Are you even aware of what you’re saying right now?
The reason why the HC terms are phrased the way they are is because of people like you, who have not the slightest idea of what they’re talking about.
Lag is the delay between when packets are supposed to arrive given the average network conditions, and when the packets actually do arrive. When your client has additional latency to Blizzard because of faulty/congested/malicious routing outside of Blizzard’s control.
A server outage is when the server is offline, either intentionally for maintenance or unintentionally in a crash. Hardware and Software are not perfect, there will be bugs and upsets, that’s unavoidable. Those are random and unpredictable (tho with good logging practices often fixable) events outside of Blizzard’s control.
And then there’s what happened on saturday on Stitches: A misconfigured load balancer / packet router swallowing every single incoming packet from client connections without forwarding them to the world servers. This is not a software bug that snuck its way through the CI/CD pipeline. This not a server crashing/being unavailable.
This is caused by underprovisioning the VM in question. Blizzard runs the world’s largest OpenStack deployment, they have fantastic engineers managing the back-end of the back-end. But this back-end has to be provisioned properly to be useful. In this case they under-estimated the popularity of Stitches when adding world server/layer nodes to improve player capacity (with the goal of eliminating queues). The world servers all held steadfast, no issue there. What buckled was the ingress point: The load balancer / packet router, which is responsible for making sure that opcodes which are sent by the WoW client arrive at the correct world server. Without seeing their logs I can’t tell you exactly by which method that load balancer fell over, I can only speculate that it ran out of RAM, or had too few CPU cores assigned, or maybe it hit a file descriptor limit; but what I can tell you is that those are 1 config line each in Terraform.
This is absolutely something that can and should be caught by a SRE at the latest. But it wasn’t, and now we have this mess.
To bring this comment back around:
You, as well as the majority of other WoW players probably don’t have a background in IT infrastructure. You see delayed inputs or some other sign of lag, and as a lay person you will put the blame on Blizzard servers, even when Blizzard is not at fault.
That is the reason why they disclaim any responsibility for lag or server outages: Because most normal people don’t have any idea what those terms really mean. If Blizzard went with the assumption that all of their customers were competent in IT diagnostics and because of that put an exception to the “no revives” rule into their HC terms, do you not think that any random Günther would claim Blizzard server outages when they died because their wife Agnes pulled the power plug for the router because she wanted to jam on her electric guitar and needed a power socket?
And if they have an explicit exception for such a case, they can’t just mass-close tickets from people requesting revives, because some of them could legitimately be from a server issue, which means now GM/CM & Engineer time has to be wasted to investigate the validity of the claim.
This policy makes 100% sense for individual claims of server issues (tho obviously showing how little devil-horns-bobby wants to invest in customer satisfaction, by continuously down-sizing the support teams), but it is absolutely correct for customers to question this policy when it really is a server issue, that has been corroborated by hundreds of players.
To put it simple, they spent total minimum to run servers .
I just had to spend around 2 hours to login into forums, cos authenticator did not work.
Did not receive SMS or code.
I would be fine if this would be indie company, but it’s arguably most expensive game on market.
Let’s be honest here. Private servers these days run more stable than official servers. We’ve all seen that. But can’t complain, all of us can imagine how hard it must be to be an indie company.
The good thing about this is that server queue went down from 2500 to 500 over this.
So I have to thank Blizz that they did a terrible job in server maintenance and game stability, so that enough people quit playing HC for the moment, so that I have more time enjoy dying (ergh playing I meant).
It is amazing that this “new server hype” lasts for so long. I really thought that queues would disappear after a few days, a week maximum.
A month into it, many deaths due to server lag, and a close-to-server crash ( which would have been better if it was just a 100% crash and all characters disconnected ), and we still have queues,
It just shows one thing : the game is amazing, the way it has been designed by people over 20 years ago is great and still gathers people. And I just wish instead of just relying on this and thinking “it’s ok people will still show up for classic WoW”, the company could realize that there is so much more they can bring to it, by showing real care for the customers who still show love and appreciation for the game.
Well died from server lag at level 58 and I’m about to go again, I can’t contain myself anymore.
That saying I have an example of the French mmo “Dofus” in wich there used to be an hardcore server.
When they were servers crashes they would resurrect people even know it was stated “blablabla if you die you die even from lag and crashs”.
And this company is infamous for the poor customer service it offers. So what does that make Blizzard ?
You are quoting me completely out of context. Vincenttbc said lag was different than server outages (which is correct) - I just added that Lags are covered by the non-resurrection rules, just as server outages are.
I have no clue why you post a wall of text to such a basic statement, and tbh I don’t really care. People accepted death is permanent for whatever reason - and died.
Only thing left is Blizzard need to fix those servers - both Era and HC.
It’s maybe pointless for you. We can argue retail is more pointless.
HC gives vibe how wow use to be, why it’s became popular.
Tbh in retail almost everything feels pointless for me.
yeah idk, I dont think there’s anything that can convince me this massively flawed gamemode is ever gonna be good. I’ve put almost a thousand hours into hardcores in other games and im ashamed it took me that long to realise what a crazy waste of time that was after 2 of my accounts died to server issues.
hardcore is made for single player games, not online games.
Played 20k+ hrs of PoE HC a online arpg never had 1 server issue ever. NEVER died to ANYTHING other than my own mistakes. HC online can work… blizz just cant.
