I had a little debate recently with a friend over the amount of server downtime that World of Warcraft has had since the official release, plus the stability (or lack thereof) of the client software. Now I'm a perfectly understanding customer in regards to this sort of thing in new MMORPGs. I've played my share and I have had a professional interest in the technical difficulties involved in massive network games, ever since I played my first**, quite a few years back. It's just not an easy thing to do, to run servers that can support so many players in real-time.

To give you an idea of the downtime-- Blizzard refunds a day of gametime when a server has been down for a significant time period. I just looked at my WoW account and there are a whopping 8 days of refunded time on my account. That's 8 service interuptions of significant length (3-4 hours or more, in some cases 12+ hours) over the course of exactly 2 months. Not a great track record.

Still, I'm loving it. I honestly have to say, World of Warcraft is the best massive multiplayer game I've played to date. I'll gladly trade some downtime for the experience to be inside such a rich and enjoyable world, they didn't even need to refund the time to me.

** I'm not counting non-graphical MUDs, so that would be Kesmai's awesome Air Warrior, which began ~1987, far ahead of it's time and perfectly playable using 1200 & 2400 baud modems on GEnie. In fact, when I finally got to interview some of their network engineers years later, they spoke strongly of a fondness for less bandwidth but better latency networks than currently found on the Internet. Kesmai is sadly no more, having been enveloped into the behemoth corporation of EA.