#22 - Feb. 12, 2008, 4:20 a.m.
Over the last few weeks there have been some issues that have cropped up on several realms, some isolated to BG's and instances and some for entire realms.
Honestly there is a great deal of information that the Game Master Department is not privy too, we are not part of the Realm Technician Team, in association with the Database Administrators or deal with technical issues. Our Technicians spend time trying to resolve the issues, not explain to people (us) who don't have technical backgrounds.
When a realm or part of a realm experiences issues or goes offline unexpectedly the situation is looked into. In some cases the resolution is as simple as restarting the realm, just like your home computer a restart can do wonders to clear up an issue. Other times the issue is more complicated.
This could be a hardware issue, software issue or a combination of the two, the issue may not be with our equipment but something off site. Realm A going offline may have nothing to do with Realm G going down; as with most things in life these things tend to come in clumps.
As much as we would love it, these issues do not come with a print out that tells us exactly what may be causing them, nor what needs to be done to fix it. It must go through a troubleshooting process, also some issues that occur don't show up at all until they happen, which makes it difficult to find and resolve, sort of like trying to find a leak in a hose when there is no water running through it at the time.
Q u o t e:
I was wondering if is any information on how we should expect the situation to be completely resolved, if ever? Being a college student, I usually have to set time aside to play WoW, and every time I have, I've experienced some kind of issue the past week.
We understand that players sometimes have a limited amount of time to play, honestly it doesn't matter if you have only an hour or if you have 16 to play, our goal has been and continues to be to make our realms, all of our realms, the most stable that can be. To do this we have adjusted software, upgraded hardware and made tweaks to how the system works so we can get the most out of it at any given time.
We will likely not be able to provide a "all issues have been completely resolved and nothing like this will ever happen again" message, but I can promise that we will strive for this scenario.
Q u o t e:
Would the many users be compensated in any way for the time we've lost, if this issue continues as it seems to be a quite big problem?
Although we regret realm instability and we do our best to prevent it, these things happen. We do not normally provide compensation for players unable to connect to a specific realm. If the decision is made to provide a credit for an extended period of unscheduled downtime it will be announced in our General Forums or simply credited to those affected accounts.
Personally I'd like to thank you for the tone of your post, Artemes, it was well thought out and rational. :)
I hope the explanation I was able to provide helped in some way.
