Burning Crusade Launch – Sink or Swim?

By George Walker | October 2, 2006

WoW Insider asks the question: “When we finally do get to play the expansion, will we be able to play it at all?”

When a company like Blizzard can’t even keep their web server running with any degree of reliability under load, I’ll be completely astonished if WoW is playable in any sort of reliable way at the Burning Crusade launch. At this point, Blizzard just does not have the track record of being reliable.

In fact, everyone has gotten so used to the service sucking that there was not even a batted eyelash at my server (among many others) being down for SEVERAL DAYS. It used to be that they’d give you a couple free days of service for garbage like that. Not anymore. Not it’s just business as usual.

So yeah, the Burning Crusade launch will be a complete disaster simply because Blizzard’s server admins seem downright incompetent. As an employee of a successful Data Center/Colocation/Web Hosting company, I can say with complete confidence that if our network were intermittently down for days at a time whenever we upgraded hardware, we would lose ALL of our customers. If the web sites that I worked on were down as much, and as often as Blizzard’s website? Fired.

And I don’t want to hear a bunch of Blizzard apologists. There are many websites that get MUCH more traffic than Blizzard and can still somehow manage to keep things stable. Penny Arcade. Slashdot. Ars Technica. Drudge Report. Google. There are many companys and sites that manage their traffic just fine, thank you. Blizzard should probably take some of the money that they’re swimming in, and buy a couple competent people so that I can play my freaking game when the detonation…er, I mean, expansion pack gets released.

More – via | WoW Insider |