For the first few weeks after World of Warcraft’s release, the game servers were bogged down, laggy, and very hard to have a proper game on. When they weren’t bogged down, they were probably offline, due to “emergency server maintenance.” Within hours of release, server queues began; in other words, too many people were on a server at one time, and so you had to “wait in line” for others to log off in order to get on. There was no way to predict whether or not you would be able to get some gaming in when you had free time, because at any time you might have to wait in line for hours, or the servers might simply be down altogether. And when you got on, the gaming experience was less than optimal. Over the next few weeks, Blizzard did their best to fix the server problems. Unfortunately, after numerous patches, scheduled and unscheduled downtimes, and repeated poor performance, not much changed. Posters flocked to the World of Warcraft forums and flooded the boards with complaints, and Blizzard gave very little response.
Two months have passed since the game’s release, and some progress has been made. For the majority of the time, there is no “server queue” to speak of, unless you attempt to play during the prime hours of 8pm-12am in your time zone. However, there is still lag and repeated unscheduled downtimes that frustrate even the most patient of gamer. There has been no word from Blizzard whether these problems will ever be solved. But now that some time has passed, a picture of real top-level play has been painted: only a few weeks ago, a party of 60 top-level players attempted to raid the opposite faction’s capital city in one of the largest and most organized raids to date. Unfortunately, as soon as the party reached the capital city, the servers lagged intensely no matter where in the world you were. Actions and magic spells lagged for minutes, and it became impossible to control. Eventually the server went down altogether, and the raid was aborted.
World of Warcraft is not the most complicated, most complex, or best-looking MMORPG out there. But it undoubtedly is one of, if not the, most fun, and definitely the most widely-appealing MMORPG in history. Sales numbers show this. Unfortunately, the game’s overall performance is hindered by a pointless and pestering PvP system, and repeated server problems. Perhaps the new Battlegrounds maps that Blizzard is promising for later in 2005, which are large-scale maps based solely on PvP play, will give some added meaning to the player versus player servers. But if you simply cannot play during the times that you have free time, because the servers may or may not be up, is unacceptable. Maybe with a little more time, this will change. But for now, server downtime and lag issues are the major problems with this game.
World of Warcraft would have received a 4.5 rating based off of the pure gameplay aspect. However, since the gameplay is greatly hindered by horrible server performance, I give World of Warcraft a 3.5 rating.
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