What’s wrong with Wow – Servers

Opinion from Matt - Tuesday, 04 January 2011 @ 9:11pm

The sheer scope of World Of Warcraft and its subscriber numbers means its hardware is going to have to be ferocious to handle it. When you consider that about 15 million people are playing this thing and take into account how many are logging off and looting Boars at peak times the performance demands are pretty impressive.

The stats alone are fascinating. Blizzard runs 10 data centres around the world, a number across the US, and ones in Germany, France, Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan and China. Their architecture includes 13,250 blade servers, comprising 75,000 total CPU cores. There is 112 terabytes of RAM. 1.3 petabytes of total storage. Apparently this cost amounts to a total of $136,986. Per day.

I can’t confirm this number, I just read it somewhere. It was on a jpeg, so it must be true.

Imagine if this power was being used to do genetic or medical modelling, and help the world in some useful way. But hey? Where’s the money in that?

The architecture is impressive, and there’s no denying that. But other aspects of the servers are less impressive.
I’ve worked in web servers for many years, and they have significant uptimes, weeks and months at a time. Occasionally they fall over or have to be restarted, giving them a minute or two downtime every few months.

By contrast, the World of Warcraft servers are turned off every week. For hours.

Why? What are they doing that has to be turned off for such a significant amount of time. I mean, World of Warcraft comes down once a week, and while it’s scheduled to be offline for the lowest time in the US (you know, the people Blizzard actually give a shit about) we lose an entire day of our peak play. So… we actually can’t play for a 7th of our most significant time. Ok, maybe a 10th, because it’s not ALL night, just the latter bit.

I’ve done a bit of research, and I have to admit it’s reasonable that they take the servers down for a period. The process of defragging the server drives, which have been hammered with small changes through the week, can’t be sped up. But really, that long? And every week?

Still, this actually not really what I wanted to talk about. In a new game by Blizzard with a similar nature (WoW2 or whatever) they’d probably have learned their lesson from the delays caused by maintenance, and implement a different system.

No, the issue I want to bring up is closer to home. Or… more particularly, further from home.
When World of Warcraft launched in Australia there were no dedicated servers for “Oceania”. I ended up rolling a character on Greymane, a server that wasn’t technically Oceanic, but was kind of unofficially a bit Oceanny. That meant that while it wasn’t opimitised for AU times you had a pretty good chance of finding people on at your times, getting raids going, etc.

It took some time for Oceanic servers to be implemented, despite the success of WoW in Australia. Australia has a whole bunch of people playing this game. Honestly I tried to get all journalisty here do some research, I really did, but I can’t for the life of me find a statistic for Australia that aside from whatever the hell proportion of “other” we make up. The point is that Australia has a fairly solid subscriber base.

But we have no servers.

France does. Germany. The UK. The US and China. Korea. But Australia doesn’t. Oh, sure, it has servers dedicated to us, but they’re not actually IN Australia, just configured to be close to our timezones. No, they’re in the USA.
These were never intended to be “true” oceanic servers. They’re just intended to give a server that’s timed to suit Australian schedules, and nothing more. The result of this is a significantly reduced latency for Australian players by comparison to our US brethren. The difference in performance is massive. “Latency” is the key issue, the time taken to get a response from a distant server. A decent speed in the US is from about 150 milliseconds. But the Australian experience starts at 450 as a minimum.

This doesn’t make the game unplayable, but the lag does make certain things difficult. For example, PvP between American and Australian players is a distinctly one sided affair, and some encounters, particularly the Heigan Safety Dance, are made significantly more difficult purely due to this slight half second delay.

There has been a lot of speculation about why this is. The commonly stated reason is that Blizzard approached Telstra regarding the setting up of Aussie servers, but the company wanted too much for them, and the prospect was ditched. Discussions with Internode may well have gone the same way.

But the thing is, this is not an all or nothing option. The problem isn’t that we don’t have servers in Australia. We actually kind of get it. What’s that? Telstra are a bunch of dicks who vastly overcharge for products that are significantly underperforming by world standards because a long established monopoly gives them a market penetration their poor service offering doesn’t deserve? Welcome to Australia.

No, the problem isn’t that we don’t have Aussie servers. The problem is that we have US servers. It’s not that it isn’t here, it’s that you couldn’t get a server further away from here without loading it onto a space ship and shooting it into the fucking sun. The US is literally on the other side of the world from us.

Blizzard has a data center in South Korea already. Putting our servers there would create a significant improvement in performance, as a significant amount of our network traffic already goes through major nodes in Korea.

How do we fix it?

Think of it this way: how many of you people playing World of Warcraft now will quit because of the Lag. None. Obviously it’s not that big an issue. It’s not costing them revenue, so why spend money to appease a bunch of whining dingo rooters? Like it or not, WoW is a business. A very successful business. And business don’t make money by being nice to their customers for no good reason just to make sure their experience with the product is thoroughly optimised.
And me? Just another whiner, who will pay their monthly subscription and feel like my complaints are legitimate.