Just briefly, Congrats to Blizzard for what was, by far, the most successful launch I've seen yet in an MMO.

There was virtually no lag on Cenarius until early this morning. I was able to play for near 12 hours straight without a crash or a drop. And best of all, except for a few specific quests in a few specific areas there was no overcrowding to speak of.

There were some small bugs (some of the respawns were occurring much faster than they should have been...but I suspect it may have been some dynamic coding based on zone population that wasn't quite tweaked enough, if so...kudos).

Some folks weren't all that impressed with the log in queue on some of the more heavily populated servers...but its better than not being able to get in at all and blizzard has stated that they were intentionally limiting login for launch to help ease the stress.

Very good job on Launch Blizzard, its pleasing to see you not making the same mistake so many other MMO's make.

Then the lag hit at 10pm Pacific time. Oh, and the East Coast servers are so full that the devs are telling them to use the West Coast servers.

I'd say DAoC and probably CoH had better launches really. At least if you don't count content wise.. in which case DAoC was worthless =-p

Wasn't an overly bad launch with WoW.. though the patch not being there sucked.

Take a look at the Central Time Servers. Hellscream, the server i'm on is lag city. I just logged off at 2:30am, and I was still lagging. But atleast the server didn't crash, nor was it unplayable.

yeah, not as good a launch as DAoC, but still a decent launch so far. We'll see if the stuff happening late this evening/early this morning is temporary or continues though. :)

Hoping it's back to normal tomorrow, we thought we were both heading back to the city to camp due to the lag, however upon logging out one of us was actually not in the city but dead. Logging back in a few minutes later produced a wisp but no body marker on the map. After locating the corpse and hoovering over the body for about 10 minutes with no res box appearing we just decided to log out and hope for the best tomorrow.

Edit: Even with that and having a timed quest fail earlier in the day due to lag making the npc unresponsive but allowing the timer to keep going, we had a lot of fun playing today. It was good to be back in the game again :).

41 servers at release and they are having capasity problems. :lol:

I hear they'll be adding like 10 servers in the next few days. Just read they added like 2 more PvP servers somewhere.

Played about 5 hours so far - Alleria just crashed this morning so I guess I'll go to work ;)

Human newbie area was totally packed last night. Kobolds and wolves were vaporizing within seconds of spawning ;)

Still relatively low lag until just before the crash this morning.

Great job Blizzard :)

I had a few problems playing last night. A couple crashes (I think they were memory errors) and each time I had to wait in a pretty long line to get back in.

Can't wait to get out of the newbie area. Way too many people!

Very smooth. Only had loot lag twice and combat lag twice. I couldn't start until 4:30pm mountain time which was just about right. I had no queue when I started. My guild's name wasn't taken, my character name wasn't taken.

Enough people had moved on from newbie land to allow for some monsters to remain for us. I only had to "camp" a spot twice looking to finish a quest. I say camp but I really just decided I was running around the spider cave and finding nothing so stood on one spot till I managed to get enough spiders. Not exactly the same as EQ camping.

Once out of newbie town I had to shut off shout and general was already off. That increased the enjoyability. Still there wasn't too much griping going on. One person decided to be an ass. Another decided to follow us and hope we'd save him from his overpulls (which we moved on after discovering that little scheme). Only one sighting of an obviously inappropriate name. Several things that weren't names but not necessarily inappropriate. All in all it was a pleasant experience.

Our guild was about 2 seconds from playing on Cenarius, we ended up on Lightbringer.

Very hard to judge how many people will play a game im sure. They have sales figures but their not always 100% accurate. Providing they bring on new servers to cope with the load its all great. Im on a LOW server at the moment really having no issues at all. however I am playing out of US times so maybe im using my "Euro time zone advantage" ;)


Tils

Very hard to judge how many people will play a game im sure. They have sales figures but their not always 100% accurate. Providing they bring on new servers to cope with the load its all great. Im on a LOW server at the moment really having no issues at all. however I am playing out of US times so maybe im using my "Euro time zone advantage" ;)

Tils
Overall it's been smooth for me. I did have one spat of lag last night that caused a disconnect followed by 10 minutes in queue but that was about it.

Blizzard knew that it would be bad at first and they're feeling is that it really can't be helped. Once people spread out and gain some levels, it's going to be MUCH better though. If they open too many servers, they're going to be under-populated down the road. So their thinking is better to have the bottleneck now which will ease up considerably in the next week or so then to have underpopulated servers 3 months from now.

With that being said, they really could use a couple more servers right now though as we've only seen the first "wave" of players. I expect the playerbase to increase dramatically over the next couple of months with Christmas and all that.

Excellent launch yesterday, servers are faltering this morning though. In the blizzard server status forums there's a message saying the servers are being worked on to manage larger capacities of players online at any given time to better eliminate the queues.

Some newbie areas are better than others. If you are alliance, forget it. :) The West coast servers became unplayable around 10:30 pm last night. They came down around an hour-ish later.

I hope Blizzard comes up with enough servers for each area. I don't want a flood of non west coast players on the West coast servers. Personally, I've had enough of the Euro time zone advantage to last me a life time. :)

Well - this isn't good.

I have the day off and I'm trying to play. The server is full of people that aren't West coast looking for relief from east coast lag. It's so lagged now that you can't move for several minutes at a time.

My server is unplayable now too and trying to log into another server is taking forever so I'll do other things this afternoon I guess. Crossing fingers they can address these issues soon.

World server is down. :(

OMG - LAG LAG LAG - kill one creature and wait 4 mins to loot it rinse and repeat.. whats going on!~

Yeah, I was wrong and am eating my words.

After one night of juicy goodness, the servers are now...erm..borked.

Yeah, my CE finally showed up today, and... I can't log in! :P

The soundtrack, DVD, etc. are cool though. I just didn't expect to be looking at them so soon.

Yeah, looks like we're going head to head against AO and SW:G for worst launch ever. It wouldn't be so disappointing, if we hadn't already gone through this in OB.

Pfft, SB was far worse than both of those =-p

/crying
At least you guys can play WoW in the "Thanks...giving"...I have to wait for my preorder to come in (Monday)...hic. But from what i saw in the WoW Com Site, it's a pretty dang gud lauch...

I will share some of that word eating there, Aidon. Today's lag issues are just horrid.

Im on one of the East coast servers atm and its running a High load and amost 0 lag, compared to the pst rp server i started on yesterday with 3 freinds thats just utterly unplayable =(

Not real happy about starting over -again- yes yes its only 1 1/2 days of work but i want out of the newbie areas =/

blah blah blah

Kay

IMHO though, its too early to make claims like worst launch ever or best launch ever anyway. True, we already know its not as good as DAoC or COH, but if everything is fixed in a day or two it will still blow away most other launches. :)

The real test is if we are still seeing bad issues after a bit more time.

The really funny thing is, its extremely frustrating of course, but I've still been having an absolute ball. We couldn't loot anything except preexisting stacked items or turn in any quests pretty much all night long without encountering 5 minute lag spikes - So we just went on mass killing sprees, and killed the things we had already started quests for, etc and still had a grand old time.

*shrugs* Hope they get it fixed soon so all the new people to the game get to experience it in its full grandeur like a lot of us got to in CB.

I'm shocked the servers are holding. I honestly thought they would've burned up by now.

The lag on hellscream is almost gone today. I lagged twice the whole night. Have to see how the weekend goes.

They brought up another batch of servers - so they have something like 60?

With all the crush of players mobbing to the servers I'm surprised they've held up as well as they have.

Please also note that we have determined that the latency issues that have cropped up are unrelated to individual server populations. For the time being, latency while fighting and looting monsters can be expected on all servers, regardless of population.

Word from a contact on the inside is that the latency is due to the massive traffic on the DB switches, which are going to be upgraded shortly as they've run out of slots to add ports.

My server, Dalaran, is down for 1 to 2 days. Sure, I could restart; but who wants to do that? Part of the fun of a new MMO is the initial "rush". Plus, all my friends are there.

For me, this has been about the worst MMO launch ever. Others not so bad really, but this one, partly due to horrible luck, is the worst for me.

That said, I take nothing away from the game, or even Blizzard...I'm not contemplating reporting them to the BBB, quitting, etc...just very disappointed.

Yup quitting would just mean you would lose out and not them. Sure they would lose 1 customer out of the thousands they have....but the game is too good to miss.

Hopefully they fix the issues quickly and not let it drag on for weeks.

Tils

Just briefly, Congrats to Blizzard for what was, by far, the most successful launch I've seen yet in an MMO.

There was virtually no lag on Cenarius until early this morning. I was able to play for near 12 hours straight without a crash or a drop. And best of all, except for a few specific quests in a few specific areas there was no overcrowding to speak of.

There were some small bugs (some of the respawns were occurring much faster than they should have been...but I suspect it may have been some dynamic coding based on zone population that wasn't quite tweaked enough, if so...kudos).

Some folks weren't all that impressed with the log in queue on some of the more heavily populated servers...but its better than not being able to get in at all and blizzard has stated that they were intentionally limiting login for launch to help ease the stress.

Very good job on Launch Blizzard, its pleasing to see you not making the same mistake so many other MMO's make.

Im not sure what game you were playing, but WoW has had one of the most unsucessful launches so far.

Constant lag while looting mobs, many server resets, overcrowding of servers, huge 3 hour+ queues, and finally 4 of the biggest servers being taken down for 2+ days straight.

I have played a lot of MMOs and while they usually all had little quirks, i was at least able to play them. So far world of warcraft has been totally unplayable for a lot of people. I suggestion checknig out the WoW general forums.

Some servers are better then others I understand, but from where im standing blizzard has done an incredibly poor job. Its probably their worst release so far as far as stability goes, it ranks amoung the most unstable MMOs that ive played on launch day.

Definately, definately, not a launch worthy of the blizzard name. Beta was more stable then this.

:) you can't really call it unstable, beyond them taking down 4 servers and them resetting servers intentionally it's one of the most stable games i've played.

The lag issues did annoy me the night they were happening, but on Alleria there's been very few hiccaughs since.

I've played through bad launches before, and i've heard about others, AO, SB, and oh, i dunno, EQ2 come to mind, AO and SB for some crippling crashes etc, EQ2 for SOE not even bothering to finish the basics before shoving it out the door.

Blizzards first MMO is a HUGE success as far as the numbers are concerned, give them some time to iron out the issues. It being their first time, i personally expected things to go worse.

Some Comparisons i'm lifting off the WoW forums here (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=21978&p=1&tmp=1#post21978):

Here are the ones I played at launch and what I'd rate them on a 0-5 scale. This is an informational post only, and might put things into perspective for a few folks.

Uptime refers to servers and general "workingness" including billing servers and signup pages.
Lag is how bad it was to do things in-game, not counting areas that were hugely populated.
Client stability is how often I got a BSOD or client wonkiness.

This refers to LAUNCH, not how the game turned out eventually.

Asheron's Call:
- uptime 4/5
- lag 3/5
- client stability 5/5
- total: 12/15
Pretty smooth launch, some minor downtime and many lag spikes which were overcome fairly quickly. Considering the year, this was a pretty solid launch.

Anarchy Online:
- uptime 2/5
- lag 0/5
- client stability 4/5
- total: 6/15
Unplayable launch, continual patches to try to fix it which introduced two bugs for every bug corrected at first. Barely playable perhaps a month after launch (but it's a good game today). Possibly the worst launch ever, but I didn't play WW2online.

Asheron's Call 2:
- uptime 4/5
- lag 3/5
- client stability 3/5
- total: 10/15
Pockets of unbearable lag, but if you got out of towns, quite tolerable. Many people, including me, had some sporadic trouble with the graphics which got sorted out, so the client might have rated higher with those that didn't have difficulties. Some billing difficulties when signing up.

City of Heroes
- uptime 5/5
- lag 5/5
- client stability 5/5
- total: 15/15
I saw NO problems whatsoever with CoH launch.
Best. Launch. Ever. This is the example of a launch to which all MMO games should aspire.

World of Warcraft
- uptime 3/5
- lag 3/5
- client stability 5/5
- total: 11/15
Bouncing between rock solid and responsive, to unplayable lag. Much server downtime on half the servers due to a regional datacenter problem. Billing signups worked fine, although some pages not installed (endless meta-refresh loop when changing password, e.g.)

Horizons:
- uptime 3/5
- lag 2/5
- client stability 2/5
- total: 7/15
Client crashes on recalls, memory leaks, skills "greyed out" and unusable. Launch could've been much better, but could've also been much worse. It was the game that eventually ground me down.

SWG:
- uptime 1/5
- lag 3/5
- client stability 5/5
- total: 9/15
SWG was down the first day or two, and once you got in, the cities were a slideshow. I don't remember any crashes on my side or the server side, and things generally worked once they were up. I initially didn't remember it was down because I went and played something else, and wasn't nearly as frustrated. Players were reimbursed a day.

Shadowbane:
- uptime 2/5
- lag 1/5
- client stability 4/5
- total: 7/15
Horrid launch, and I entered a couple days after it went live. Lag was unbearable, causing serveral timeouts, and spells that went off 10 seconds after you cast them. The client-server handshaking was also very strict (being pvp) and there were times I was frozen in place, but the amount of client-side computation is a choice designers make. Terrain appeared to be loaded by the server, and this caused tons of server bandwidth issues so you'd be stuck while trying to walk around with nobody around. I feel there was lots of server downtime, but can't remember precisely.


Now i can't guarantee all his facts are straight, but the launches i experienced or saw up close (when a co-worker experienced them) seem dead on.

Yeah, it's hardly a bad launch. Between AO as the worst and CoH as the best, WoW is definitely about halfway. Neither of those games had to deal with the massive amount of sales and bandwidth issues that Blizz is trying to deal with, however. Its not an excuse - it was brought up many times in beta that it seemed Blizz was underestimating just how many people were going to want to play their game. They may have been hedging their bets, not wanting to spend lots of money on new hardware that they may not need in a few months due to low retention, but that kind of bet is for fools. You never live down a bad launch in this industry. (And lets all remember that EQ's was among the worst ever... remember we all got a free extra month because it was so bad.)

Even still, I've had minimal issues personally trying to play, outside of the HORRIBLE HORRIBLE BITTORRENT PATCH SYSTEM! WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

And lets all remember that EQ's was among the worst ever... remember we all got a free extra month because it was so bad.)

When kunark released they even gave rebates they messed up so bad hehe.... I got my kunark for free cause of that ;) but yes i know its not release...but its a kinda release :)

Tils

Hrm. I didn't get a rebate! In fact, I don't even remember Kunark being that bad release wise. I just remember heading down there before work(think it was before =-p) and grabbing a copy, coming home, and making an iksar monk with a few hundred other people =-p

For the majority of people it seems the problems existed for only about 24 hours, about 24 hours after launch. IE, things were fine from Midnight Tuesday (morning) until late that night. Thats when the problem started. They had the problems fixed for most people/servers by Wednesday night(At least seemingly, not enough time has passed yet, we'll see if it holds). Now true, 4 whole servers of people are quite screwed at the moment. And I have a character on one of those servers, so I am not entirely unaffected. But thats 4 servers out of 80 some.

So far, things don't seem that bad at all. Also, to Takoda specifically, the post you responded to was made before things had gone downhill, and the poster later retracted his statements... In case you didn't notice. :)

*edit to add* And I totally agree that its still disappointing. I really do think the DB issues at the very least were very evident after the second stress test/open beta. They dropped the ball on that.

At least the queue gives me a chance to catch up on the forums!

K

Since its release two and a half days ago, World of Warcraft has already seen incredible concurrency numbers across all active game servers. To keep up with the demand from our players, 47 new servers were made available, increasing the total number of servers to 88. Doubling our server capacity in such a short period of time created issues in existing servers. We immediately recognized the issues and began implementing fixes. However, some players were unable to log in and enjoy the game during this period.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and are dedicated to providing World of Warcraft players with the best play experience possible. Therefore we'll be adding a small trial-period extension for players who created accounts before or during the downtime. In the days ahead, we'll provide additional details on how the trial-period extension will be determined. As always, we appreciate your continued patience and support; we're still monitoring the servers very closely and making adjustments as needed in order to ensure that World of Warcraft continues to run smoothly for everyone playing.

It looks like blizzard will be extending the free-trial period for a lot of us. Honestly, i didn't expect that to happen, nor do i think it necessary for anyone other than those who's servers were down for an extended period.

We played last night with no problems at all. I do feel for everyone on one of the servers that have had a lot of down time. Hopefully everyone will be up and running smoothly shortly.

Well, I'm back to be happy with the launch.

One day of badness. The past day has been near perfect.

Not the best launch...but far from the worst. All in all, I'm happy.

Aidon, you're not allowed to post when you're happy anymoe. My server is down again and I'm blameing you. Everything was good for a couple days. ...then.... Yas jinxed it!

My experience has been "mostly" positive. I started a Human Mage on Argent Dawn first night and it started better than I expected. However, a couple hours later the lag was bad, I got the disconnect and was in queue for 10 minutes.

Next day Argent Dawn was down but they had opened new servers including a new EST RP server so I logged on Earthen Ring and created my Mage over there. I decided to make Earthen Ring my home (despite a really lame name) for the sole fact that on Argent Dawn the names I really wanted were taken but on Earthen Ring I was able to snap them up.

Since starting on Earthen Ring, life has been good. Population is always in the Medium range and while it's not crowded there are a bunch of people around. Lag has been non-existant for me as well. After the initial SNAFU, everything has been running great for me and I have no complaints.