World of Warcraft Server Problems Getting Worse?

Long queues to get through the World of Warcraft log-on process. WoW servers that suddenly go offline for hours at a time for “urgent maintenance.” Increased latency, general slow performance, and characters dying due to lag spikes.

It seems like the frustrations of server performance in World of Warcraft are not going away. In fact, many players feel that things have gotten worse since the latest 1.10 patch in March.

It doesn’t help that World of Warcraft’s rampaging success, with 6 million subscribers and still climbing fast, seems to outpace Blizzard’s ability to build a technical infrastructure that can scale seemlessly to handle the load.

Personally, I think Blizzard is doing a fairly OK job of keeping things on track, given the rampant success of WoW. But there is obviously room for improvement. Many players are seriously frustrated. Does Blizzard’s network provider AT&T suck? Is Blizzard skimping on hardware? Does the World of Warcraft code scale poorly? Who knows, Blizzard isn’t talking.

But with Blizzard more or less single-handedly maintaining the profitability of media giant and parent company Vivendi, there should be more than enough cash around to throw at server and network problems. 6 million World of Warcraft subscriptions at $10+ per month each… just a tiny percentage of the subscriber fees buys a LOT of performance.

Come on Blizzard, invest in your core technology, make the players happy. You can afford it!