for enterprise level quality) is just a tiny percent of the generated revenue, since the game isn't free. they can have one megaserver for everyone if they wanted. load balancing is also a basic thing related to the subject. the person who wrote that was lying or is incompetent.

spinning up new servers means adding more ressources to help balancing the load. 100k connections per server is okay in current year. if it "doesn't work like that" then first they were incompetent, second they need to correct that. it is possible. the only barrier is like I said competence. a regular server is not much for a company like blizzard. softwares they should use are FOSS, or they could do it themselves if they have good developers.

it's very clear that setting up new separate servers is a very easy and lazy solution which doesn't address server issues under load.

to me it just looks like the infrastructure has been badly designed or is overly complex and they're lagging behind over time because they weren't competent enough when they had to, and now it's a mess both in terms of salary and actual steps to solve their issue. servers issues that plagued the game since forever, including in smaller servers, seems to indicate that it's true.

This is a copy paste from the blue post itself, the irony is hilarious lol...

"I also just want to reiterate this point though; we’ve raised population caps to accommodate mega-realms to the absolute limit of current technology. I’ve seen a lot of armchair server engineers say things like “just add more hardware”, and I can’t stress it or put it any more plainly, the technology to allow more than we have on realms now does not exist. We’ve added the hardware, we’ve optimized as much as we can optimize, and the current demand on these few realms is just too much. Continuing to push our luck and find ways to reach ever higher realm caps has hit a point where we can’t go any further, and eventually something had to give. That something has given and we are going to be taking different approaches to this problem going forward."

Your "facts and guesses" are wrong.

- - - Updated - - -

its less so the server and the allowed peered connections connecting to it based on bandwidth and other network limitations it seems. One day i hope they adopt a true megaserver approach to alleviate these issues. Modern game doesnt have these issues because everyone technically lives on all servers whenever they hop around a battlegroup

From the post itself:
"Wadaplanet: One of the main concerns I see from Couch-Server-Engineers seems to be that retail works with larger players on a server, so why not implement some of that technology;

This is not the case. The issue we have here is also an issue on certain modern realms such as Illidan and Tichondrius when new expansions are released. They have the same realm caps we have. This is purely a perception thing, we are using the same hardware, and backend infrastructure for both games."

[Mysterymask]

and queue the Armchair Engineers

I mean we already got the arm chair marketing execs in full swing

[Cæli]

This is a copy paste from the blue post itself, the irony is hilarious lol...

"I also just want to reiterate this point though; we’ve raised population caps to accommodate mega-realms to the absolute limit of current technology. I’ve seen a lot of armchair server engineers say things like “just add more hardware”, and I can’t stress it or put it any more plainly, the technology to allow more than we have on realms now does not exist. We’ve added the hardware, we’ve optimized as much as we can optimize, and the current demand on these few realms is just too much. Continuing to push our luck and find ways to reach ever higher realm caps has hit a point where we can’t go any further, and eventually something had to give. That something has given and we are going to be taking different approaches to this problem going forward."

Your "fact" is wrong.

if you read my previous post you would have seen that I said that they were either incompetent or lying. let me quote myself "the people who wrote this are either completely incompetent or they've been told to say that for some reasons". it IS possible, with today's technology, to have more players on large realms. are you saying that blizzard have higher servers demand than google? please.

[tomten]

if you read my previous post you would have seen that I said that they were either incompetent or lying. let me quote myself "the people who wrote this are either completely incompetent or they've been told to say that for some reasons". it IS possible, with today's technology, to have more players on large realms. are you saying that blizzard have higher servers demand than google? please.

I'm saying you dont understand this topic at all nor the differences between the infrastuctures. And I'm also saying the post is spot on in calling you and others like you out for pretending they know better.
But maybe they should just hire you to design the architecture for them? That's the real long term solution isn't it? When are you applying?

[Mysterymask]

if you read my previous post you would have seen that I said that they were either incompetent or lying. let me quote myself "the people who wrote this are either completely incompetent or they've been told to say that for some reasons". it IS possible, with today's technology, to have more players on large realms. are you saying that blizzard have higher servers demand than google? please.

Google isn't running a game?

[Cæli]

I'm saying you dont understand this topic at all nor the differences between the infrastuctures. And I'm also saying the post is spot on in calling you and others like you out for pretending they know better.
But maybe they should just hire you to design the architecture for them? That's the real long term solution isn't it? When are you applying?

why would they hire me if I "don't understand this topic" according to you?
and I would gladly try to help them for free if they contacted me, but they won't, so why bother talking about that.

[tomten]

why would they hire me if I "don't understand this topic" according to you?
and I would gladly try to help them for free if they contacted me, but they won't, so why bother talking about that.

The roll eyes emote didn't let you know I was being sarcastic??
You could do nothing to help them but I find it very hilarious you think you could.
Only argument you have is "but muh, google", like it even has a correlation?