Day: November 9, 2005

WoW Rocks, But Blizzard Sucks

It was just a typical Monday — I had nothing to do and, of course, World of Warcraft’s authentication/login server was hosed so Lisa and I couldn’t play until well after midnight (its a sign of just how sick our addiction is that we were still awake trying to logon that late.)

The bottom line is that while WoW is incredible, Blizzard sucks.

And it doesn’t just suck because of the downtime. Rather, it is how it handles the downtime — or fails to handle it, to be more accurate.

When I switched this website over to Conversant several years ago, initially there was a lot of downtime. The problem turned out to be some faulty components in the server — they were replaced and life went on as before.

As frustrating as the downtime was, it was ameliorated to a large extent by Macrobyte’s customer support which always let me know they took the problem very seriously and were working as hard as they could to isolate the problem. From my experience, both as a customer and providing technical support to others, if you are earnest, honest and forthright, people will generally give you the benefit of the doubt and give you room to do your job.

What I absolutely hate is to be blown off as a customer. In contrast to Macrobyte, take McDonald’s. Recently I was at a McDonald’s with a breakfast order and I needed to return to work ASAP. My food is actually all prepared — the Egg McMuffin comes down the chute, the hash browns are made. But 10 minutes later I still don’t have my food. The person behind the counter who should be throwing my food in a bag has spent the last 10 minutes going in the back, grabbing some creamers, and is refilling the creamer holder one creamer at a time. The managers are huddled off in a side office joking about something, and the cashier is oblivious. Which is when I walked out without my food — there are plenty of other places to obtain breakfast.

Unfortunately, Blizzard is more like McDonald’s than Macrobyte. Blizzard has had repeated problems with their login/authentication servers. I don’t know what’s involved in that sort of technology and I don’t want to know. When you’re raking in tens of millions of dollars for an online game as Blizzard is, you should damn well make sure your customers can log in. More importantly, you should have a game plan for what you’re going to do when they can’t and provide some sort of explanation.

Instead, first Blizzard pretty much refuses to communicate about the problem and the communication they do offer is PR bullshit. So a screen will come up saying, “We are aware some people are having difficulties logging in.” Some people? Based on forum comments and my completely unscientific survey of WoW players from around the country, it was pretty much everyone.

The same message urged people not to abort the login attempt when it appeared to hang but instead urged them to hang in there “for a few more moments.” Unfortunately what this meant was you might wait half an hour before getting the disconnect message.

The support in the forums was even worse. As I said this is an ongoing problem, and has been a huge problem for several weeks on Monday nights. Blizzard takes the servers down for maintenance every Tuesday and at that time they updated PVP stats which determine relative ranks between players. As a result, one theory is that a lot of people try to log in Monday night to get a few more PVP kills before the next day’s calculations. This apparently overwhelms the login/authentication server (either that or its one hell of a coincidence that the game is unavailable practically ever Monday evening).

But despite this, the technical support people in Blizzard’s forums resort to blaming the user. I read a number of threads, for example, for the first people who had trouble logging in. So they’d report that the would see a connecting/authenticating/handshaking screen which would take a long time and then disconnect — exactly what players have experienced that past few weeks.

The responses I read from Blizzard support were basically to the effect that it couldn’t be a server issue so it must be a problem with that person’s computer. In one thread the Blizzard support technician had the player uninstall her user interface mods, uninstall her video driver and queried her about what version of driver she was using for her network card. But the problem had nothing to do with any of that — it was entirely a problem with Blizzard’s servers.

At the moment, Blizzard probably doesn’t care and it really doesn’t have to. WoW is so much better (IMO) than similar games that it is just not going to lose many people with its callous indifference. If something comes along that is even close, however, that indifference might cost them a lot of customers. They may be saving money now by not investing much in customer support, but it could still cost them in the long run. If that was my business, I wouldn’t want to take that risk, but Blizzard apparently does not have such qualms.

Congressional Oil Hearings

Watching and reading excerpts of the hearings today on high oil prices, it amazes me that hundreds of years after the publication of the works of Adam Smith and other classical economists that the workings of markets remain such a mystery to so many people. This is especially egregious a sin among lawmakers who stop at nothing in the relentless pursuit of demagoguery.

It is especially bizarre to watch Democrats propose solutions that are diametrically opposed to their stated goals and not even realize that such a conflict exists.

For example, Democrats typically tale the lead in harping about the horrors of the United States purchasing a large percentage of its oil from foreign companies and markets. But what do they propose to do when domestic oil companies, after decades of weak performance, actually achieve high profits? A windfall profit tax. Yeah, that’s certainly the best way to promote domestic rather than foreign production.

Jimmy Carter signed such an measure in 1980, and the result was the U.S. government took in an additional $80 billion over the seven years the measure remained law, and domestic oil production fell by up to 1.6 billion barrels.

It is also a bit odd to see Democrats outraged over the price of oil and gasoline given their constant whining about global warming and other environmental concerns. How can anyone take these people seriously about the need to implement something along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol when they act like $3/gallon gasoline is the end of the world? As the U.S. Department of Energy noted in a 1998 study of the likely impacts of Kyoto,

The carbon price required to reduce U.S. energy-related carbon emissions ranges from $67 to $348 per metric ton in 2010 (1996 dollars) (Figure 2). In the more stringent reduction cases, the carbon price will decline by 2020 as more efficient and lower-carbon technologies become economically available and penetrate later in the forecast horizon. Due to the carbon price, the average price of gasoline could be between $0.14 and $0.66 per gallon higher in 2010 than it would be otherwise, and electricity prices could increase by 20 to 86 percent.

So even if you assume very optimistic increases in energy efficiency, Kyoto would cause huge permanent (since they are not, like the current increases, the result of temporary market fluctuations) increases in energy prices. Democrats who believe implementing Kyoto should be a major priority should openly welcome high gasoline and energy prices, as they are a de facto way of slowing U.S. carbon emissions. But when the rubber hits the road, Democrats are horrified at the thought of even temporary hikes in energy prices.

Personally, I’m hoping for a return to 1998 when oil was $10/barrel, gas hit an all-time record low price in real terms, and oil stocks made the dot.com implosion look like a bull market. But I’m not sure why those ostensibly worried about global warming wouldn’t want even higher energy prices (this guy’s got the right idea if you’re serious about reducing carbon emissions).

Finally, I always wonder why there aren’t these silly Congressional investigations during periods like the late 1990s when oil and gas prices were at record lows. Grab a few drivers and subpoena them to testify. Then grill them about receiving windfall savings and taking advantage of the international glut of oil. Perhaps even propose stupid federal gas taxes that would punish consumers for daring to trade freely in gasoline and for conspiring with other consumers to find the lowest possible prices.

Lego Obtains Batman License — What Are They Thinking?

It was just five years ago that LEGO was in serious financial troubles. One of the major problems then was licensed products — LEGO sells a lot of licensed products such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, Spider-Man, but it also shells out a ton of money to those licensees. Add to that the general trend in juniorization of its products and its focus on more traditional toy markets over the plastic brick business and LEGO looked a lot like a company that had lost focus.

Five years later, and apparently not much has changed. At the end of October it won the Batman and Sponge Bob Square Pants licenses. Hmmm…maybe they’ve overcome their financial problems and found a way to return to profitability where these licenses make sense.

Not exactly. In January 2004, Lego announced its worst one-year loss in its 72-year history. The cause of the huge loss? Licensed products,

Lego, the Danish children’s toy manufacturer, looks set to announce its third-ever loss this year after its chief operating officer said Star Wars and Harry Potter products had a disappointing 12 months.

LEGO’s line, repeated in The Daily Telegraph, is that kids simply grow up quicker and stop playing with plastic bricks. Certainly this is a real issue, but Lego has done almost nothing to address it.

First, its emphasis on licensed products makes Legos appear to kids and adults as simplified model building kits. Buy the Lego kit to build the Millenium Falcon or whatever the model is and that’s that.

Second, the licensing costs mean that Legos are ridiculously overpriced. A few months ago I bought a Batman playset on clearance at Toys-R-Us for $18. It originally retailed for $49. A Lego playset half that size will like cost close to $100. Every time I go into the local toy store, there are dozens of the Spider-Man kits on clearance and are overpriced even with steep discounts.

Third, Lego waited far to long to embrace the online Lego building community until recently. For years there were third party Lego building software, but Lego only finally got around to releasing its own version this year. And, casual users might be shocked at just how expensive it can be to purchase some of those custom models due to the way that Lego manages its inventory (there are ways around this, but its something that users shouldn’t have to worry about, period).