World of Warcraft. We can't stop talking about it. We even invent hilarious fictitious personas so we could continue to devote brainspace to this crazy, fun, and addicting world that Blizzard has created. We love to play it, we constantly think about it, and collectively, some of our best game-related memories of recent times directly involve our WoW sessions. As such, we hate like hell the fact that many of its servers are so damn broken now. Personally, both of the servers that I play on are completely jacked-up; last time I tried to log onto the game's Blackrock server (West Coast, PvP), I was about the 600th person in queue, with my estimate wait time clocking in at over three hours. Frostwolf (West Coast, PvP) was a little better, with a one and a half hour wait. You know what I did? I chose to "log on" to my GameCube and play Resident Evil 4.

I'm far from alone, and I'm aware of this. 20 of World of Warcraft's 88 servers are suffering from similar issues, and the players aren't taking it sitting down. The game's official message boards are full of virulent posts by angry players. See for yourself. The webcomic Penny-Arcade rescinded their Game of the Year award to the product. Apologists abound on the forums as well, of course, but beneath the veneer or dutiful patience you'd expect from them, you could note a tinge of displeasure.

World of Warcraft, to some degree, has been experiencing some pretty serious server issues since its inception. But problems that used to manifest only on the most popular PvP servers are rearing their ugly heads on the PvE servers as well, evidenced by the recent weekend of instability. Even the most patient, understanding players' nerves are starting to wear thin.

After some initial silence, Blizzard has been open regarding the issue. According to them, recent issues are a technical problem, born of migrating WoW's "problem servers" to new database hardware. After an initial period of smooth, satisfactory performance, it all apparently went haywire. The outages that occurred on the weekend of the 14th were a result of this, and the reduced server capacities that caused the massive queues were, rather than a symptom, a stop-gap fix on Blizzard's part. All the serious lag issues occur when the server populations reach high numbers, so rather than take them offline altogether, Blizzard chose to limit the number of y'all that can play. It's a temporary measure that's proving as unpopular as the problems it's trying to work around. My advice: if you're on one of the jacked servers, log on early, and try your best to not get booted, especially on peak hours.

Blizzard's Response

To Blizzard's credit, they're making up for the downtime with free game time for subscribers and trial-subscribers: 48 hours worth. This small concession on Blizzard's part is a big deal, I think. It's acknowledging that this shouldn't be the modus operandi for MMO developers, and extending an olive branch to its users to express this. Now, if they could only steal away EverQuest II's networking team… Just kidding.

Even in offpeak hours, the queues can get hectic on some servers.

We fired a few questions off to Blizzard regarding any future downtime, but as of press time they weren't able to get back to us, other than to re-iterate what's posted on the World of Warcraft homepage: "We hope you'll bear with us as we continue to work hard on implementing changes for long-term stability."

In the meantime, Blizzard and Vivendi are holding back publishing more copies of the game until the server situation stabilizes. That's good news for those of us who already own the game, but a real body blow for people who are looking to buy it. Will it cost them money in the long run? That all depends on how long these issues last.