Blizzard…please upgrade the hardware on your servers.
This has been an issue since launch, and there’s only been a few weeks where the queues aren’t so bad.
If some servers have way more people than others, you need to upgrade the servers to handle the amount of players that are logging in.
It seems like nothing has been done for 4-5 months to improve this issue, other than offering free server transfers (pathetic).
If you’re running a server that supports 5,000 players, and you have 20,000 players… you don’t just let them suffer and take their money.
One of the main reasons for the many server problems in classic is due to blizzard not using hardware anymore, instead they cheap out and rent budget amazon cloud services to host everything.
This works fine in retail since they sharded the game into so many different small realms that it’s never a problem, but in classic where it is one big realm these cloud servers run into problems fast.
If servers could accommodate 3,500 people back in 2004 without an issue I don’t see why todays technology couldn’t handle significantly more.
Even in a fantasy setting where Blizzard can just keep throwing more and more server horsepower at the problem, it still doesn’t work. The client still has to run on our end, and there are limits to how many players can appear around us before it starts degrading the quality of game play. Even with unlimited server power we would still be bottlenecked by the client systems.
Let’s go a step further. Let’s imagine that both the server and the client had unlimited power. The gameplay itself would still have limits. We already see complaints every day about the excessive competition for tradeskill materials and quest mobs. There are only so many players the game world can support and a lot of people would argue we are already past that point now.
I’m not trying to come off as prick, but your grossly misinformed. I’ll break it down and try to give you a good explanation as to why.
“One of the main reasons for the many server problems in classic is due to blizzard not using hardware anymore, instead they cheap out and rent budget amazon cloud services to host everything.”
Blizzard having the hardware in house vs them outsourcing to amazon has no negative impact performance wise for their users. Amazon has top of the line hardware and their prices are no where near budget. The fact is Amazon is most likely running better tech then what blizzard is running on their in house servers. Cant say for sure because I don’t know what blizzard is running but amazon does say what hardware they are running in their data centers. The reason blizzard went with a cloud solution for classic was because they didn’t know how popular it would be and they wanted to be able to rapidly scale up or down. If classic needed more servers tonight blizzard could call up amazon have them partition off more resources to them and they could have a server up and running in no time. This is also the reason they are able to turn on and off layering like a light switch. If all there hardware was in house and they wanted to replicate this same ability, they would either need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware sitting around not being utilized just in case they need it; which isn’t really realistic. Or we would literally have to wait for them to order more hardware, have it delivered, and for them to get it installed and up and running which would probably take about a month. I could literally go on and on for pages here but I will simplify it down to just a few main bullet points.
Blizzard is a gaming company, AWS is a cloud service provider. AWS is going to have more expertise and better hardware because that is there bushiness. they are not focusing on anything else like trying to design a game.
From an end user perspective it doesn’t matter if your connecting to amazon servers or blizzard owned servers. Your connecting to the same if not better hardware in the same exact manor.
The fact the blizzard only has to pay for what their using and that they can rapidly scale it up or down means performance is never going to suffer due to a lack of hardware.
“If servers could accommodate 3,500 people back in 2004 without an issue I don’t see why todays technology couldn’t handle significantly more.”
You actually answered this question yourself in the paragraph above this one. Today we have sharding, layering and a whole host of other server technologies that boost performance. I mean if you look at ESO the entirety of North America plays on “one server” thanks to the use of sharding. The problem here is that a lot of players don’t want these technologies implemented into the game despite the fact that these are the solutions technological advancement has given us. Technology didn’t advance or hasn’t yet advanced in the way to give us the ability to host 20k players altogether on singular hardware. Instead it gave us other ways to do it, and people just don’t want those ways implemented here. The other big thing here is you have to think about it in other terms besides from just the hardware perspective. The game world was designed to support at max around 2500 players, having 7000 players online at once would probably make for pretty terrible game play and we saw this with some of the private servers who expanded to allow more players on each server. There were entire zones that were impossible to quest in due to so many enemy players camping them, it was impossible to harvest resource nodes, the economy was screwed due to there not being enough resources to support the player population, the list goes on and on. In fact we are even seeing a lot of these same problems now with the server pops just being at there current max. Additionally 2004 servers did not operate with 3,500 players with out issue lol, game performance from a server perspective is much better today then it was back then. The main gripe here isn’t performance; its the fact that people have super long queue times. In my opinion this is much more a player issue then a server issue. The fact is the vast majority of classic servers have no login queue at all, people have just chosen to congregate on a small number of them. In 2004 most people rolled on the server that was suggested to them when they first logged in, today a huge portion of the player base wants to play on the same server as their favorite streamer, its just a different world.
They’re just going to bring back layering. With AQ gates right around the corner coronavirus is the perfect excuse to use layering to handle the event.
Excuses and more excuses, nost/elysium/northdale all held 15k players hosted from a russian basement running smooth and problem free,
but blizzards poop servers can’t handle more than 3k players online at a time.
As for the world being busier, anyone with half a brain would just adjust spawns to be dynamic to reflect current realm populations, private servers managed to do it fine, where as incompetent blizzard thinks that would be to much work for them.
(Remember, the multi billion dollar corporation doesnt want to invest a single cent back into classic, most retail devs hate classic, they hate it’s playerbase, the only thing they like about us is our money )
Cloud servers are terrible choice for MMOs, you cannot achieve the same performance you would have from having your own server.
Clouds weren’t built to handle the insane amount of traffic in MMOs and in case you haven’t noticed people have been complaining that blizzard servers have only deteriorated and got worse over the years as a result.
We have gone backwards instead of forwards all because blizzard is to cheap and scummy to invest in their own infrastructure for their paying customers, how can you justifiably excuse a multi billion dollar company that you give money to every month taking the cheap route at your expense?
Sharding is terrible and shatters and fragments the entire community so you never see the same person twice, it’s a terrible feature that i can’t believe your defending it, most people think it is one of the worst features of modern wow and one of Classics biggest attractions is it’s non sharded servers that give life to living breathing communities.
One day I hope people like you wake up to this scum company that only wants your money instead of defending it like you have stockholm syndrome.
It’s hilarious servers lag worse in 2020 than 2006. You can barely move in SW on incendius a lot of the time and we had our server killed by these genius’. Blizzard doesn’t care about customer experience.
"Cloud servers are terrible choice for MMOs, you cannot achieve the same performance you would have from having your own server.
Clouds weren’t built to handle the insane amount of traffic in MMOs and in case you haven’t noticed people have been complaining that blizzard servers have only deteriorated and got worse over the years as a result."
-This is all I had to read to know you don’t know what your talking about. A data center owned by blizzard and a data center owned by Amazon are the same exact thing. “Cloud servers” are literally just normal servers, only they are off site and they require an internet connection to access. In the case of MMO’s there are some things that happen client side. but the majority of things happen server side and they require a connection to the server over the internet to play. Literally every MMO in existence is “cloud based” because you are connecting to servers in a data center. The fact that you think the servers in a AWS data center are just some how magically built worse then servers in blizzard owned data centers tells me you shouldnt be sharing your opinion on the internet.
“Excuses and more excuses, nost/elysium/northdale all held 15k players hosted from a russian basement running smooth and problem free,
but blizzards poop servers can’t handle more than 3k players online at a time.”
Not much to say here besides every sentence in this quote is factually inaccurate.
- No Private server ever held 15k concurrent players
- Privates servers were not hosted in a Russian basement, they were hosted by European server providers. AKA the European version of Amazon Web services. This is how blizzard was able to get the servers taken down, they were able to threaten to sue the server providers.
-Private servers did not run problem free, there were numerous issues. And dynamic spawning of resources didn’t fix the problem of entire zones being unplayable due to the increased population.
“One day I hope people like you wake up to this scum company that only wants your money instead of defending it like you have stockholm syndrome.”
One day I hope people like you educate yourself before speaking. If you want to prove me wrong though, please post a server build that would be capable of doing what you are wanting blizzard to do. If you can post me a full spec sheet, I will retract everything I have just said about you.
This guy knows what’s up. It’s not a “hardware issue” lol. If anything, it’s the polar opposite. Perhaps they ought to be using hardware ha! Y’know, emulate it pretty exactingly & it runs as it should kinda thing. But that’s just crazy talk I’m sure.
There’s only been a few weeks where the queues were so bad. There have only been queues for the month follow launch and for the last few weeks when Covid has stuck people at home.
That’s because for the last 4-5 months there hasn’t been an issue. This post is pathetic.
I think we should just have every single player in the US on one server. I’m sure the technology exists right? And if the quick google search I did is right, that means we’d be trying to fit all of wow classic’s player base into about 80 square miles of in-game space. Less than half the size of Guam. About 15 Classic Azeroths would fit inside of Rhode Island. Now just need to get numbers on how many players we’re shoving into this small place.
If we’re willing to accept Mumbai’s level of population density (-76K per square mile), it means we should be able to handle 6 million people on one server. I’d be totally cool with that
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