“We are looking into issues that players are experiencing when attempting to login, use the Auction House, or access Crafting Orders.” - Blizzard
First of all, “scheduled” maintenance this morning was to nerf the levelling process (a problem that only Blizzard, not the players, saw as a problem). What did you guys do on the nerf that now prevents us from logging on, use the Auction House or access Crafting Orders? I have absolutely no programming/coding knowledge but I fail to make a connection between how nerfing the levelling process would affect logging in? Or the Auction House or Crafting Orders, for that matter.
Also, never mind the Auction House and Crafting Orders problems. If players can’t even log in, those two other problems, cease to be problems.
Since I’ve been playing (in 2005), there has always been scheduled maintenance. But the schedule was: Tuesdays from 7:00 PST to 8:00 PST, sometimes extended (planned) maintenance. Now, and especially since the pre-expansion patch, there has been “scheduled” maintenance on many days of the week. Just because you let the playerbase know 5 minutes before it happens or even the night before, doesn’t necessarily make it “scheduled”. Add on to that all the connection problems these past couple of days, playing time has been difficult for many players.
Did none of these problems come up during beta testing? This is a serious question. I have no knowledge of beta testing, apart from the fact that you can’t realistically replicate the volume of players during beta that exists during live. But apart from that, no one realized during beta that levelling was “too easy”? The Auction House problem that is now happening wasn’t happening during beta? Why are these problems showing up now?
No, I don’t want my money back, and no, I’m not quitting the game. I’m just genuinely curious.
They should have waited before making these changes. I am glad they gave me a refund though. This toon is locked, but thats ok I got alts out the wazzoo.
Live users are the beta testers, and since (as you mention) nobody is quitting, they can do it whenever they want… not good, but seems like PTR is not enough QA for the live envs
These issues were present on the beta as well, I’m really not sure how it got into live save for lack of QA testing. I think this expansion is the best since Wrath, but these issues really do threaten it a great deal. I have 15 days left on gametime, a busy season with work and family, etc. I’ll give a week then let it lapse. Plenty of other games to play this fall. Hopefully they sort it as any victory for content means very little if we can’t, you know, play the content.
A lot of people forget that a beta is for testing above all, not previewing. That being said, these were issues that were being talked about a LOT on and off the ptr. I struggle to imagine a world where they weren’t aware of it, but Actiblizz has also been going through a massive amount of restructuring lately so I’m not going to lose sleep over being unable to play for a few days. A week? Yeah, then I’ll enjoy Star Wars Outlaws and the…interesting hair.
I think people would take the testing aspect of beta testing WAY more seriously if blizzard ever gave even the slightest suggestion that they were reading feedback/bug reports. What’s the point in filling out suggestions/bug reports if they half the time can’t be bothered to fix, let alone acknowledge that feedback.
Like sure, maybe someone is going to be angry if devs respond “hey, we saw your feedback on Y, but we won’t be changing it because of X”, but way more people are going to appreciate that then the almost universal silence we usually get. Same goes for bugs, just telling people that it’s seen, and being looked at goes a long way in contrast to people complaining about bugs and just getting dead air in return.
Can’t really be surprised that people mostly just use beta as a way to preview things, and maybe get enough deep knowledge of the systems, especially the crafting/gathering to get an advantage over people who didn’t preview in beta.
My theory is that since the pre-patch something has not been resolved in the server infrastructure, and the team has been trying to fix it since then with several patches during the week, because since then things have gone wrong, with: disconnections, lags, “scheduled” maintenance.
I have experience with backend development, but I have no idea what is happening behind the scenes, but the symptoms I am observing and have experienced several times in my career that are maintenance after another give an idea that they are going through a big backend problem.
Regarding the maintenance time having increased, my theory is that the database has scaled a lot, and every year the updates, inserts, deletes are also increasing in time.
I am not defending anyone, just speculating what could happen, and believe me in the development world the most common thing is to release a product with bugs and try to fix the incident later in a hurry.
Or they just have some process that is messy, and needs that restart/downtime to clean up. Might be low enough activity to make it between normal resets, but new expansion launches probably see an order of magnitude more ‘stuff’ happening on the servers than a few weeks in, when people have mostly settled into their usual raid logging behavior.
The more frequent restarts is less surprising to me than the hours upon hours of things being completely and utterly broken in-game after whatever they did earlier during maintenance.
I’ve no experience with this but I don’t think it’s a theory, I think you’re spot on. Logins, Auction House and such are all authentication centric. Somewhere along the line our individual interactions with the servers and their account systems are getting tied up. I’ve experience in PR, however, and their ‘less is more’ approach is actually the right way to go about this despite what many may feel. Far worse to give us incorrect information in a large summary than a small tidbit about the issue being acknowledged. Smaller devs like Airship Syndicate gave more information because being small means they have less eyes on them and as such less judgment. Actiblizz is enormous, why fuel outrage by sharing too much?
I myself thought the leveling was fine. They could take the leveling part of this game away at this point.
I just want my hero talents so i can quest easier and start grinding gear.
Leveling in a mmo is kinda outdated now. We just want the end game and all the fun things to do
The issue is usually their authentication servers struggling to process people into the servers, or the servers physically unable to handle the number of people trying to play on them (This has seemed rare for a few expansions now). I can’t recall the last time they had the launch, there was the couple of days or week of badness, and then they got it under control, only for them to randomly break it again. Usually, once we’re past the bad, we stay past it until at least the first major patch.
The changes they made aren’t that bad honestly. Between dps and tanking, it’s minute. The irony is that people in early access were actually not happy with how overpowered people under 80 were and were asking for this. Now that it’s here, the ship burns. Can’t please everyone.
Pretty much. I also play on Illidan, so I’m sure that’s a hot mess. I inadvertently bought 35k worth of Glyph of Ghostly Fade due to being tired and not paying attention to the weird AH quantity thing, so I’m getting doubly mucked about with the issues but I don’t ingame gold to eat my dinner so…
That’s clearly what I said, and not that more reasonable understanding that maybe if they get hundreds of pieces of feedback generally related to X, that maybe they should make a post about X.