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.