As you may

or may not know, one of my major hobbies is playing computer games. I’ve had a

designated game computer of some kind or another (often more than one) in my

home since 1981. Wow, I just realized that’s over 25 years.

Anyway, the

game I’ve been playing most often lately is World of Warcraft,

which is the one of the most popular MMORPGs right

now. That popularity probably means many of you are also playing WoW.

(Just

before I posted this entry, I noticed this

href=”http://www.techrepublic.com/5208-11185-0.html?forumID=85&threadID=192479&messageID=1985709″

target=”_blank”>discussion, which confirms my belief that I’m not alone in

my gaming experience. I wonder if we have enough to start a super-guild on one

of the new servers. We’d be so 1337)

I started

playing during the beta testing phase, so I’ve been running around in that

universe for quite a long time. In general, I still enjoy playing; I’m more of

a PVE guy, but I dabble in PVP from time to time.

The one

thing that irks me though is the continuing lack of stability the various

servers experience on an almost weekly basis. Maintaining the login servers,

the game servers, several databases, and whatever else is required to keep six

million players in the game happy and questing must be a real nightmare. I’m

willing to bet the administrators of those systems have some real pearls of wisdom

to share about how to handle that many simultaneous connections.

I’m going

to try to get an interview with a Blizzard representative to see if I can glean

some pertinent information that I can report to the TechRepublic membership.

Assuming I

can get them to talk to me, what do you think I should ask? I know a good

portion of TechRepublic is playing World of Warcraft

or some other MMORPG like EverQuest 2 or Star Wars

Galaxies. I mean there is a high geek quotient here. As an IT professional,

what would you like to know about how the game is served? How many servers? How

many CoLOs? What hardware? Give me some suggestions

in the comments to this blog and I’ll try to get some

answers.