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World of Warcraft Trial Period Extended
EvilAvatar has details on the recent World of Warcraft server issues. This despite the addition of over 88 servers in the last week. Total game population is already in the 200,000 subscriber neighborhood and rising. As a result of the lag, the free month included in the box is being extended for an indetermined amount of time. From the article: "We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and are dedicated to providing World of Warcraft players with the best play experience possible. Therefore we'll be adding a small trial-period extension for players who created accounts before or during the downtime. In the days ahead, we'll provide additional details on how the trial-period extension will be determined."
Got this the day it came out, and I must have been one of the lucky ones because I've yet to sit in a que.
I have experienced the loot lag though, but I'm cutting Blizzard some slack as they would have had a totally smooth launch if they didn't have so many fans of the game coming out in droves to play it. 200,000 plus accounts made within the first two days? That tends to slow things down.
By contrast, EQ2 had a flawless launch by all accounts I've read, but when you have what, 5 people buy the game it tends to run smoothly. Ok, that's not fair, they had many more people than that. At least over 20 or so.
But WoW is running smooth now on my server. No lag now, never a que still...for me at least. So far it's been a great game. And no, it's not a "MMORPG for newbies" either. No more than any other MMORPG out there.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
That's cool of them. However it just depresses me when I think of the mess that the Star Wars Galaxies launch was and the mess that game has degraded into (or has always been depending on who you ask).
I will probably try WoW, but I really wish that SWG had been the Space/Sci-Fi MMO I was looking for.
No sig for you!!
With the most MMO sales ever in it's fist day, WWO was bound to experience lag and sever crashes.
Wow. It's a real shame that you wasted all that time doing stuff that wasn't fun at all, only to be stripped of the precious reward of having a high number describe your character, and have to formalize your association with your friends again.
How can they sleep at night knowing they did this to you?
Excuse me, early adopters are always getting fcked over no matter what.
Think about it like this: WHAT do you want them to do, exactly? Migrate your entire clan to another server transparently?
They have too many people on your server. Now, they've created 88 apprently new servers for people to use, but you begrudgingly want to stick to the server that has horrible performance because you have a 2 day frigging history. If you play the game for more than a month, will it really matter in the long run? Nah. You'll probably end up having characters on other servers anyways to play horde & alliance.
Honestly, you have to stop being stubborn and realize that this problem can't be fixed without people making concessions, and for me, my first server was ItemLaged since day 2. What did I do? I moved to a new server. Problem solved. Alliances are more difficult, but it comes down to the same principle, if you start the game from day 1, expect problems, I don't care how confident you were with pre-open beta (open beta did suck a$$ for item lag, you can't deny that), this is slightly larger scale.
Bye!
The original post may have been whinging in tone, but I can see the point and if I were in the same situation, I'd be annoyed. One of the real thrills in any MMORPG is to be at the "top" of your server.
This isn't just a prestige/ego thing, although that's no small part of it. In the first few months of a MMORPG, those who are at the "top" get to engage in the greatest share of genuine discovery, in terms of quests, abilities, areas to explore and so on. Once you fall behind the pack, the rest of the game is comprehensively "spoiled" for you and due to the very nature of the game, it's almost impossible to avoid this.
200,000 subscribers. That means at least 200,000 people bought the game (probably 250,000 or more), at a worst case price of what? $40? So someone pulled in $10,000,000 on just those copies of the game (mostly the retailers, but the publisher got a good chunk that's about half of that price).
And Blizzard or whoever gets what? $15 a month? Even if only half of these folks stay past the trial, that's a cool $1,500,000 a month on subscription fees. Not a bad chunk of change, and you have to love the recurring monthly revenue.
This despite the addition of over 88 servers in the last week.
/. submitters apparently RTFA?
Why do none of the
From the *LINKED* article:
To keep up with the demand from our players, 47 new servers were made available, increasing the total number of servers to 88.
Is the above sentence really that difficult to comprehend?
I've thought about becoming a paid subscriber many times, but goofs like this always prevent me.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Too bad thats BEFORE expenses. Say 1/3 of that goes to server maintanence, another 1/3 goes to salaries and working on upgrades and add-ons, and finally another 1/6 for everything else (break downs, advertising, paying the GMs, etc). After all that, its $250,000 ASSUMING nothing goes wrong, not counting taxes, and no one attempts to sue Blizzard because 'their game made their son/daughter/husband/spousee commit suicide/run away/divorce.'
For the first time in my life, I'm actually happy that I have to wait for the european version. This means that when I get online next year, all these "bugs" will be gone. Which isn't that bad. Thanks for "beta" testing for me america!
Simply retarded
I unfortunately agree... Considering the game out just a FEW DAYS AGO and there are already "3L33T" players calling everyone else "noobs."
Free Trial? Free Month? Gotta love marketing.
How about: Month included and paid for as part of the $50? $50 for a game engine (no source) and no right to play would be silly.
Guess that doesn't roll off the tongue however...
What most people are pissed about is that guild names are UNIQUE ACROSS ALL realms. For instance, I play on Hellscream. My guilds name is Grasshoppers of Death. No other player on any realm can have the guild name Grasshoppers of Death.
Across all 88 realms, there is only 1 Legions of Doom (made up name, probably a real guild).
That's a cool name, im sure the guild master from beta wanted that name and joined the first realm avialable. The problem is that there are hundreds of names that people wanted to reserve.
My name is Azrael, each realm can have their own Azrael, but no other realm can have Grasshoppers of Death.
Combine that with the inability to transfer characters across realms? Thats what people are upset about.
Of course, we've also known about all of this some time before the launch.
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
I appreciate the bringing to light of overhead fees, but could you at least use numbers that don't come out of your ass? That'd make the point a whole lot better.
88 servers, couldn't that, like, punch a hole into another dimension?
After all that, its $250,000 ASSUMING nothing goes wrong
So in Fantasy Land where the expenses pop right off the top of MMaestro's head, they might only make 3 MILLION dollars of PURE PROFIT per YEAR? Fuck, how will those people feed their children?
Hell, while we're making shit up, let's say that 1/4 of that money goes to starving kids in Iraq, and another 1/6th goes to funding terrorists!
I haven't...
Also, Blizzard forum accts have been hacked before iirc.
I'll believe it when the announcment is sitting in my inbox...
Wow i really love this game but was pissed when i had to wait in line for an hour to play. I dont understand how they did not see this coming. They Boxed X number of games and have X number of slots/servers it seems like they over sold their capacity. That makes me mad!
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
"By contrast, EQ2 had a flawless launch by all accounts I've read, but when you have what, 5 people buy the game it tends to run smoothly."
LOL, ok!
I'd mod your ass Troll right there.
EQ2 is SUCH a better game than WoW. I played in the WoW beta.. reminded me of a kid's MMORPG, sorta like that Disney online game..
I never really like EQ1 much, but EQ2 is so superior to WoW in EVERY single aspect, SAVE 'Solo' content..
those numbers DON'T exist, they haven't released any. Numbers out of asses are all that exist.
I for one think this shows a lot of class from blizzard. And yes i am a fanboy of blizzard. How many other MMORPG's have had crappy launches and just told the customer to deal with it? or here..have ONE free day (gee, thanks for the nickel, sir!). It sounds like to me that they are going to be giving this extention until they get the problem figured out. Could be days or could be weeks, but at least their customers don't have to wonder if they are going to get compensated. I would even go so far as to wager that Blizzard will extend the free period to a day or week PAST the end of server poblems.
They've always put the customer (ME) first.
-out
Agreed, but, the things he talked about are more or less constant/predictable according to industry standards.
Oh, I don't know, maybe people didn't expect the problems that were encountered during the freaking Open Beta to extend over until the launch. What exactly was the point of the Open Beta is not to test these things, find the mistakes, and fix them before launch?
ALL these problems occured during the Beta, but we couldn't complain about them, because after all, it was just a beta. Now it's the launch, and they're STILL HAPPENING, but we can't complain about it because "it's just a launch, after all."
Maybe people are upset because people keep on saying that World of Warcraft was completely ready for launch, and that this would be the best MMORPG launch.
Well, screw that. Blizzard can make mistakes, and people need to stop saying that Blizzard is perfect and rationalizing away everything that's obvious wrong with the release.
At least they're extending the trial period, that shows class.
They upgraded to 80 servers recently right? Considering we're talking about high-end, 1000+ users minimum servers a price tag of $10,000 is nothing. 80 * $10,000 is $800,000. Thats more than 1/2 of their first month of income if they pull in $1.5 million a month. Assume 2 system operators for all the servers and they each get paid a simple salary of $60,000 a year. Divided by 12, they get paid $5,000 a month so $10,000 a month for sysops. Thats $810,000 gone in the first month.
Lets say Blizzard starts getting stingy here. 50 game masters/administrators/moderators for ALL the players. They guys are getting 'paid to do what they love' so a mere $1,000 a month, a little over $8/hr, 40 hours a week. Thats $50,000 a month. (I've seenen MMO games go a LOWER than 10 people so 50 is not impossible). Advertisement is probably going to continue for another 3 months, not including expansions/add-ons, and that can range anywhere from $100,000 to $1,000,000 depending on how much they do a marketing blitz but for our purposes we'll say $100,000. (This is pennies, a full page advertisement in a small newspaper costs about $1,000 try doing that nationally.)
Without taking in taxes, expenses such as electricity and cooling, and the costs of making the game engine BEFORE all this, you come to about $960,000 in the first month. BUT don't forget Blizzard offered a free first month for all users, SO they don't actually get any money until the second month. And when that happens, Blizzard is $960,000 in the red at LEAST. Pulling numbers out of my ass? More like pulling numbers out of the shallow end of a corporate budget. Bill Gates is worth nearly 100 million privately, how much do you think Blizzard is worth as a corporation?
The only firm numbers for a MMORPG around are ones that SOE released for EQ1 for Forbes magazine.
They say they yearly bring in around $45 million and spend around $14 million on costs.
Not a bad profit.
88 servers for 200,000 accounts. Thats 2272 accounts per server. Must be awfully lonley in Wow, unless the world is much much smaller than ever Everquest 1 before all of the expansions.
But they aren't buying new servers every month. Sure, the first month they only make $500,000 net revenue, but they've already paid off the fixed infrastructure costs. More than likely, the servers are on a 3 year depreciation schedule like other fixed assets, so they are only out $22,000 a month for equipment. This is even a tax write off, lowering their taxes.
So they are easily bringing in more than a million a month profit, assuming of course bandwith + salaries + maintenance is under $500,000 a month. Don't forget, they sold 200,000 boxes also, so they made at least a million on initial sales alone.
Even if they did use cash to buy the servers outright, the accountants will amortize (I think that's the correct term) them over their expected lifetime.
As for the other expenses, well I don't have the foggiest idea what they are. Electricity, bandwidth, payroll, and the other expenses would be too hard to guess at.
Hollywood: The place good stories go to die.
What I suggested was merely an overhead view of what they'll have to pay. If you want to sound fancy with tax write offs, crediting, fixed costs, and revenue in the long term rather than short term, you still don't pull an income for at least a year. Blizzard probably OWES an easy 5 million just for past expenses in making the game, so if they make an initial million in sales, thats gone instantly.
Lets say Blizzard starts getting stingy here. 50 game masters/administrators/moderators for ALL the players. They guys are getting 'paid to do what they love' so a mere $1,000 a month, a little over $8/hr, 40 hours a week. Thats $50,000 a month.
You're making a common mistake here. When someone gets paid $8/hr., they usually cost the company about $15/hr., because of benifits, taxes, etc.