For those that haven't seen this:
The building housing the beta-servers for World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/) was hit by a Tornado on Friday night.
"Enough electrical power is now available at the datacenter for us to analyze the extent of any damage that might have occurred as a result of the direct tornado hit Friday night, but the hardware is not yet dry enough to be powered up"
and you thought it was bad when you got a BSOD on a machine... :-)
I've put a few thoughts together about it over at my blog, I suspect most Aussie developers would be in a world of pain if something like that happened to them!
That's one way to cool your machines, I guess :-)
Anything that delays the World of Warcraft release should be seen as a wonderful thing for hobby game developers - I got into the beta stress test for WoW, and I am now _really_ scared of what this game is going to do to my life :->
My thoughts after playing WoW for 10 days or so, Blizzard have done a really good job on WoW, atmosphere of the game is stunning, and gameplay was heaps of fun (it fulfils each of the 8 categories of fun in Marc Leblanc's scheme admirably). It is still in beta, but even so I would describe it as one of the best games I've yet played. Network code was great, very nicely done - network latency was only noticable very occasionally. One thing I was very impressed with was that if the client drops out or crashes, when you rejoin the game server you're still in the same party you were in when you crashed :)
One of the cute touches I liked is that when your character is drunk, the level estimate that your character makes of monsters is a lot lower than monster's real level :)
Anyway, if you like any of blizzard's previous offerings or you play fantasy MMORPGs, my best advice is: don't start to play this game - just run as fast as you can from it!
Cheers,
Mark/CW
Yep, that's the main reason I don't play any MMORPG's.. I'd never get any work done!
I just read your blog entry, Zaph, but I'm curious - what is at the data centre there exactly? I had the impression that it was only the servers hosting the games and storing players data/records etc, rather being where all the artist's working files, code source etc is stored?
There are two pictures of the datacentre after the hurricane hit it at http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/ (some Star Wars Galaxies servers are hosted there as well). I guess a safeguard step is to build them underground. [;)]
quote:I guess a safeguard step is to build them underground. ;)
That?s a good idea. Then if tornado?s or nuclear weapons hit, we can still play our online games, even if the rest of the world is in nuclear holocaust! I mean, if people need to live underground in a nuclear winter, they are going to need some online games ? it?s essential for survival! [:D]
naaaasty, i wonder if they had much of a backup plan for their servers been taken by a tornado :O
the one thing anti virus cant help you with -_-