In the weeks after its late-November launch, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft quickly became one of the biggest successes in the history of massively multiplayer online games. It quickly surpassed 600,000 sales, and more than 200,000 concurrent users, numbers most MMO publishers would salivate over.
But no one knew how quickly World of Warcraft would take off, and the downside to such instant success was that the game's servers rapidly got overwhelmed, leading to server shutdowns and delays.
"The success we've been experiencing since launch has been more than even we expected or hoped for," said Blizzard community manager Paul Della Bitta. "Unfortunately, that uncovered a few hardware issues with our infrastructure."
The game's server problems got so bad that Penny Arcade, an online gaming site, pulled its designation of World of Warcraft as game of the year until the problems go away.
Like most MMOs, World of Warcraft is intended to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for certain planned maintenance. Players pay up to $15 a month for full-time access to the game, and as such, expect to be able to play whenever they want. That's why, in spite of the fact that so many people love the game, there has been a vocal outcry from those who have experienced the server problems.
As such, Wired News looked at other so-called "always-on" services -- DSL and other broadband internet, wireless telephone and other MMOs -- to see what customers are told about network uptime expectations and performance.
According to Jeff Shafer, a spokesman for Sprint PCS, the company's consumer customers -- that is, non-business customers -- are given no specific promises about the reliability of their wireless phone service. That's because, Sprint PCS maintains, there's no way to predict bad weather or other factors that may bring down their networks. And, spokeswoman Mary Nell Westbrook said, no wireless company guarantees its consumer customers that the network will never go down.
But Shafer said that Sprint PCS business customers do get such guarantees. He said the company recently announced service level agreements, or SLAs, promising business customers 99 percent wireless voice network availability, as well as less than 2 percent voice calls blocked, and less than 2 percent of calls dropped.
"There are certainly things in place that we do to try to make sure the consumer experience is an outstanding one," said Shafer, "but there's not really any equivalent to an SLA in the consumer contract."
Still, he said, the company understands that many people now expect --unrealistically, it seems -- that their wireless service will perform as reliably as their landline phone.
Meanwhile, many DSL subscribers are used to dealing with the occasional network outage, but to hear Earthlink spokesman David Blumenthal tell it, they shouldn't expect any kind of compensation when it happens.
"DSL is not something that has an SLA," at least not for consumers, said Blumenthal, who added that Earthlink business DSL customers do get a SLA guaranteeing uptime.
At Sprint, which offers data services, including high-speed internet -- in some parts of the country, all such subscribers, consumer or business, get an SLA that guarantees an average of no more than 45 milliseconds of latency, all across the network.
And if the service falls below that level?
"We pay out 100 percent of our customer's monthly recurring cost," said Scott Lacoff, group manager for Sprint's IP enterprise services.
In the MMO world, each company treats network uptime expectations differently.
For its part, Blizzard maintains that its World of Warcraft server problems were strictly a result of overcapacity.
"We sort of got enough of a load where we considered it successful," said Blizzard's public relations manager, Gil Shif. "But instead of it happening in a year's time, we got it in six weeks."
The company said it is working hard both to manage the number of new players entering the game and getting its equipment ready to handle the load.
It is trying to assuage players' anger by keeping them informed on the company's website and on the game's community forums, and by offering up to 48 hours of free play.
And some players think Blizzard should be given the benefit of the doubt, given the company's past performance.
"Given Blizzard's exemplary history of uncompromising quality, I am giving them a lot of trust," said Ron Meiners, a World of Warcraft fan and virtual worlds expert. "They're an industry watchword for concern for high quality."
Peter Jarvis, the IT director at NCSoft, another publisher of successful MMOs like Lineage and City of Heroes, said, "My goal, of course, is to have everything up all the time. (But) we know that's unrealistic."
Jarvis said that with MMOs, however, the issue isn't necessarily network uptime, but gameplay experience.
Thus, said NCSoft spokesman Mike Crouch, "They want to be able to play the game all the time, and we try to keep them informed about when there's going to be network outages."
Recently, Sony Online's Everquest II, which in just weeks since its launch had reached more than 300,000 subscribers, had to shut down its servers for nearly 24 hours because of a bug that cropped up during a patch.
But the company didn't leave its customers hanging, said director of public relations Chris Kramer.
"They got about an hour's worth of warning," Kramer said. "We try and be pretty good about letting our players know when we're going to bring our servers down."
In any case, Meiners said that players who gave Blizzard a hard time because of World of Warcraft's server problems were probably conditioned to be angry.
"The gaming community is quite demanding," Meiners said. "Their experience is shaped by how many companies don't have such a high regard (as Blizzard) for the quality of their games.... I do think Blizzard should be given more slack. Nobody shuts their hugely popular game down on a Sunday on a whim."
