Monday 12 July 2010

New servers are great! Oh wait... What? No! Noooooo!

I had a post planned; a nice, happy and congratulatory post for Mythic after what had been a very smooth and successful transfer from GOA to the Mythic servers. And then this weekend happened…
 
It started with ever-increasing mailbox and auction house lag, with some people reporting having to wait minutes for their mail to load. And then with a resounding DOH the crashing started. When changing zones, be it from using a flightmaster or a scenario, the game started crashing. Sometimes crashing to server select, sometimes to character select and on occasion right back to desktop. And I’m not talking about the occasional crash, oh no sir, this was consistent and constant crashing. It got to the point where most of us just gave up, as WAR was simply unplayable.
 
It’s real shame, not because of a bit of lost game time, but because this is yet another opportunity to further WAR’s resurgence utterly squished. You see this coincides with Mythic reactivating every EU player’s account for 2 weeks free and by the looks of things this was taken advantage of in a huge way. Over the last few days I’ve seen entire guilds return to see how WAR is doing, seriously loads of old faces popping up everywhere. These are people that when they saw all the improvements to WAR would quite probably subscribe and enjoy the game, at least for a while and Mythic’s next patch could well have kept them here longer. We’d told them the lag was so much better, that the new servers were so much more stable and at first they really were, but then BOOM! Server meltdown, with crashing eventually became so constant and epic that WAR no longer functioned at all.
 
Gutted.
 
Prior to this I’d maintained a comfortable FPS in fights that were on a scale our old GOA servers could not have dreamed of running. I remember at one point looking at the map of Chaos Wastes and seeing the entire RvR lakes covered in fight symbols, WAR was indeed everywhere. It was brilliant, the new servers a joy.
 
Now I’m sure Mythic will get this sorted out. It’s just a crying shame that all those returning players return to WAR was met by such massive server problems. Perhaps all those returning players cramming onto our servers were the cause of the problem? I don’t know, I can only guess. I know a lot of those people quit because of a combination of the dominance of AoE and poor game performance, they come back and discover AoE is still dominant (albeit point blank) and it would appear to them, the game performance is actually worse.
 
Yet it isn’t. WAR is soooooo much better now; the game normally does run extremely well, in fact in the moments when the server stopped dicking about, I had some great fights this weekend. For me Sunday night ended on a real high with brilliant scrapping in Black Crag with 2 groups of KF and about the same from Tainted working together to fight an Order zerg, really tremendous fun and drama. And Mythic genuinely are finally starting to make and talk about the right kind of changes for WAR. It’s just such a crying shame that all the improvements and future potential has been utterly overshadowed by a weekend of epic server failure.

9 comments:

  1. I'm sure they are working their butts off (as usual) to get it perfect. I've never seen a dev team work so hard to please it's customers. I hope the returning players take the glitches with a grain of salt and stick to it. I hope Mythic gets it fixed soon too.

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  2. Aye was a crying shame, though I’m glad it wasn’t just KA that was getting stiffed.

    Tried twice on Sunday to have a session, both times I gave up after an hour was getting ridiculous after a point.

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  3. Seems its only the english eu servers. Drakenwald at least is running better than ever so far.
    The only thing that seems worse is sending mail.

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  4. Yeah I'm not annoyed by it myself, it's just a real shame and I hope it doesn't have too much of an impact on how many returning players stick around.

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  5. Eldard/Gorefist12 July 2010 at 19:56

    Well..

    I havent suffered that much from the problems with the new servers that much to be honest..

    The old GoA servers where god dam awful i will admit that much the mythic servers to me are fine sure there are a few nicks in the roads but other wise i cant complain..

    But i have all ready seen the whines and troll threads on the offical forums and i woundering to my self is it really that bad? Or are the doom sayers and complainers have nothing better to do than find the weakist link and complain how the game is dieing ect..

    Any way there just a few of my feelings on this matter

    -Eldard/Gorefist

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  6. Dude it was terrible over the weekend during the day. For example at one point logged in and saw there was a city siege under way, 15 minutes to go. I went to change to a charcter that wasnt locked, logged in, crashed, logged in, crashed, logged into Eataine... Rode to the portal, went to zone, crashed, logged in, crashed...

    When I actually got to Reikwald it was too late, the siege was now in safe mode and it had literally been 15 minutes of chain crashing.

    I agree the whinging threads are a bit over the top, but it geuninely was that bad.

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  7. I had the same thought. Slow mail. Emergency server closure. Plenty of crashes. FORGETTING TO RESTART THE WARFRONT. There has been plenty of mistakes to freak out the freebie players.

    On the plus side the action has been intense, Black Crag is a wonderful 3D map when there is alot of action. The game is more stable and the lag is definitely reduced. So I think there is plenty to entice players back.

    IMO they should have waited another week before allowing everyone back on for free, to give them time to smooth out any issues that would occur.

    on an unrelated note... I dont want to be cynic but creating 2 sets of sov armour is just a gimick to keep the RR80 guys grinding for shinies.

    VonPlinkplonk

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  8. Yep, been a horrible weekend to say the least. Wad working fine up until the emergency patch friday night, not fun at all crashing to char selection screen after a SC etc and then spend 10 mins to get back in.

    @Von plinkplonk: As i understand it you simply hand the sov-gear back to a npc and you get to select what type of sov you want. You dont even need to grind anything if you already have a full set.

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  9. Had some problems last night. Had a CTD infront of Wrath Keep, which wasn't probably helped by the huge zerg in front of me.

    I was hearing of people being disconnected while attempting to join Scenarios.

    It's not a great way to entice people back to playing the game. Not seen anything from Mythic on the problems.

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