World of Warcraft Memoirs: Part II - Caring for Daggerspine, a.k.a Laggerspine

We finally got official realm forums in WoW by September 2005. They were supposed to have a function of integrating each realm community even further but that never actually happened since most players didn't care about forums and the core of forum participants (also known as trolls) didn't exactly take it seriously.
At this time I was pretty much at point of no return. I discovered the wonders of trading at the auction house, started leveling an alternate character and that way spent whole days inside the game. It was then, at the time of my highest activity, when increasing problems with our server became unbearable.

Daggerspine, our server, was quite a popular and desirable destination from the bare beginning (unlike many other servers): we had a healthy 50:50 ratio of the two enemy factions, English-speaking and well-mannered players, who were mostly from Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, England and Slovenia (with smaller Italian and Czech communities), and of course a set of quite successful guilds. All these factors contributed to constant influx of new players who came to this almost perfect server to have a more enjoyable game experience - but soon this enjoyment became hampered due to their very own arrival: the server, full of disconnects and lag from its birth, started crumbling under the weight of players and eventually turned into a cesspool of high latencies and server queues (all servers have a limit of maximum players-logged-in-at-a-time), hence getting its notorious nickname Laggerspine, also known in a more severe version as Laggerspike.
At first we blamed it on the lazy French, since the server itself was located in France. Eventually, the server became so slow that we even started blaming hamsters for not spinning the wheel fast enough. The next thing, which was in a way even worse, was customer support. Blizzard gave us an occasional pat on the back by offering a free day or two of game-play but when things got really bad, it was time to act... so I posted my own appeal for action on the official forums, as always full of enthusiasm and ideas, truly hoping that we will be able to change things together - and it wasn't that bad of a plan, really:

Initiative for official Laggerspine protest
[Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2005 1:11 AM]


Dear fellow Daggerspine players!

From the bare beginning of playing on Daggerspine realm more than six months ago we have been facing constant and occasionally severe server issues like server lag, frequent lagspikes, server downtime etc.
We looked upon those troubles with patience and indulgence, believing that problems will be solved sooner or later.
But instead of things getting fixed, the situation after six months is outrageous to say the least! Not only that our realm's problems haven't been fixed, they have gone from bad to worse!
And in the last days, no matter what the Blizzard EU team says, we find our server in worse condition each time we log in! Or should I say each time we get disconnected?
It is true that other servers have their problems sometimes as well, but it simply can't compare to the Laggerspine situation!


Since nobody can hear or take our complaints seriously, we must find another way of getting more attention and understanding from Blizzard EU team. Otherwise this lagging can continue forever.
The only way to get some deserved attention for solving our realm's current bad shape is to organize a peaceful protest.


Here is a simple proposal on how to it could be done:

1 . Posting an initiative message for the protest on both unofficial and official realm forum. [already done]

2. Getting approval and support from all Daggerspine players, both Horde and Alliance! The more players participate, the more likely our voice will be heard and taken into serious consideration!

3. Posting a detailed protest message in WoW EU forums - Technical, General and PvP sections, just to make sure it doesn't get overlooked. It should as well get a /bump from as many players as possible. (There is a possibility that players from other realms would join us for their own cause as well.)

4. Arranging the exact time and place of the protest. - Since it would be hard to arrange a peaceful protest of any kind on our own server, I would propose making (for example) gnome lvl1 character on some other server and protesting in Ironforge of that server (or trolls in Orgrimmar).

5. Executing the peaceful protest! And if we fail to get attention (which I doubt very much), we can easily repeat it!


So, I am asking you all to put aside your differences for a moment and work together to make our realm playable again! Even though I wish that problems would disappear over night and we wouldn't be forced to set the plan in motion, they probably won't. And this protest will become inevitable.

Important NOTE: World of Warcraft Terms of Use enEU 20041203, paragraph 2.D, contains the following text: "You may not institute an attack upon a World of Warcraft server or otherwise deliberately attempt to disrupt World of Warcraft servers. You may not institute any such attack which results in the disruption of any other player’s client. ANY ATTEMPT BY YOU OR ANY OTHER PLAYER ON AN ACCOUNT TRACEABLE TO YOU TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE WORLD OF WARCRAFT OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS AND, SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE OR ASSISTANCE FOR SUCH AN ATTACK BE PROVIDED, BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES FROM ANY SUCH USER TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW" The peaceful protest has no intention of harming or disrupting WoW in any way. It merely wishes to address the problems that are mentioned in text higher above.

And what actually happened afterwards? As it turned out, I was overly optimistic in my hopes of mobilizing the community. My ideas weren't too radical or too blunt yet still no direct action of any kind was taken, only a few people expressed their disgruntled opinions in general section of the forums.
It was at that point that I started sobering up, realizing how passive WoW's community really was ...and still is. They aren't aware of their rights as consumers or individuals, they don't really want to get informed about them and even if they were - they are quietly prepared to go along with anything a corporation called Blizzard comes up with, no matter how badly it treats them.

Why is it so, I keep asking myself? They probably aren't too young (most WoW players are 20-30 years old) or too addicted to the game to notice the problems and take some action... the most common answer I got was "don't wanna bother with it". As it appears, the thing they're spending 15€ a month for and investing additional time in just isn't worth bothering with. This is an all too familiar picture from real life as well, and while one of the reasons I escaped to the virtual world was exactly that passiveness, it followed me to the other side, haunting me in the virtual realm as well.

I think that the most valuable lesson I can extract from this is that the real battles should be fought in the world of Real, for it is there that the passive attitude originates from in the first place. virtual one is merely its reflection.
This realization was one of the main reasons why I decided to leave WoW and open a different, far more important front so that both real and virtual could be... saved.