29/03/2010

A plea for more stable servers

You know, I'm generally not too fond of just making rant posts that don't have much of a point, but I just have to get this one off my chest: What in the world is currently going on with my server (Earthen Ring - EU) and with its whole battlegroup for that matter? I tend to be pretty laid back about things like lag and overloaded instance servers, but the way ER has been completely and utterly broken in the past week is seriously bordering on the ridiculous.

Last Monday we went to ICC, killed Putricide, continued to Valithria Dreamwalker... and then the server went down. We stayed on TeamSpeak for fifteen minutes or so but eventually had to call the raid since there was no way to tell when the server would come up again.

On Wednesday we had a great raid and almost downed the Blood Queen for the first time. I was hyped again.

On Thursday I wanted to run a ten-man. Since we were short on signups it took a while to get the group together, but after half an hour or so we finally found a tenth person. A mere minute later, the server went down again. All that work for nothing.

Yesterday, Sunday, we struggled to get enough people for a twenty-five-man together but the officers pulled it off. We intended to start with clearing the plague wing, started by killing Festergut, but just as we were about to pull Rotface a bunch of people - including myself, the raid leader and the healing leader - got booted off the server. This time the server wasn't down and the majority of the raid was still online, but the people who had been kicked off for no reason were unable to log back on and so another raid had to be cancelled.

I checked the official forums and I could find nothing, absolutely nothing about those issues on there, apart from a few resigned posts about dead hamsters on our realm forums. The people of Earthen Ring are used to their server not always working properly, but come on!

I love this game and I want to keep playing it. With the next new and exciting major patch a long way off, it can be hard enough to motivate people to attend raids as it is, and all this nonsense with servers going down or randomly booting a quarter of the raid is not helping. When you finally get enough people together to raid and then it doesn't happen because Blizzard won't let you, people are even less motivated to try again - because how do they know that it won't just be a complete waste of time again?

For one of our warriors, last night was the straw that broke the camel's back and he decided to call it quits. With three out of four raids having to be cancelled due to server issues this past week, I can't say I can blame him.

6 comments:

  1. /sign
    I'm also in the cursed cyclone battlegroup. Three raids destroyed the past week. And the communication from Blizzard about the issues is ridiculously bad, almost non-existent.

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  2. Man, I can't believe I've been reading your blog for so long without realising that we're actually in the same battlegroup! It's comforting to know that another blogger feels my pain though.

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  3. Hear hear! The lag, the neverending loading screens, and now the server going down really drains the fun out of the raiding :-(

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  4. That sucks. Cyclone battlegroup has been pretty screwed this week, but other groups had problems too. I was unable to login on sunday evening for about an hour.
    The worst for me was the poor and terrible response from technical support. I work as technical support and the way Blizz reacted was horrible. As far as I saw it was an ISP problem, since the traceroute stopped at Telia without reaching the login server, but I was able to get the list of servers during connection phase... so maybe some server was malfunctioning too. In anycase the poor response from Blizz was to offer the typical "basic automatic answer": reset router, disable addons, delete WTF folder. That wasn't of any help in this case. The second answer was a bit better (flushing DNS, renewing IP) but didn't solve anything. They should recognize if it's a Blizzard or Telia's fault, at least we'd know what are us up to. Pretty lame.
    Anyway I hope things get better.

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  5. I'm also in the Cyclone BG (Terenas-EU), and it's been just as bad with lag and d/c's for us the past week. We had a good raid on friday tho, where we killed the blood queen for the first time. Sunday as we pulled Dreamwalker 2 healers, a tank and several dps got booted and couldnt get back on. Apparantly it was the login servers not working, and not just for Cyclone but for every realm.

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  6. I'm in the EU Misery Battlegroup. We don't have any problems so far apart from the occassional server break down, but only once every two/three weeks or so. I feel your pain though, having to call off raids for this kind of stuff is terrible.

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