What is wrong with our server?

The tragic situation of our server, Jubei’thos, doesn’t seem to be coming to an end. Not that it is limited to just one server but seems to be an issue for Oceanic servers in general. It probably all began back when everything slowed down to a snails pace while honour rolled over, then we had the constant disconnections and lag spikes with patch 2.4 that went on for weeks. Now it seems to be happening again, with large lag spikes and the server crashing.

Last night we had two wipes in Karazhan because of this and not long ago the same thing happened in Gruul’s Lair. But that wasn’t the worst of it, last night we experienced something completely different, which led us to calling an early end to our raid.


At first we just though it was another lag spike but it when on and on, I sat and watched Gothicminx casting Flash of Light and Stragoth running in place for well over fifteen minutes. We could type in chat but couldn’t control our characters, log out or even raise a ticket to a GM. A couple of players forced the program to close (Alt F4) but then couldn’t get back on their character in the raid even though they could log onto other characters. The GM ticket issue was by far the weirdest, I would write a sentence and then it would disappear and I would have a blank page again. I eventually managed to raise one by typing it in note pad and copy pasting it into Wow. An early end was called to the raid and I went to have dinner, when I got back I was disconnected and have yet to be back on to see what happened.

This is just the tip of the ice berg, there are a large number of posts on the official forums including Stragoth’s petition and as people experience the pre expansion slump this is really not helping.

I’m not an expert in the area but there is one very obvious thing which might be part of the problem. If you look down the list of US servers they all show up as mostly medium populations, when you look down the oceanic list it’s all red with High, Full and Locked. In fact we only have one which isn’t. Perhaps over population is part of the problem.

I am sure Blizzard are well aware of the consequences of lag, crashes and technical glitches. They would see the anger and annoyance on the forums that people have died or can’t progress in raids because of raids. Hopefully they understand that they have created a huge immersive world that people get very involved in and when this virtual word doesn’t work like it should the consequences can go past a few gold and some lost progression time.

Finally I wonder what Wrath of the Litch King will really give us? A great expansion with heaps of new content or just worse lag in a different location.