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http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w ow-general&t=902431&p=1&tmp=1#post902431

The overwhelming success of World of Warcraft has brought hundreds of thousands of people together to adventure in Azeroth, and concurrency numbers are well beyond what we expected or even hoped for. Unfortunately, this high concurrency, especially when concentrated on a small number of realms, initially caused issues with our hardware infrastructure. We were able to streamline our code to increase performance in the weeks following launch. However, the holiday season nearly doubled our player base, and it quickly became apparent that in order to handle not only the current player base, but all future players as well, we needed to make some upgrades to our infrastructure.

Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.

In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.

The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our players this weekend. This process coincides with our constant efforts to improve the current performance of World of Warcraft, and sometimes issues can arise when implementing these improvements. We will do our best to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, and we once again thank you for your patience and understanding.

I don't think so. . . Blizzard's reps on the forums had already indicated that more games wouldn't be shipping days before the guys at P-A rescinded their award. See Caydiem's comment in this WoW Official Forum Thread dated to the 14th (and I've seen similar comments in earlier threads, just can't find them right now).

You can go to that website to get the official numbers there.

Those numbers are in no way official. Blizzard has said that they are inaccurate. You can read one of their responses here (if the forums aren't hosed).

-prator

But those things happen sometimes. Sometimes projecters die. Sometimes cable goes down. This is the reality of the world. Furthermore, this type of thing happens with just about every new MMO, and should be expected.

All of this is based on customer expectations. Having telephone service 364 days a year means nothing if it's down when you need to call 911. We expect utilities to have at least 5 9s. Cable service has become a utility, particularly with their push to offer VOIP. Naturally, expectations for a MMORPG are considerably lower, but they already schedule 4 hours a week of down time. (and on at least one occasion it stretched to 16) Nobody screamed when Blizzard's datacenter was down after a hurricane.

Server status forum

Are we not allowed to expect progress? Or should we continue to pay $15 a month and hope it will be fixed someday?

Oh, and yes, I would expect a theater to have spare projectors, particularly with the multiplexs they are building now. It's an essential to their business.

Well I know you're not trying to rag on me but you don't seem to be quite as aware as I am of the situation.

Huge- Many servers are experiencing huge queues. I happen to be on one of the worst, however I hear that it is spreading to many servers now. Look forward to queues because they are coming.

Whether half the servers or all were brought down for the 16 hours is not really the point. The point is, after all this (and zero comms on what they did aside from a few class changes) the servers that were worked on performed worse.

Lack of server - Australia had a major release too. Enough said. We have been released to and don't have a server. Our "unofficial" server is consequently the worst server as it struggles to deal with the high load of australians/US people on it.

Communication: The log in page RARELY references downtime. The forums have a standard 1 line comment, read them if you want. Many of these downtimes can last hours upon hours. Generally we are given a 1 line explanation an hour after it has crashed.

Realm Status Forum

Check the general forums, blizzard do not comment on anything.

Check the tech support forums, if your game is crashing heavily they will ask you very little but to update your drivers and reinstall.

I accept that you clearly are on a much better server and thus are mostly oblivious to the terrible problems of server instability though.

If World of Warcraft is any indication... Yeah, I think people do.

32MB of VRAM is the minimum listed at worldofwarcraft, but I haven't seen it first-hand to tell you. Maybe you could get a look at an Apple store.

Yep

Here's the WoW system requirements:

Mac® System OS X 10.3.5 OS:
933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor
512 MB RAM or higher; DDR RAM recommended
ATI or NVIDIA video hardware with 32 MB VRAM or more
4 GB or more of available hard drive space
MacOS X 10.3.5 or newer
56k or higher modem with an Internet connection

Since the cheapest Mac Mini has a 1.25 GHz processor and ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB of VRAM then you should be set. Though since it only comes with 256 MB of RAM you'll probably need to upgrade to 512 MB, but you were going to do that anyway, right? Actually, you were going to max it out at 1 GB of RAM, right? ;)
--
It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo

Oh gaming is no problem on this. From the Warcraft 3 specs it is plenty enough power to run Warcraft 3 and it could run World of Warcraft just fine if you add another 256mb of ram.

Doom 3 wouldnt run however.

BitTorrent is already being used for non-warez purposes. Most notably, World of Warcraft (link to page with info) uses the format to distribute their patches for the game. That's a ton of exposure right there, given that the game sold 600k+ copies already.

Seems like Blizzard has adopted the BitTorrent protocol for distributing large files. If you are intersested in downloading their 'cinematic trailer' http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/trailer/ of World of Warcraft you first download an application that starts a BitTorrent-like download of the film itself.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?fn=wo w-tech-support

Quite a lot of posters and blizzard reps have talked about the lag and all the other issues you pointed out in the above forum.

> 1-Each and every map has a quest serie that goes a little something like this: get a lady ingredient for a pie, find a guys tools, ((kill x monsters of this type, bring x items of this type) x 6), kill the Bosses (3), go in far away land to retrieve item or give item to someone -- repeat

Well, there are only so many different types of quests you can work into a game like this. Whenever I'm feeling bored or overwhelmed with quests, I just drop what I'm doing and go do something else. Some fun things:

-- Visit exotic (and dangerous) locations. Exploring can be fun, and you'll often stumble across nice mining/herbalism spots.

-- Engage in the PvP system somehow (note: this will be even more fun when PvP Battlegrounds are implemented)

-- Help people out. It's strangely satisfying.

-- Determine yourself to get some hard-to-get doodad. If you're a Hunter, try to tame a rare beast, perhaps deep inside the opposing faction's lands. Or maybe try to get a complete armor set at the Auction House.

Basically, what I'm saying is that not all the "quests" you can enjoy in the game have to come from NPCs.

I think he's referring to Blizzard's official updater using BitTorrent, not pirating the game. More info

Despite the success, not all is well in the WoW. Some of those 600,000 users are pretty pissed about some employees inappropriately using their influence in-game.

yeah?

I agree, those trees look a lot better than the ones in this screenshot from WoW...

In the face of their current competition, which I might add is a true gaming phenomenon, SOE fights back by- wait for it.......coming up with ways to charge their user base even more!

Sorry SOE, I'll stick to paying one monthly fee and enjoying WoW waaaay more than I ever did EQ.

(BTW you guys should try Battlegrounds. I hear it's going to be a blast!)

Who were the braniacs who masterminded this one?

You're probably going to like this, then. The Battlegrounds. A battleground will basically be a special region of the map where each side must cooperate to upgrade their bases and take resources, while battling npcs and other players as well. It'll really introduce the whole Warcraft feel to the game, I think.

The "russian" suprnova is up and works fine and at least the loki people are putting up some kind of fight so the technology isnt just considered illegal outright.

Not to mention that BT is the P2P app with significant non-infringing uses that are more than just theoretical, and past the "I upload my crappy basement-produced MP3s for the world to see" level. Frankly, this kind of use interests me a thousand times more than the next Britney Spears pirating system.

The 5200 is a crap card, sadly.

Advice for improving performance on the iMac G5 can be found here.

No prob on my 15" PowerBook btw. That won't really help you, unfortunately; I just didn't want the casual reader to think that all Macs suck playing WoW.

Has Sony learned nothing from its newest and closest competitor?

What are the game's system requirements?
[...]
Mac® System OS X 10.3.5 OS:

* 933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor
* 512 MB RAM or higher; DDR RAM recommended
* ATI or NVIDIA video hardware with 32 MB VRAM or more
* 4 GB or more of available hard drive space
* MacOS X 10.3.5 or newer
* 56k or higher modem with an Internet connection

It doesn't look scrapped to me - my store-bought copy of WoW updated itself via a custom BitTorrent client, the Blizzard Downloader, and reported peer connection stats during the download.

MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft get a hit of cash up front and then involve monthly revenue. Hollywood has nothing like that.

Most games cost between $30 and $50, no-matter what platform you're buying for. How much is a movie ticket? $8 to $10 for tickets or $20 to $30 for DVDs. How much do games cost to make vs. the revenue they bring in?

Everyone seems to be jumping on the fact that this guys wants to make a living buying/selling in game items. While I applaud Blizzard for wanting to prevent this, we don't have to lynch the article's author for this single point.

Some good points of the article:

1. WoW is so much fun to play that it is not clear if anyone would _want_ to pay for items/levels. Even if buying/selling were allowed it's possible that there would be no buyer demand.
2. WoW has a severe lack of money sinks for the high end content. If you hit 60 and keep playing then gold starts piling up _very_ quickly. What happens to the economy when players get bored and mail 50G from their lvl 60 to their lvl 1 alt?

I've witnessed some of this first hand. I was in alpha, closed beta, and open beta. In the final days of open beta I decided to test a new class so I created an alt on one of the old crusty alpha servers. This server was filled with 60s. I kept my character pure (no gimping) and tried to level up, group, buy and trade with the auction house, etc.

It was horrible! Not only were there very few low lvl characters but the ones that were there were equiped with the best equipment and had no incentive to trade. The auction house was barren of low level items.

I re-rolled on one of the newer servers and the game was filled with low level characters, grouping and trading. It was fun...like the alpha servers were 6 months before.

I'd like to think that Blizzard sees this problem but I'm not so sure. As soon as 1/5 or so of the players on a server hit the cap (and this will happen very quickly in WoW) the whole economy will go to hell. I don't see anything in their Under Development page that indicates otherwise.

Allow me to point you in th right direction. Expressing the reasons that US and International Copyrights protect a creator of Intelectual Property from unliscened and unwarranted sales would take many hours without the all parties having extensive knowledge of the many laws and acts involved.

First look at the US Copyright law:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

Then take a look at the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 and the Intellectual Property and High Technology Technical Amendments Acts of 2001 and 2002:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/olia/aipa/in dex.htm

Both of these site contain alot of technical and legal information. There are many sites devoted to IP both in the US and internationaly:
http://www.wipo.int/ and http://www.aipla.org/ are just a couple.

Once you have a good understanding of Intellectual Property law read over the WoW End User License Agreement and Terms of Use both of which I have quoted else where in this thread: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.ht ml

Pay Close attention to EULA Section 3 and 13 (which states you agree to the laws of the state of California) and TOU section 2 subsection H, Section 7 and Section 10.

That should clarify the situation. If you need more information feel free to ask questions and, time permiting I will look up specific case law. I would also suggest contact a legal profesional in your area who is familiar with US Intellectual Property law.

Allow me to point you in th right direction. Expressing the reasons that US and International Copyrights protect a creator of Intelectual Property from unliscened and unwarranted sales would take many hours without the all parties having extensive knowledge of the many laws and acts involved.

First look at the US Copyright law:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

Then take a look at the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 and the Intellectual Property and High Technology Technical Amendments Acts of 2001 and 2002:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/olia/aipa/in dex.htm

Both of these site contain alot of technical and legal information. There are many sites devoted to IP both in the US and internationaly:
http://www.wipo.int/ and http://www.aipla.org/ are just a couple.

Once you have a good understanding of Intellectual Property law read over the WoW End User License Agreement and Terms of Use both of which I have quoted else where in this thread: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.ht ml

Pay Close attention to EULA Section 3 and 13 (which states you agree to the laws of the state of California) and TOU section 2 subsection H, Section 7 and Section 10.

That should clarify the situation. If you need more information feel free to ask questions and, time permiting I will look up specific case law. I would also suggest contact a legal profesional in your area who is familiar with US Intellectual Property law.

Speaking of other game music, I've been enjoying the World of Warcraft soundtrack CD. If you haven't gotten it yet, you can hear a few samples at the Blizzard site. I'd recommend listening to "World of Warcraft - Legends" from that list.

this is solved by judicious use of instancing, which WoW obviously incorporates. Simply make Tomb of Dread an instanced dungeon, and you won't have a single camper waiting for the Uber sword, as they'll all be in their own dungeons waiting for it.

Here is his post.

I think that Blizzard is planning to keep players in the game through its PvP content (Player vs Player), or Battlegrounds, which would offer almost unlimited replayability... this is because combat against fellow players is almost guaranteed to be different every time.

Although battlegrounds are not currently in the game, Blizzard has what I believe to be a nice plan laid out and I just can't wait. It's also nice because these battlegrounds are available on both the PvP servers and non-PvP servers. It is consensual in both cases.

And there are plenty of people who have a similar complaint.

has anyone tried it on the current 12" iBook? according to the official Requirements it should be playable, but since some min. req. are just a joke i'm wondering if i can play it on my iBook.

i know, i was indirectly suggesting looking into SBC instead of AT&T, if that's an option :)...

but anyways, did you try checking the little box on the client that disables p2p sharing and just downloads the patches?
according to the WoW support site, that should allow you do dl patches even if your ISP doesn't allow p2p. i haven't actually tried it though so i don't know if it works well or not.

By "well" you of course mean "well for Blizzard." It's not entirely smooth for those ppl who made characters only to see their realm go down for 1-2 days: Server Status Forum

Also, and I realize this is not the main point of your post, but MS games? What have they developed themselves that's been good?

I wasn't trolling, that was my experience with the client. I was just 'demoing' it out and found out it was worthless. I'm not terribly interested in checking out the "full" version to "publish" them, especially because their website says this is pretty much the same as the downloaders version (see the section on the front page entitled "Why use Blog Torrent on your blog or website?").

Why not just learn from blizzard and use a technique like the blizzard downloader, an all in one stand-alone exe which doens't need installation and does its job well?

You think you've got it bad?! The clowns at Vivendi only distributed 200 - for our entire COUNTRY.

EB Games got 40 units for its complete shipment nationwide. I ordered a month in advance, two copies, from a major online retailer here - who received only 60 copies, and couldn't fulfil either of those orders.

I posted about this [worldofwarcraft.com] on their forums, but got no reply, when I found out before launch day.

It really blows! I really wanted the art book. And what with the region locking of accounts, it looks like I can't buy one from eBay either (there are a few copies there, going for nutso money).

I know exactly one person (personally) in my country who's managed to get their order filled. Vivendi have told retailers here that they won't be re-releasing this pack either, or any of the product within it seperately.

For my money: whilst I'm not into piracy per-say, I really hope someone scans and copies the products and rips 'em out to a torrent or ed2k source. I mean, ffs, 200 for an entire country is a joke.

Is it just me, or does $15/month seem WAY out of proportion for something like this? I could see paying $15/year, maybe. But this is almost as much as I pay every month for my broadbant Internet access, which is FAR more useful.

The friend will have to go out and buy the full retail pack. The information is on the World of Warcraft Community Site, but it's a ways towards the bottom, so scroll down a bit. It says:

Collector's Edition 10-Day Guest Pass

Players who will be accessing the game through the 10-day pass will create their account for that exactly the same way as a normal player, by visiting the account-creation webpage.

Those who wish to continue playing the game once the 10-day free period is over must first visit their local retailer or online store to purchase a copy of World of Warcraft. Once they have obtained a copy of the game, they can log in to WorldofWarcraft.com using their 10-day pass login information and then enter the authentication key that came with boxed copy into the field found at the bottom of their account page.

That's all that's required to activate a full-fledged World of Warcraft account once the 10-day free period has expired. Any characters that players have created during the 10-day trial, along with all their items, will be available for them to continue playing!

According to some posts from Blizzard in the beta forums, you can use the beta client in retail. I've managed to find one of the posts.

-prator

Here's the link to the collector's edition sneak peak.

Why the heck does "Warcry" get linked to? It looks like it isn't even run by Blizzard.

To the actual World of Warcraft FAQ than to some random news site that just quotes it?

World of Warcrack

"I'm already addicted, and its not even out yet!"

Yup. Mac client available at launch.

A few corrections for those interested: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/death.h tml

I never felt majorly upset after dying as the penalty (compared to EQ) is relatively light. Some argue, however, that a heavy death penalty makes the game more exciting. Currently it is a decent balance IMHO although a 50% durability reduction would probably been a better punishment.

Hi all, A number of inquiries have come in about the lag issues on some of the servers, so we want to take some time to provide more in-depth information for you. Some of you might be surprised to learn that the lag you're experiencing is an expected and necessary part of the open beta test. Contrary to what some of you might believe, the open beta test is intended as a massive stress test, and not just a free demo of the game prior to launch. Having hundreds of thousands of testers playing the game at this time lets us analyze how well our server infrastructure -- made up of the best, most up-to-date hardware available -- can handle extremely large server populations. In fact, the open beta test is allowing us to simulate having an even greater number of testers spread across even more servers than we currently have up. In terms of concurrency, we're already seeing servers with twice as much population as we had during the closed beta test, and our total overall concurrency, across all servers, is already rivaling that of the most popular MMORPGs currently available. Keep in mind, also, that this population is distributed across a relatively small number of servers -- again, for the exact purpose of stress testing them. In general, lag issues are caused when thousands of players congregate in one or two zones on a server. When this happens, the normal communication that comes from the server -- which includes information about every NPC, monster, player, item, etc. in the area -- increases to the point where the flow of data can get backed up. For those of you who are concerned about server stability and possible loss of character-related information, take heart knowing that the lag you experience when this backup happens is not at all related to stability; it's more of an issue with how quickly the data is handled. That is, with an excess of communication from the servers, the data remains stable, it just has to wait its turn in line to be processed. Running a massive open beta test like this allows us to steadily optimize how the data is processed. With half a million people having signed up and been accepted into the open beta test, we have the unique opportunity of being able to fine tune our code prior to release in a way that most other MMORPGs have not. These code optimizations are done server side and do not require players to patch. As more and more testers finish their beta-client installations and start logging on, we'll be able to do even more analysis and optimization prior to release. While this process brings about a challenge for those of you facing lag issues, it ultimately helps us maintain our schedule of analyzing and optimizing our code for all of our servers, including the ones that have yet to be brought online. We are looking forward to having hundreds of thousands of players enter the world of Azeroth on November 23, and we're grateful that you all have the interest and the patience to help us do this last, sometimes challenging, bit of testing. Your assistance with this will truly help us ensure that World of Warcraft will run as smoothly as possible at launch.

I'm running on a 800 g3 ibook and its playable, but not really.

You can try adding memory, but it isn't going to get better. From Requirements:

933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor.
512 MB RAM or higher. DDR RAM recommended.

I think it's playable with slightly less, but they are essentially covering their butts. I've been playing since April on a 1Ghz Powerbook with 512MB, and the performance is a lot better now. It still bogs down in certain areas, but is pretty good overall.

Threads on running WoW on Linux using WineX/Cedega.

If you're a paying customer, you can grab the file from FilePlanet. Alternatively, you can signup for the WoW beta here, and grab the Official Blizzard Download Client from the signup area.

Since the official Blizzard download client is a marvelous piece of BitTorrent shit (the Blizzard forums are rampant with posts complaining of choked bandwidth and horrible download speeds - I'm personally getting about 6 KB/s down and was putting up 70 KB/s before I choked the upload with a 3rd party program.), does anyone have a torrent file for this?

I did find a torrent on Suprnova, but haven't been able to get a decent connection speed.