You can either live in a big city with lots of people and congestion (lag), or a small rural town with fewer people but a more easy going attitude (no lag!)

John makes some very good points as to how a few very simple changes would affect the load balancing and make the game much smoother running.

Blizzard makes a lot of money and since it is a “business” they won’t change until they lose money. I’m doing my part to send a message so now they are down my $180/year. I’ll gladly come back if I can actually play but until then they won’t just “get” my money.

I have been playing for about a year now. In the early days of my gaming in WoW I never had lag issues, or wait times to log in.

Now, I occassionally have a wait to log in, have been disconnected a few times due to server crashes, and do suffer lag out in the world on occassion (though this only seems to happen when I am participating in a large raid).

It does appear that there is a huge revenue stream flowing into Blizzard, but remember, there are huge costs as well. The servers, connections to the web, staff, etc all cost money. I imagine with 6 million users, Blizzard has a pretty sizable profit margin, but I would be surprised it it was higher then 30%.

The issue I have with blizzard and the handling of things is that they do not seem to take the technical issues into account when the come up with new content.

Take the war effort for example. Regardless of what server you are on, where are you the most likely to suffer lag issues? Capital cities. So where does Blizzard decide to put all the collectors for the war effort?

There was no reason for his. Actually, it might have been more interesting if they scattered those collectors across the world. If nothing else, it would have avoiding massively increasing the lag issues in Capital cities.

Also, the largest reason for the lag in capital cities is the auction houses. More players are in the cities because they are buying and selling on the auction house, then for any other reason. It seems to me, that if they would expand auction house access to locations other then the cities, they would spread these people out and reduce this localized lag problem significantly.

This IMHO would also add flavor to he game. People would find small towns that they liked for one reason or another and would use these towns as their “home” because they would not need to be in the capital for auction house access.

There are things blizzard can do to address the current issues on the servers. But the biggest thing they can do is start planning new content with an eye on avoiding adding to the various high load areas.