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World of Warcraft Breaks PC Game Sales Records
Many readers have written in to mention the astonishingly fast rate of sales for World of Warcraft. From the article: "...sold through to over 240,000 customers at retailers in North America on Tuesday, November 23, selling more in its first 24 hours than any other PC game in history. ... Within the first day, over 200,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts. By 5:00 p.m. PST, over 100,000 were playing the game concurrently. These two record-breaking numbers made World of Warcraft the fastest-growing MMORPG in history." The official site also has information on an extension of the trial period for users who have experienced lag and queues.
I am impressed that they have sold so many copies yet I can still play with no problems. I got it Saturday and I have had no problems with lag or disconnects at all. Three cheers to Blizzard!
It was a hairy first few days and I do get the 4 days for the extention, thank you Blizzard for giving a crap about your customers.
Since they have added the new servers and such, I have not had a single problem whatsoever. Kudos for releasing a polished and addictive game.
Home of the midwest loser - www.say-10.net
I dislike the way mmorpgs have shaped up. No permadeath, limited PvP, endless level grinds with the sole purpose of achieving a high enough level to grind again in a "more dangerous" zone. Not good tools for fantasy storytelling.
...played in the WoW beta out of morbid curiosity.
(see armageddon.org for an close example of what I'd like to see in a big commericial mmorpg)
It turns out WoW's actually a good game. It has just about everything I hate about the average mmorpg, but still manages to be addictive fun. Like a Nintendo game, WoW just oozes quality and playability.
Exploring is fun, grinding for the sake of grinding basically doesn't exist, crafting isn't annoying, finding a group and fun quests to do with that group is super easy. Music's decent, in some spots pretty good. Graphics are, imho, amazing. There are areas in the games that are simply works of art--exploring the geometry and looking at the pretty textures is sometimes more fun than bashing the beasties decorating the landscapes.
EQ2's graphics might be more whiz-bang, but I think there's better craftsmenship in WoW's enviroments. (though I haven't spent but a few hours looking at someelse's copy of EQ2) And WoW still manages to run quite smoothly on crap computers.
I'm shocked that blizzard managed to pull it off.
I'd better start by saying that I've played WoW and I don't like it. Compared to FFXI, my MMORPG of choice, it seemed primative, shallow and dull. A few FFXI players I know are taking a month or so out of FFXI to try WoW... I suspect we'll see most of them back again.
However... it's been amusing (and encouraging) to watch Square-Enix's response to the arrival of some serious competition. We've just been given the changelog for the next patch (due to be implemented early next week) and it's not only adding new content, which is normal for the once-every-two-months patches, but also fixing major issues that players have been complaining about for several months.
The biggest of these issues, which many players thought would never be resolved, concerns the selling of gil (FFXI cash) for "real" cash. This might not seem such a problem in itself, other than the natural imbalance it would cause in the economy, if it weren't for the behaviour of the players who are selling the gil. Obviously, in order to sell gil, they need to make large quantities of this. FFXI has a number of ways of making gil, but many of them are quite slow (such as mining and logging, or "farming" for normal item and cash drops from regular monsters) or else require more prep-time than your average gil-seller can afford to spend (such as high level crafting or fighting Higher Notorious Monsters).
Most of the really troublesome gilsellers seem to be Chinese, normally "working" the game under sweatshop conditions. In order to carve out a really profitable niche, they need to gain a monopoly on the right kind of item. This needs to be an item which is relatively low level (so that lower-level players need it as well), important for a large number of jobs (to further increase demand for it), not easily obtained (to keep supply relatively low and discourage competition) and dropped from a monster in a dungeon with the potential for severe anti-social behaviour (more on this later). Archer's Rings and a couple of other items fit the bill perfectly. Only a couple of these are usually obtained per server each day, so it's rare. It's level 30, so it's usable by fairly casual players. It's pretty much essential for any heavy-hitting melee job. And it's dropped from a monster in Ordelle's Caves, where there are high level monsters which can be tricked into attacking competing "normal" players who also want to try to get the drop.
The result of this was that a few items, particularly these rings, soared in value and became inaccessible to the average player, unless he bought gil from the very people who created the situation. Over a few months, the price rose from about 350,000 gil on my server, to over 800,000. And if anybody felt like getting the ring without buying it, they'd probably end up dying when the gil-sellers used exploits to kill them using high-level monsters.
But then... a few days after the launch of WoW, Square-Enix surreptitiously introduced a flood of these rings into the servers, bypassing the gil-sellers. The result of this was that the price of the rings fell to even less than it had been before the problem began and the gilsellers suddenly found their profits vastly, vastly reduced. However, there were still a few other items in the game that they could apply their old tactics to. Then came the patch notes, which not only included a declaration that SE were planning to more rigidly enforce the TOS (which, yes, I'm a bit sceptical about), which prohibit selling gil for real money, but also that they'd be completely redefinining the paths for obtaining this whole type of item, essentially making it impossible to maintain that kind of monopoly. This seems to be a damned effective way of resolving a problem that we never thought would be solved and the timing seems to be too close to WoW's launch for coincidence.
This isn't the only issue we've seen addressed since the WoW launch, but it's perhaps the most significant. There's no denying that SE have been forced to put a major time-investment into kee