Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Instances Are Fun


A growing number of players are complaining (I'll pause for a moment so you can get over the shock of that statement) that they can't get an Instance started up. Since most of these people are 80 and working through Heroics, I don't feel sorry for them. I'm an elitist that way.

Anyhow, Blue Poster Vaneras posted this over on the EU forums -

We are aware of your feedback concerning the limit on the number of instances. This limit was set up some time ago in order to preserve the gameplay experience of players who are already inside instances. Allowing too many instances to be opened at once would eventually have a negative impact on performance, which was definitely noticed and reported right here in the EU forums. This limit is still in place today for the same reasons. However, we are working on a more permanent solution for instance performance. This can take a lot of time to plan, implement and test -- so it is not something we can resolve quickly, other than using the limit currently in place. But we do wish to assure you that we are very much aware of your feedback and we continue to monitor the situation. We will inform you about the longer term solution as soon as we have more details to share.
I've never understood Blizzard's approach to situations like this. They touted Wintergrasp as the "Ultimate Epic PVP Experience", allowing for huge armies to battle each other. They then take steps to nerf the piss out of it because too many people were using it, thereby bogging down the servers. Now too many people are starting instances, bogging down the servers. Did someone not stop to do the math? Or were they too busy rolling around in their giant mountains of subscription money to realise that they might have to slap some more system tech onto their network to handle the growing load on it?

All I'm saying is that if Blizzard doesn't poke someone down their corporate food chain with a sharp stick to get them to pay attention, the only load they'll have left is the one growing in the player base's collective pants as they cancel subscriptions in pouting protest.

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