Warcraft Bible

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!

No Comments »

Leeeeeeeee-royyyyyyy !

The scourge of World of Warcraft players the world over.

Soon to be replaced by:

1) “minus 50 DKP”

or

2) “more DOTs!”

No Comments »

The new kid on the block in World of Warcraft game guides, Guide Bazaar, is adding new downloadable (PDF) guides regularly. The latest is a comprehensive guide to the Alchemy profession.

Acarro’s Alchemy Guide for Warcraft lays out a comprehensive collection of information that you will find useful in developing the alchemy skill. Whether you are just starting out in World of Warcraft, or you are a seasoned professional looking for a change of pace. It features more than 45 pages of exclusive Alchemy content, including information on the profession system within World of Warcraft, tips for generating gold a WoW alchemist, general crafting tactics and full list of Alchemy recipes available.

Guide Bazaar also offers a Tailoring profession game guide for World of Warcraft: Acarro’s Guide to Tailoring.

Each of these profession guides is priced at $12.99 U.S., and they are available for immediate purchase (PayPal) and download.

No Comments »