Yep, I’m back. I had Friday off due to the holiday and Anne and I wasted a good chunk of it playing the World of Warcraft Open Beta together rather than doing anything constructive. Anne and I have different tastes in games so it’s not often that we find one we can play together so when it does happen we tend to make the most of it. We were up much later than usual all three nights of the weekend in part because that was when the server load was the lightest and we didn’t sleep in as much as we probably should have to make up for it so we’re both feeling it today. I’m definitely not the night owl I used to be, or at least not as much of a night owl as I used to be.
Saturday they were trying out different server configs to see how it would handle the load and that made trying to play a lesson in patience as the game would lag whenever you moved stuff in and out of your inventory and there were network problems for most of the evening hours that complicated their testing efforts, but by Sunday things had smoothed out. This is a pretty smart move on the part of Blizzard as it should help them to avoid the problems in the first several days that plagued the launch of other MMORPGs where servers crashed repeatedly under the massive loads suddenly thrown at them, but it still caused quite a bit of whining in the WoW forums. With 500,000 people participating in the open beta they have more than enough players to simulate heavy server loads simply by adding or removing available test servers. We’ve been in some major hours into game play so far, but I’ll save my impressions for after the game’s release in case they toss some new stuff in at the last minute. Still, it’s safe to say we’re having a blast with it so far.
When we weren’t playing WoW we weren’t generally on the PCs so that’s why I didn’t post much over the weekend. It was nice to not pay attention to the rest of the world for a few days and just have fun and be lazy. Though we did make it through all the loads of laundry we’d been meaning to get through so it’s not like we were complete sloths. Still, my free time is looking to be filled up even more as tomorrow brings the long-awaited release of Half-Life 2. I need to find a job where I get payed a ridiculous amount of money to play video games all the time.
Posted on 11/15/2004 at 07:46 PM 
Posted on 11/15/2004 at 09:29 PM 
“I need to find a job where I get payed a ridiculous amount of money to play video games all the time.”
If you find one, my son wants it too.