With all the crying and dieing about the servers being down. You do have opions. 

First, my warning to blizzard.

How many problems in a month can people endure before they go somewhere else?  Ths isn't about the bad patch today, but it's the final straw.  With the DC's, Lag  and  the cities being overan to the point where you couldn't bank or AH, paying for this fustration is simply silly. 

I am a 23 year software developer and have never, and I mean never put a client out of work because of a bug or software issue.   Once you found you had an issue you should have simply rolled back the patch and tried again tommarow morning.  Instead, you poorly tested this update (Yes,  no excuse for a main stream funcion such as the mail not to be properly tested) that  affects paying accounts.

Second. 

I came to WOW because DAOC was having a tremendous number of issues on patch days and a ton of lag when New Fronters came out.  It always seems to be the second major patch that causes the most issues.  If any of you rember EQ 1, EQ 2, EVE or FFXI you rember those upgrades. 

So after many afternoons and evenings of being fustrated over a game, I simpled solved the problem by changing games. 

I have chosen to cancel my second account and went to the store and purchased WAR. Since I been wanting to try it anyway.  If I like this game and Blizzard keeps the fustration level up,  I might end up with no accounts on WOW.

Do you honestly think blizzard can set up perfectly good 100% guranteed running servers for 11 milllion people? Not to mention a HUGE expansion coming in a day?  

Maybe, instead of freaking out and going all EMO you might want to think of the reason why all servers are down.....

Seriously this happens on a lot of MMO's.... and Blizzard refunds game time, seriously whats with the QQ.

I'm a software developer and who says the problem doesnt reside on the database.  My personal theories since you have yours out there of things not being tested is they are moving/upgrading databases for wrath and something went wrong with the mail database. Roll back can be a lengthy process but at the sametime it may be something that needs to be done for the expansion. So before assuming its a bug cause because of batch it could also be other issues.

Can  I have your stuff!!

You truly don't understand regression testing and rolling back.

When any update fails, it should be rolled back until it is fixed.  End of Story

It's not the bug thats the issue, it's the lack of play time for over 8 million players and .40 cents per day.  So i think for 4 Million + dollars, they should have properly regression tested each and every component.

The only reason the patch is not removed is because of the software release on 11/13.  So don't give me that crap about how hard it is.  Its the money.  They simply don't want to loose out.

If they really thought current players where the most important, they would have long since rolled the patch back and tried again later.

If you think I am wrong about this then i feel sorry for you.  You will always be settling in life with bad performance, customer service and paying too much for it.   I am sure you think that an employee at Target talking on the cell phone while checking out customers is just the way it is and it's ok.

Down time in a MMORPG is just a nature of the business. No one game is immune to it. Even though I no longer play WoW, I know that Blizzard is out to make money. Down time means money lost, which equates to them pouring all their resourses (which they have more than any other game) into getting the game back up. If you want to leave WoW (which is fine by me) leave it for a reason that actually involves the game, because you will suddenly find yourself in another MMORPG facing the exact same issues.

Originally posted by UltraPure

You truly don't understand regression testing and rolling back.

When any update fails, it should be rolled back until it is fixed.  End of Story

It's not the bug thats the issue, it's the lack of play time for over 8 million players and .40 cents per day.  So i think for 4 Million + dollars, they should have properly regression tested each and every component.

The only reason the patch is not removed is because of the software release on 11/13.  So don't give me that crap about how hard it is.  Its the money.  They simply don't want to loose out.

If they really thought current players where the most important, they would have long since rolled the patch back and tried again later.

If you think I am wrong about this then i feel sorry for you.  You will always be settling in life with bad performance, customer service and paying too much for it.   I am sure you think that an employee at Target talking on the cell phone while checking out customers is just the way it is and it's ok.

 

 

You obviously dont know what you are talking about because there was no patch, so it was not a software issue. I dont even think you play wow and quite honestly I just said Blizzard refunds time for crap like this.  I work with financial software for a fortune 400 company, its not the same as a video game. You can just refund a day and be fine compared to millions in transactions not getting paid. Dont try to take my standing here about WoW and twist it to doing something with my job.  THERE IS NO PATCH TO "ROLL BACK" SO OBVIOUSLY ITS ANOTHER PROBLEM, AND OBVIOUSLY YOU CANT REGRESSION TEST EITHER.  

If you trully are a software engineer , unless you dont have to support what you put out then you understand it could be other issues impacting and there may not be a magic rollback button. And if you worked software any amount of time you understand it happens.

Schedual down time  is not  the issue and is not only accpected, its required.

Even a bad day with routers is not the end all.

This was a preventable issue.  Simple roll back the patch.

I might  come from a differn't world. I write Casino software and Slot machines.  If we put out a bug, we could be held for all issues realated to that bug.  So we don't have them. 

First,

Our Dev team does it's inhouse testing
Then it's the QA team
Then it's Alpha
Then Beta

That would be normal if i was writing a new email program or web site. 

We then have to go to State approved labratories and have them test the  systems.   I gues dealing with real gaming, we do more to prevent these issues. 

Our company will not release any software upate with out a roll back procedure.  Experice has shown us this.

I would hope that Blizzard would have been at least as good as our small shop.

Damn, I can understand the frustration OP, but.....well 20+ years and you can't get "tomorrow" typed out...

Chill dude and realize, from YOUR experience, that things don't always pan out the way it's planned.

Suck it up and learn from the mistakes.

As others have replied, this type of thing is typical in the MMO arena.

Blizzard has always been more than willing to compensate for the down time.

If something like this gets your feathers all ruffled maybe you should re-evaluate your priorities.

Just a thought.

I did read your whole first post...and all the responses too.

If there was not patch there would be no issue.

A database restore or reindex would be finished long ago.

Just becuase the don't patch the client does not mean they didn't patch the servers.  With WOTLK comming out, there where changes.

But if you want to pay for accounts and not play do it. 

Please read my whole first post.  Today is only one of the   many issues over the last month.

Now it is 6:00pm PST. 

Originally posted by UltraPure

Schedual down time  is not  the issue and is not only accpected, its required.

Even a bad day with routers is not the end all.

This was a preventable issue.  Simple roll back the patch.

I might  come from a differn't world. I write Casino software and Slot machines.  If we put out a bug, we could be held for all issues realated to that bug.  So we don't have them. 

First,

Our Dev team does it's inhouse testing
Then it's the QA team
Then it's Alpha
Then Beta

That would be normal if i was writing a new email program or web site. 

We then have to go to State approved labratories and have them test the  systems.   I gues dealing with real gaming, we do more to prevent these issues. 

Our company will not release any software upate with out a roll back procedure.  Experice has shown us this.

I would hope that Blizzard would have been at least as good as our small shop.

 

Hey we do something similar for out testing. Let me give you a great example.

We had a routine install that failed.  The server needed to be reboot after the rollback. What our luck the server wont come up. Fine, failover time to box B. Wow, the mount points all mounted but one which caused the server not to boot.  Now we have two boxes that will not boot. They literally had to take the server apart. It wasnt up until the next day.  There isnt always simple roll back solutions

You realize they already gave 3 days free time because of the transition to WotLK.   This game has been extremely stable the past 3 years it's hard to blame them for a rough few weeks.

Originally posted by UltraPure

I have chosen to cancel my second account and went to the store and purchased WAR. Since I been wanting to try it anyway.  If I like this game and Blizzard keeps the fustration level up,  I might end up with no accounts on WOW. 

Sweet.

Expansion in two days.

Woot.

Its far better that there getting the servers ready for wotlk for when it comes out in a day then the servers crashing when it goes live.  Stop being ignorant and open your eyes.. for the past 4 years WoW has been running smoothly and now that there trying to make launch day go perfect people flip out.

Every now and then a break is a good thing. WIth  WoW being down all day other things can be done. There really is no reason to go nuts about it. Stuff happens move on come back later and all will be well.

Is the countdown timer on this website when the servers come back up I can't seem to find any reliable info on when they will be back up?

Originally posted by Azrile

You realize they already gave 3 days free time because of the transition to WotLK.   This game has been extremely stable the past 3 years it's hard to blame them for a rough few weeks.

The game has not been that stable.  My account had been active since launch (closed as of today) and I went back and checked all the free time I had been rewarded.

Hardly an indication of stability from such a large company.

Originally posted by Azrile

You realize they already gave 3 days free time because of the transition to WotLK.   This game has been extremely stable the past 3 years it's hard to blame them for a rough few weeks.

Funny I started another forum dealing with the the server issue and what the average Joe doesn't understand is that some of us don't have weekends off so a Tuesday debacle effects us.

I don't care about free game time, I care about my time to game.

 OP must be new to this compu terrr thing if he thinks there is always a simple solution, or simple way of finding it.

I cant help but think, with WoW getting the crazy amount of money it does. How much do you need before things are released properly? If patches were released like expansions, with similar testing and devotion to them working and customer satisfaction there wouldn't be this problem. But people just accept its the way things work and MMO's require all this.

There are several issues with the OP.

First off - he has never even seen code at the complexity level of WoW (or any other current MMOs) - so his 'personal experiences' in software development is not grounds for crying rollback.

Secondly - if you did have the right kind of development experience you would know that a roll back is not always possible - yes I repeat, not always possible. I've done E10K/E15K system engineering for one of the worlds largest logistics companies. You can test all you want but you will never have a 100% bugfree situation in a rollout of this magnitude. And it's not like you just buy new servers to roll out the patch on and then switch over when it's applied (or switch back if there is problems). Take my job as an example - in each server center our oracle servers alone cost 2x 15 million USD, and we have 9 locations. That's just the DB side, then there is frontend etc.

There is always a lot of questions and problems to be adressed during the rollout - and with 11 million people who just changed their client and have to change back? (yes you have to roll back the clients as well) You have no clue what you are saying tbh.

It might be fine for a small software project like a mail client or heck even Firefox, but for a seriously big project, it's a whole other world.

Can anyone make a point without shouting "ME LEET PROGRAMMER!" to justify their arguments.

Originally posted by Clixgamer

Down time in a MMORPG is just a nature of the business. No one game is immune to it. Even though I no longer play WoW, I know that Blizzard is out to make money. Down time means money lost, which equates to them pouring all their resourses (which they have more than any other game) into getting the game back up. If you want to leave WoW (which is fine by me) leave it for a reason that actually involves the game, because you will suddenly find yourself in another MMORPG facing the exact same issues.

Actually, Guildwars is...

*chuckles*

Good luck getting better quality from EA games.

Played UO for 9 years and uhm .. well .. good luck

To the OP, you are applying business software development practices to gaming software development practices.

The standards are not the same. And hence gaming devs get a way with much more than software being developed for business.