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World of Warcraft Reaching Record MMOG Sales

Posted by Zonk on from the go-dwarfs-go! dept.

Drac8 writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft has reached record sales in the first day, selling over 250,000 copies, and 200,000 accounts have been created. As of 5:00PM PST tuesday the game had over 100,000 people playing."

8 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. You ain't kidding by jayhawk88 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Tuesday night they had freaking wait lines just to join certain servers. The starting newb zones were a crush.

  2. Blizzard one of the few left.... by MBraynard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not surprising the launch is going so well. Blizzard is proving that developer reputation does matter. This is one of the few developers that I can count on getting my $$s worth with. For me it started with Warcraft 2 and then Starcraft which I played somewhat competitively. The only other PC devs I'd put on their level are MS Games, Id, and maybe Epic.

    1. Re:Blizzard one of the few left.... by katanan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'd rank Bioware and Valve in that kind of category as well though. Both companys have a penchant for producing great quality games and both have released games that have helped define their specific genres. I have great confidence when I get a game by some companies and I respect the amount of effort Bioware, Blizzard and Valve put into making their games great.

    2. Re:Blizzard one of the few left.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's not surprising the launch is going so well.
      - Launch going well? You have a very weird definition of "well". 5 minutes to loot a corpse is not "well". 20 min wait on 700+ queue is not "well". Regular server reboots is not "well".

      Blizzard grossly underestimated the number of people that will buy the game, also their database architecture is pure crap. Plugging many servers on the same database is just asking for trouble. Especially with 200k+ accounts.

    3. Re:Blizzard one of the few left.... by FozzieCDN · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I honestly wouldn't get too excited about the source "engine". Any company that can afford to add in Shader support and most importantly the Havok Physics engine can produce something that is along the lines of the Source "engine". With that said though its not the engine that matters but how you use it and Valve was able to do a lot with it which is why every "joe gamer" thinks that its the greatest thing since free internet porn :)

  3. only 100,000? by darkmayo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So what happened from open beta where they where stating they had 500,000 signups and for the most part (with less servers) had very little problems (I only recall a few times where there was a queue to get into a server but that was when other servers were down)

    Now they have more servers but the queues are really bad to get into alot of them.. what happened, did the open beta numbers of people playing online at one time never hit 100,000?

    --
    "I am a kernel in the linux army"
    1. Re:only 100,000? by Dachannien · · Score: 3, Interesting

      One thing to keep in mind is that you never actually had to download the open beta client in order to create an account during open beta. I suspect that a whole lot of people have crappy connections that severely throttled their client download, and before they had a chance to download the entire thing, the open beta closed, and they never had a chance to log in.

      What with installing from CDs now, everybody who buys the game is (obviously) able to create an account and log in within minutes of cracking open the box seal. So, rather than having 500k accounts and 100k people playing (strewn throughout the day), you have 250k accounts and 100k playing at any one time.

      Much of the lag on Tuesday and Wednesday was caused by a database issue, where anytime an action occurred that caused a new slot in your inventory to become occupied, you'd lag out for up to several minutes waiting for the database to catch up. During OB, this seemed to be a "threshold" issue - that is, once the server had more than a certain threshold of people logged in, the problem quickly became bad. Wednesday night they brought down most of the servers, and after they came back up this problem seemed to be mostly solved (though this may be because the threshold wasn't met afterwards due to people going to bed).

      Supposedly there was also an issue with insufficient bandwidth at the east coast data center. That'll learn AT&T not to underestimate the power of the nerd.

  4. Servers have been better since last night by prator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ever since they restarted the realms last night, I haven't had a problem. I'm sure that the people with characters on the 4 servers with extended downtime are upset, but they can start alts while they wait.

    This launch is still better than any MMO launch I've played in.

    -prator