Worst than WoD Launch

[Vrinara]

Blizzard should be ashamed of themselves. I do feel sorry for those who took time off of their jobs to experience nostalgia again. It may partially be your fault but Blizzard should've tested this WAYYYY before deciding the prepatch to launch this week. We're now getting this patch a whole -day- later in 2021.

Blizzard has been messing up in several areas lately. What the absolute hell is going on with MGMT?

You act like this has never happened before? You call it "Worst than WoD" Quit crying.

[Nosnogard]

There's nothing better than neckbeards crying like the world is going to end, thinking they know better than employees of the biggest gaming company in the world.

Please don't compare us neckbeards with the OP. We have standards you know

[Valkyr7]

In theory they have already tested duplicating everything in game as they do it with character Copy’s and the PTR.

In practice even character copy’s on the PTR can be delayed so it’s likely that by doing it all at once they have a sort of data bottleneck.

"The biggest reason that many small files takes longer than a single large file is they are copied one at a time and they complete the copy before reaching maximum speed and then the next file starts to copy and increases speed then it finishes and the next file starts to copy and increases speed."

Each character is most likely a small file.

[ClassicPeon]

Blizzard should be ashamed of themselves. I do feel sorry for those who took time off of their jobs to experience nostalgia again. It may partially be your fault but Blizzard should've tested this WAYYYY before deciding the prepatch to launch this week. We're now getting this patch a whole -day- later in 2021.

Blizzard has been messing up in several areas lately. What the absolute hell is going on with MGMT?

how is it worse then WoD launch again? :P

[Vaenhearts]

This isn't even the launch of BC wat

[Kagthul]

"The biggest reason that many small files takes longer than a single large file is they are copied one at a time and they complete the copy before reaching maximum speed and then the next file starts to copy and increases speed then it finishes and the next file starts to copy and increases speed."

Each character is most likely a small file.

Probably not even a few MB/character. And a lot of the files that need to be transferred (like mail) are tiny - a few Kb (not even KB).

And we're talking probably tens of millions/server.

And if the process runs into an error? Start over.

Which is what they had to do.

[Nasuuna]

they should just do 24h maintenances prior to big releases

[owbu]

I think this might be the worstest thread since that one about WoD actually being good now.

[Nite92]

which should have been done DURING THE BETA

They tested it, but doing it for the real thing can always cause issues. You can test all you want, these things will happen, or why do you think this happens all the time for each and every game studio with large games. Are they all incompetent? They are not. There will always be bugs when processing large databases.

[Mysterymask]

you want your ...

uhh...

*maths* 15/month comes to .50 a day, 2/3 cause you're not playing Classic Era or TBC Classic... Carry the 5, divide by zero, multiply by the square root of two...

Pester Blizzard about your missing 33 cents,

oh boy I can't wait till blizzard pays 55 cents to send them a check for 33 cents so he can use up about $1.00 worth of gas to cash it!

[God Save The King]

I do not envy Blizzard in this situation. Lots of armchair software engineers, deployment experts, and more.

As someone actually in the field who deals with billions of database entries during deployment and has handled many migration scripts, this happens and even the best testing can fail. Usually in normal deployment, you simply roll it back and postpone deployment if you need additional development and testing. That's not really an option with such a public facing entity dealing with angry players. People revolve their lives around the game, schedule vacation time around release dates, and more. I cannot even imagine the pressure the engineers and database team are under right now.

Separating your product into two "halves" with one receiving new features and upgrades and the other existing as legacy is extremely difficult. I've had to do something similar as many of our newer customers wanted features that did not exist on the machines of some of our older customers. It took us three attempts to finally get all the kinks out and deploy both to live environments. Despite ample testing and our dry runs showing that it should work.

[Ogarash]

which should have been done DURING THE BETA

You can't test live data during a beta test. That's why trouble always happens. The databases for WoW Classic are HUGE. I mean, it's clear you are talking out of your ass not knowing the first thing about data migration. A day's delay, is nothing absolutely nothing. And it's not even a full day yet so just, I don't know. Take a walk? Relax? Read a book and rest until you can play?

- - - Updated - - -

While it doesn't sound like a lot, if you factor in the massive amount of players who were simply unable to play, it means Blizzard essentially profited off them while denying them service.

More of a macro problem. In old times they credited accounts with time during maintenance. Now? Not so much.

Not for every delay they didn't. They credited only for extremely long delays of several days. If it was a one day delay that was just business as usual.

- - - Updated - - -

how is it worse then WoD launch again? :P

It isn't. OP probably never even played WoD.

[Kelathos]

This is precisely what pre-patch is for. It works out the technical problems for a smooth launch.

[Tharkkun]

which should have been done DURING THE BETA

It's not a problem with the game software, client or server. It's the database backend. The Oracle database. One of the copy processes failed as they stated. With big amounts of data you have to verify the integrity once it's been copied. If it fails. You repeat the process. All the testing in the world can't prepare you for a replication glitch.

But that being said had they not tested it then it would've gone live with a huge chunk of data missing and that would've been a catastrophe. By testing the data they prevented this from happening. This entire game is nothing but one gigantic database. It has to be 100% accurate or it breaks.

[Bagrod]

Blizzard should be ashamed of themselves. I do feel sorry for those who took time off of their jobs to experience nostalgia again. It may partially be your fault but Blizzard should've tested this WAYYYY before deciding the prepatch to launch this week. We're now getting this patch a whole -day- later in 2021.

Blizzard has been messing up in several areas lately. What the absolute hell is going on with MGMT?

Yes, I also do feel sorry for those who now even take holidays for a prepatch where nothing substantially changes until BC finally launches on June 1st.

If you wanted to dive into it and directly level a dreanei / blood Elfe I think you should be able to cope with a delay of a day or so. Not too much of a deal tbh.

[Azadina]

Wod was almost a week so they got quite a ways to go to be worse then wods launch.

Took me 10 days to reach 100 back in wod, and it wasn't for lack of trying the first week. Only in the last 3 was I finally able to slog thru 94-100.

[Xykotic]

Pre-patch is not really a launch.
Just sayin'.

[Tharkkun]

You can't test live data during a beta test. That's why trouble always happens. The databases for WoW Classic are HUGE. I mean, it's clear you are talking out of your ass not knowing the first thing about data migration. A day's delay, is nothing absolutely nothing. And it's not even a full day yet so just, I don't know. Take a walk? Relax? Read a book and rest until you can play?

Yup the company I contract for migrated to a newer version of the software they use to store aerospace drawings, tech data, etc. It took them 3 weeks to migrate all the data. Plus another month to then convert it all to PDF for read only viewing. People don't understand the massive amount of character data Blizzard is working with for this game.

[Deneios]

While it doesn't sound like a lot, if you factor in the massive amount of players who were simply unable to play, it means Blizzard essentially profited off them while denying them service.

More of a macro problem. In old times they credited accounts with time during maintenance. Now? Not so much.

Yeah they can just say " Well the other version works fine so no harm"
Its like if car dealership would sell you a car and a bicycle in package so when the car breaks down and you ask for varranty they can say the bicycle works fine and flip you off

[Coffeh]

Ok I'll hear you out. How do you propose they go about testing this.

Um...do what they're doing right now, only on test servers.