08-04-2006, 07:07 PM
Quote:I worked in IT for 4 years. We had a subscriber base of 100k maybe 1/20 of the size of Blizzards NA subscriber base. Those customers paid a monthly fee much the same as Blizzard's except ours was $50 a month. We had performance standards contractually built in that made our network available during 5 AM PST to 7 PM PST. If we went down as much as 15 minutes our subscribers got refunds. 100% uptime was expected and pretty well maintained. We even had expensive back up power options if the power went out. We did lose customers to competitors if we had any downtime.
Yes Blizzard's terms of service negates them from having to provide a good service. But good luck to them on their next MMO if they continue to have stability and lag problems on their server. They are the present day SOE that everyone likes to hate.
/spit on Blizzard
Smaller systems like yours are only able to survive because of the ability to provide superior ETRs and LD (liquidated damages -- those refunds) to their users. However, bigger systems have more complexity ingrained. More complexity leads to even the smallest breaks you can ignore in a smaller setup .. well, you just can't ignore in these more complex environments.
I don't know about comparing them to SOE -- I didn't play SWG or anything besides Planetside for a free month.. But, Blizzard has added more realms, and offered the ability for you to move to one of these, with a premium just high enough that you won't do it on a whim. They are planning a huge hardware upgrade -- and they don't want to incur more downtime than they have to, so they have to make sure they are able to freeze everything and copy it quickly enough and get it up and running that they -don't- keep it down longer than too much. They have now even broken down and done an interim hardware upgrade which seems to have had favorable results.
I think for the explosion of audience that they've had, which they were completely caught offguard by from all accounts, they are handling it as well as they can.