February 2005
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Mike Rozak
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Sporky McBeard
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Mike Rozak
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Hulbert, Leland
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Mike Rozak
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Jim Purbrick
- DESIGN: Player pyramid Mike Rozak
- On grouping, thoughts Jeff Freeman
- On grouping, thoughts Douglas Goodall
- On grouping, thoughts John Buehler
- On grouping, thoughts Freeman, Jeff
- On grouping, thoughts John Buehler
- On grouping, thoughts Douglas Goodall
- On grouping, thoughts Jason Downs
- On grouping, thoughts Mike Oxford
- On grouping, thoughts Mike "Szii" Oxford
- On grouping, thoughts Peter Harkins
- On grouping, thoughts Freeman, Jeff
- On grouping, thoughts cruise
- On grouping, thoughts John Buehler
- On grouping, thoughts Alex Arnon
- Musings on ad-hoc social connectivity as a realtime meta-game J C Lawrence
- More ad-hoc grouping thoughts John Buehler
- [Design] Randomness without Replacement David Kennerly
- More randomness in games Alex Chacha
- More randomness in games David Kennerly
- Focus vs. Scope Mike Rozak
- Bartle receives IGDA "Frist Penguin" Award Koster, Raph
- Bartle receives IGDA "Frist Penguin" Award Richard A. Bartle
- DGN: Mudflation as antibody of a "stain development" HRose
- DGN: Mudflation as antibody of a "stain development" cruise
- DGN: Mudflation as antibody of a "stain development" Bad Mojo
HRose wrote:
> In the case of World of Warcraft I preached since August that
> their choice to divide the servers by timezones would make the
> overcrowding problems more serious. This problem isn't trivial as
> it seems, there are a large number of implications. What was the
> result? The result was that what I predicted was ignored till
> Blizzard got swamped in the problem and had to start to suggest
> the players to log in servers that do not correspond to their
> timezone and relative peak times, disrupting directly their plan
> and even a few important design implications, like the 24h clock,
> GM support and scheduled downtimes.
This problem of overcrowding was not caused by the timezone servers,
but by a breakdown in their server recommendation system. When new
players were logging in for the first time and picking a server to
log into, a load balancer system was in place to direct people to
the lowest population server first. This broke and was stuck on a
limited number of servers for several hours during the first day of
logins. This aspect of the game, which was never beta tested (and I
believe a last minute addition as the game was flying out the door),
was what caused so much of the overcrowding problems during WoW's
first few weeks.
I could barely bring myself to read the rest of your rant, my
apologies. Sometimes this mailing list is no better than the forums
for any particular MMORPG.
--
Bad Mojo
MojoZilla <http://www.rps.net/mojo>
--
"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure
reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing
can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"
--- Bill Watterson's Calvin from "Calvin & Hobbes" - DGN: Mudflation as antibody of a "stain development" Mike Rozak
- DGN: Mudflation as antibody of a "stain development" Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Hulbert, Leland
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) olag@ifi.uio.no
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Hulbert, Leland
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Adam Spivey
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Paul McInnes
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Exar Kun
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Tasci
- Attractive Grouping (Was: Focus vs. Scope) Kiztent Hatepriest
- [bus] Anarchy Online to serve in-game ads ceo
- Middleware pricing Dana V. Baldwin
- Middleware pricing Alistair Milne