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New servers are great! Oh wait… What? No! Noooooo!

Monday Jul 12,2010 01:27 PM
By Bootae
In Uncategorized

I had a post planned; a nice, happy and congratulatory post for Mythic after what had been a very smooth and successful transfer from GOA to the Mythic servers. And then this weekend happened…

It started with ever-increasing mailbox and auction house lag, with some people reporting having to wait minutes for their mail to load. And then with a resounding DOH the crashing started. When changing zones, be it from using a flightmaster or a scenario, the game started crashing. Sometimes crashing to server select, sometimes to character select and on occasion right back to desktop. And I’m not talking about the occasional crash, oh no sir, this was consistent and constant crashing. It got to the point where most of us just gave up, as WAR was simply unplayable.

It’s real shame, not because of a bit of lost game time, but because this is yet another opportunity to further WAR’s resurgence utterly squished. You see this coincides with Mythic reactivating every EU player’s account for 2 weeks free and by the looks of things this was taken advantage of in a huge way. Over the last few days I’ve seen entire guilds return to see how WAR is doing, seriously loads of old faces popping up everywhere. These are people that when they saw all the improvements to WAR would quite probably subscribe and enjoy the game, at least for a while and Mythic’s next patch could well have kept them here longer. We’d told them the lag was so much better, that the new servers were so much more stable and at first they really were, but then BOOM! Server meltdown, with crashing eventually became so constant and epic that WAR no longer functioned at all.

Gutted.

Prior to this I’d maintained a comfortable FPS in fights that were on a scale our old GOA servers could not have dreamed of running. I remember at one point looking at the map of Chaos Wastes and seeing the entire RvR lakes covered in fight symbols, WAR was indeed everywhere. It was brilliant, the new servers a joy.

Now I’m sure Mythic will get this sorted out. It’s just a crying shame that all those returning players return to WAR was met by such massive server problems. Perhaps all those returning players cramming onto our servers were the cause of the problem? I don’t know, I can only guess. I know a lot of those people quit because of a combination of the dominance of AoE and poor game performance, they come back and discover AoE is still dominant (albeit point blank) and it would appear to them, the game performance is actually worse.

Yet it isn’t. WAR is soooooo much better now; the game normally does run extremely well, in fact in the moments when the server stopped dicking about, I had some great fights this weekend. For me Sunday night ended on a real high with brilliant scrapping in Black Crag with 2 groups of KF and about the same from Tainted working together to fight an Order zerg, really tremendous fun and drama. And Mythic genuinely are finally starting to make and talk about the right kind of changes for WAR. It’s just such a crying shame that all the improvements and future potential has been utterly overshadowed by a weekend of epic server failure.