Ok, we all knew that there would be teething troubles with the release of World of Warcraft in Europe (don't go - this has a technical/design slant to it), but this is just ridiculous.

It seems while Blizzard are pretty damn good at writing computer games, they royally suck when it comes to producing enterprise grade e-commerce websites that can cope with massive load when processing new accounts, credit card details and sign up.

Their new account pages were down all night, until a message was posted on the forums claiming that the problem had been fixed and the pages were back up. Were they heck (and that's not the bit I'm mad at).

When I eventually got past the "Server not found" error pages and waded for 35 minutes through interminably slow loading pages, failing pages and other crap to enter all my details, I got presented with a screen that insulted me saying "Slow Poke! You took too long to enter your information and you session timed out. Now you'll have to go back to the beginning and do it all again".

Yeah - real smart. Insult the customers that have slogged through your dire attempt at an enterprise grade application with some pithy comment like that. When are games companies that try the massively multiplayer online thing going to realize that being able to manipulate a DirectX 3D surface DOES NOT mean that you are able to just whip out enterprise grade apps too. Next time, can the pithy comments and focus your time and energy on finding a web application expert to prevent the thousands of customers you are pissing off leaving in disgust!

11:43:42 PM    

When Enron went under in London, a rampaging hoarde of programmers, analysts, traders and  managers located and pillaged the marketing goodie store. It was a beautiful, uplifting end to an era.

Seems the World Of Warcraft European beta testers are experiencing something similar themselves today. The beta servers come down at 8pm tonight since today is the UK launch of the game, so to celebrate Blizzard have unleashed hoardes of rampaging level 100 monsters all over the world letting people experience sites, and presumably maniacal giggling and terror, the likes of which they may not have come across in their months of testing.

There's also a rumour that all players are about to be magically levelled up to level 60+ if they aren't already there so that they can reap mighty vengence on players and NPCs alike. What a great way to go out with a bang!

I have the game, and I'm signing onto the European PVP server tonight by the way as Froogle, the same game tag I use in XBox Live, Eve Online, and various other mighty time burns.

9:02:04 AM