World of Warcraft MMO failure

from Stardock Forums
I've been a fan of MMo's for almost 3 years now, having heavy influence from Anarchy Online, FFXI, SWG, and EQ2. I've never seen such blatent incompetance as what Blizzard has demonstrated in their lack of support. It's become a phenomenon how they can destroy almost every server in their setup every single week that I've owned the game. I sat for a minute tonight and got tired of trying to log into my account management with nothing but fail, and nothing but failure on their 1-800 support line to find nothing less of a training bra supporting this game. If you put two and two together... if there's over 40,000 people that play this game, and it's 15 dollars for 30 days, that's $20,000 dollars a day that this company makes. There's no reason they can't afford a support team 24/7. To me it's absolutely ridiculous to pay a person to make a eula that states noone can emulate the servers . They should allow people to, cuz they can't even keep the game in order themselves!!! ORRRRRR just make their "SERVER ALERT" popup that Blizzard uses to state that their looking for individuals that KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING! I'm nothing more than a consumer, not a computer genius, but I know that some of you are more than able to fix the problems they're having. To not even be able to submit my 60 day prepaid card that i bought today is quite a frustration... Mind you, I'm not trying to say emulating their server system is justified, but in doing searches tonight (while bored and frustrated) I found that this company filed a lawsuit claim on a person for emulating diablo 2's server system.

I bet he kept it up better than they did... that's the sad part.

To me, I love the game, but Blizzard is an AVALANCHE.

My e-mail is [edited] I have an idea for a great game MMORPG but i need more input... looking for programmers and designers... i'm not a company, but looking to start one.
51 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Hi Lilbuddy,

I moved the thread to Multiplayer Mania since it's more related to this forum. If you want to start another thread about your MMOG idea in the Developers forum, that's fine. Also, I deleted your email address since posting it online is not a good idea unless you want to be nailed by spam spiders and the like that regularly traverse the net.

I'm only just started playing WoW, so I haven't felt the same pain as you (though not being able to play last night was annoying). Blizzard claims to have over 1.5 million subscribers, so they should be bringing in over $22.5 million a month on World of Warcraft. I think the problem they're having is that developers always seem to underestimate the demand for certain MMOGs - though you have to wonder why anyone would have thought WoW wouldn't have been huge given the franchise.

Certainly they could be doing better, but it could also be worse. I think they're making the effort to improve things as fast as they can, but it takes more time than you'd think to hire and train new people, get new servers going and optimized, etc.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I don't think you realize how difficult running an MMO is. Did you play SWG or AO at their startup? Those setups were unfathomably bad, it was just ridiculous how bad that launch was and they weren't even at full capacity. Blizzard underestimated how popular WoW would be, which I believe is their only downfail, they have doubled their amount of servers since launch and are allowing people to move their characters to lower populated servers. My server (Magtheridon) has seen almost no trouble until recently, annoying yes but they had given back a total of about five days to players.

As for how much they make in a month, thats not their profit, they have very high operating costs, but I still believe they make a good some of money. Remember that each server is not one unit or one computers, its a collection of many machines that have to run in tandum to work correctly, one thing goes wrong on any of them and that can be a big problem.
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