I ask this, because several people have mentioned how bad WoW’s servers have been as of late and how sloppy they’ve been at fixing them. I know we tend to leap all over newer MMOs for screwing up, but older titles seem to be invincible against this sort of thing.
Do Older MMOs Get More Slack For Being Sloppy?
Bio Break 
I think it is because it is WoW not because it is older. WoW has moved into this “Can do no wrong” roll with a lot of its players.
Yeah, not sure about other servers, but Hydraxis has been terrible for the past 3 weeks or so.
It’s even better when the game server is running but the instance server doesn’t work, so you finally get a random dungeon going and can’t get in….even though other party members from other servers are in….
Haven’t all the good dev’s and admin’s been pulled off it now to work on the ‘unnamed MMO’ ?
Yes because you’ve already got a vested interest in the product. In a new MMO I might only have a lower-mid level character while having these problems and that could be a huge percentage of my total experience.
EQ2, on the other hand, has years of history and a max level character. I also have had a consistent experience. If I’ve had five good years and two bad months that feels “not as bad.” Even though it might be worse ^_~
Perception, perception, perception!
No, they don’t. If anything, I hold older MMOs to a higher standard, especially an MMO like World of Warcraft.
I have noticed recently that Blizzard rarely keeps to their scheduled downtimes. What should have been a 2 hour maintenance period can quickly be extended to 4 hours. Are gamers compensated for this downtime (through extended time given)? No. Should they be? A tricky question.
Blizzard Entertainment sits at the top of the MMO mountain. No other MMO comes close to World of Warcraft’s popularity or subscription numbers. However, Blizzards high production values do not seem to translate well in the customer service department.
Player experience is everything. Why should I pay $15 a month for a game seemingly in maintenance mode until the Cataclysm expansion? I pay only because I enjoy the game, the quality that is World of Warcraft, and the friends that I play the game with. That is not to give Blizzard a free pass. If anything, Blizzard needs to be going a step further in the little things (server maintenance, customer service, etc.) in order to round out the overall WoW experience. No one wants to play an MMO in maintenance mode.
Bryan
For me, it’s about trust.
Server maintenance isn’t my top priority. If the game has a few hours more downtime a week, it’s not fun, but I’ve got lots of other things to occupy my time.
But lack of server maintenance does reduce my trust that an MMO’s team is committed to being top quality.
Every time a game like Champions has server problems, it reinforces my perception of that team as clueless and incompetent (even if well-intentioned). The server guys aren’t the same as the guys designing content, but I have to suspect that the leadership at the top that isn’t giving the server guys what they need is also failing the content team.
For WoW? There’s just no reason to believe they are a 100% serious development team, with all the resources and motivation necessary. I may not like what they’re doing all the time (haven’t subscribed for a while), but they still set the standard for serious, polished, and technically nearly flawless design.
If WoW’s having server problems, I just know that’s because something’s not right with the servers, not because the entire company is falling apart.
I think you missed the boat here, Syp. It isn’t a function of age as much a function of market position. The 2009 MMO season has come and gone and yet…no WoW killers. Blizzard realizes this and quite frankly, they don’t have to try as hard. They’ve got fanatics that follow them, and the namesake to rely on.
Look at DAoC. Their downtimes are down and up before the window 90% of the time. They’re aggressive at fixing server stability issues (such as the 4000 person cap) and the overall quality of the game is top notch. There’s a reason that people are coming back to Dark Age. Well, another reason besides WAR’s under-performance.
It’s a mix of variables. By virtue of being old and well used, people still are still investing their interest in the game. Whether you believe in the great WoW mind-control scheme, if you’ve got a toon on a server and you’ve been playing that toon for more than two years, you’re probably not going to jump ship to a MMO that probably has vocal opposition from “players just like you.”
It just happens that MMOs have a predictable path. Even if WoW currently sucks, it would suck more to leave the nest and do, essentially, the same thing (or same thing redux) and fork out fifty for the client.
Really, it’s like running away from home. MMOs are competing to be your home. Once they get you to sign your emotional ticket, you can kick and scream all you want, very loudly and emotionally at that, but in the end, the kid usually comes back.
I think every MMO gets a lot of grief about everything regardless of age 😦
@WoW’s “scheduled” downtimes
I have never, not once, in all my time playing WoW, seen one of their downtimes come in on-time or earlier than they initially projected.
The primary problem I have with Blizzard’s server troubles is their ham-fisted methods of handling customer complaints (locking threads, deleting posts, 72-hour account bans) coupled with a seemingly pathological refusal to offer gametime for server problems. This is coupled with their tight-lippedness truly addressing and understanding why their customers are upset.
I further don’t understand why this particular game is plagued with server problems with over 5 years of live development and an additional 4 years predevelopment. I _understand_ it’s an MMO, and it’s a moving target. Yes, I do understand that. However, server populations are not growing exponentially or even linearly — most research seems to show a leveling off of concurrent subscriptions — so
So therefore, I fail to understand how these problems are occurring. You can’t seemingly blame server load. Therefore these server instabilities are self-inflicted by the Blizzard development team, and we have to pay for it (figuratively and literally).
Rancidmilk said: “Blizzard realizes this and quite frankly, they don’t have to try as hard.” While this may or may not be true, it sure feels like it. I know I feel stuck in my server/battlegroup. I don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to transfer all of my characters to another server for a problem that seemingly is being created by the people I would be paying. Additionally, encouraging our guild to switch servers would essentially pay a DB tech’s monthly salary.
I’m locked into a server that I can’t play because I refuse to pay $25/toon to transfer off, plus I’ve been in this guild for over five years. It’s very frustrating.
Some people might be giving WoW slack, but I’m on the brink of suspending my subscription due to their server problems. The only thing I’m really enjoying in-game at the moment is raiding Icecrown, and the last two weeks, the raids I’ve been able to attend have been all but ruined by massive server overload.
I can see that they’re not going to invest in hardware for the period when new wings of a raid instance have been freshly released, and see it sit underutilized the rest of the time, but frankly, I’m not getting my $15/month worth of entertainment at the moment, due to this.
There were some serious server issues when crossrealm BGs were introduced. I think this is the same. I mean anything touching the EU Crash’Akir aka Lag’Akir, must be tainted by its problems. Al’Akir is run by hamsters. That’s been a well known fact from the days of launch.
But yes, you’d expect stability from 5-6 year old game. Although any MMO has instability. The only thing that annoys me on this one, is that Blizzard should have less excuse. They have the money for fixing things, yet they seem to pour it to other projects.
Some one said that this Blizzard is in a hard place because they have millions and millions of players. But they are on different servers. The amount of players has little to do with it. The amount of workers…
As someone who was on the receiving end of the demands that an aging game be changed with the agility of a new game, I’ll agree that people rarely cut you slack for an aging game. 😉
I don’t envy the Blizzard team. I’m sure they’re doing things with the game servers that the original programmers never intended. Every time one of the new developers gets creative with a solution, one of the older programmers probably tears his hair out. (As I often say, I had more hair on my head when I started in the industry.)
Personally, server downtimes never really bothered me. I have plenty of other games I can distract myself with. 🙂
If anything I believe older games like WoW have less room to breathe, not more. WoWers complaining about otherwise impeccable server stability? Nothing new. If they had to face regular queues, servers going down, glitches etc that other mmo’s suffer there would be rioting on the streets. As it is, any minor nerf is met with howling QQ and cries of Blizzard hating class X. Everything in the game is judged on an incredibly minute scale. Honestly? If WoW suffered even a fraction of the issues that, say Warhammer does? There would, quite literally, be mass protests and picketing in front of Blizzard’s offices.
@skurm
“…mass protests and picketing in front of Blizzard’s offices”? Really? The bottom line: Blizzard will always get away with this because they sell drugs in the online game packaging. And drug addicts will always come back to the pusher no matter how badly they are treated.
I’ve done extensive research for about two weeks last month, when I wanted to change a European English realm and I came to the conclusion that on almost every server there was something not right.
What I did was read all forums from front to back on both battlegroups and realm forums and I created characters on realms on both sides to ask people questions about the current situation.
This is what I found out:
In most cases one of the two factions where extremely low populated (this even on some High or full/locked realms), which led to more people to faction change and lowering population even more. There are a lot of realms where people are asking to do something about the ghost towns.
Also there are currently only around 4 of all battlegroups that are “working” with pvp and/or pve que’ing… most others have big problems getting groups the normal or the que-way*.
In addition quite a lot of realms are mostly dominated by some other language other than English, which led to other language speaking people to migrate.
*Note this depends on a lot of factors and it isn’t as black and white as I just stated.
In most cases Blizzard tried to make some of the high population realms migrate to the lower ones to “solve” things, but people lately hardly do so, because the most of them know it will turn out in the end to pay for another migration. So they stay to endure the lag and realm que’s during prime time.
There’s a lot more going on and I’m starting to believe Blizzard likes to keep things the way they are, because of their new services that probably increased their income by quite a bit.
Questions arise like, why not merge some of the low populated ones? For example a low populated Horde realm with a low populated Alliance realm. And while they’re at it, why not merge quite a few battlegroups as well?