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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 have played both World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 on my crappy machine, 1.4ghz Athlo nXP 1600+, 768mb pc2100 DDR, Radeon 9700. Everyone I know has MAD graphics problems with EQ2 with their uber systems, but these people are idiots because they are turning the graphics as high as they can get them. WoW runs smoothly cause it really doesn't require much more power than Everquest 1. I run EQ2 on medium settings perfectly with little to no lag.
Oh, if anyone wants to rant about GameSpot's 7.8 for EQ2 and 9.5 for WoW, notice the same guy reviewed the games.
the Political Inquirer
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!
There's a monthly fee, so you can't warez it.
The biggest lag and longest waiting queque record.
It's vary phunny to pay 50 buck for a game and then have to wait 2 hours every day to play it.
And if you don't like this - well you payed 50 bucks for trying out the game, no chance to get your money back according to Blizzard customer support.
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 refer everyone back to this post
SPYRO THE FUCKING DRAGON ONLINE, MORE LIKE!!!!
When will you children grow the fuck up and stop playing stupid fucking cartoon games? Half Life 2 has more plot in the first level than all the fucking 'get me five wolf pizzles' quests World of Wiggas attempts to force down your throat.
Oh, and I love the way that PvP is totally fucking broken in WoW. Makes you sad little 'uber' kiddies look even more pathetic now. Where's your 'balanced honor system'? Oh yeah, that's right. Blizzard took your money and now they're not going to implement it.
HAR DE FUCKING HAR HAR!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
The biggest lag and longest waiting queque record. It's vary phunny to pay 50 buck for a game and then have to wait 2 hours every day to play it.
..."
As a day 1 and 2 player, I had one instance of a 20 minute wait. From what I've heard from other players the problems were pretty much cleared up in a few days. And this is consistent with what Blizzard has said:
"... The extremely high concurrency numbers that we've seen since the game's launch have required us to double our total number of servers over a four-day period, which is much faster than we had initially planned
"Accounts created on November 23 will receive a 4-day extension
Accounts created on November 24 will receive a 3-day extension
Accounts created on November 25 will receive a 2-day extension
Accounts created on November 26 will receive a 1-day extension"
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/
I would play but I can't get myself to pay monthly for a game when I can play FPS games online for free and have even more fun with it.
w00t w00t to TFC!
~ Mooga
Yeah, it is so frigging off topic to have an article about the best selling PC game ever appear on games.slashdot.org. And how can the editors expect us to expend all that effort to scroll on past it and not click on the link if the game does not suit our tastes.
True
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
VALVe should take some hints from Blizzard.
Who said anything about off topic, mental midget? Try reading. It works wonders.
"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."
So, the ratio of 0 to 100,000 is now greater than the ratio of say, 0 to 1,000? When did this happen?
I know more than you drink.
We mod you down if we don't agree with your opinion.
Anyone know where I can find this info out, but about EverQuest II? It seems as though publications, reviewers, etc. seem to be pushing it aside in way of World of Warcraft. Now, how is that very respectful? Did EverQuest I not give us the MMO's we play today? Did it not blow open the genre for massive multiplayer games? Sure, we had Ultima, and some others, but EQ wasnt called EverCrack for nothing. Come on now mens and fems, give the game the rights, the respect it deserves(That does not mean you have to give it to Sony ;P ).
Flat Screen TV for F
hands down the most enjoyable game (of it's genre) I've ever played. If Walt Disney (circa Snow White, not today's crapfest) had made games, they'd look like this.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
You are free to make idiotic posts, others are free to mod it down, anyone is free to browse at -1 if they care to. Freedom of speech is about publishing, you are not guaranteed readers or admirers. You were published, you had your freedom, now let others have theirs in peace and ignore you.
So in that one day, selling 240,000 units at $50 each means making $12 million dollars in one day. Wow.
Apparently if you make a game fun, it will sell well. Watch out Sony and Squaresoft... Blizzard's wacky new equation may just be what people are looking for.
I just don't get it. Everyone and his mother seem to be playing some sort of MMORPG these days. As soon as they get bored with one, they jump to another - which plays the exact same way, only with different graphics. I swear, i've tried MMORPGs a lot of times, but they bored me to death the second they turned into a job instead of a game (clicking for hours, walking huge maps, "training", etc).
I respect Blizzard a lot, and the game looks, on it's genre, quite nice, but i just don't get the madness over it. It's not like it's something fresh and never seen before...
Besides, is it me, or the most popular games in the genre require you to purchase the game and then pay a monthly fee? I mean, a fee for a quality server sounds nifty, but, why must you pay for the game aswell? Can you even set your own servers?
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.
Most other games are released for Windows Only, WoW is both Mac and PC.
IMHO Doom 3 was a failure and a step back from other ID software releases since it did not support Mac, and HL 2 is a miserable game to try and get running.
Blizzard has had a good track-record with supporting people who actually buy the games...
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
I, unfortunately, play on one of the early Eastern PvP servers which has a very high population. Day 1 and 2 we were seeing queues of 800+ people which translated to a 2 hour wait. As of last night around 8PM queues were roughly 50 or so, which made for a 15-20 minute wait.
We also still have problems with the auction house lagging out, some server crashes, dead mobs still running around, etc. So all is not yet smooth in WoW land.
However, all of that said, it is still an incredibly addictive game with just a purely engaging atmosphere. The problems are minor and are easily overlooked since the game is so wonderful. It is well worth the money.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
Blizzard fixed the problems quickly, except for one server (Mal'Ganis). During that time period, they had a workaround for the lag and queue times: join one of the lower populated servers. Technically, you could have played the game without any lag or queue times, if you were willing to go to another server. Unfortunately for Blizzard and the majority of MMORPGS, you can't enforce uniform distribution of players over the servers without repurcussions. Think of all of the people complaining about not being able to join their friend's server? This is probably the catch-22 of MMORPGs and server balance. Until one actually implements a feature that allows you to change your character over to another server, there is probably no hope of solving the initial capacity problems.
How is the EBay market for items from WoW? I know that high level items can not be sold but are people selling other items on ebay?
i got +3 for talking about Natalie Portman's goods
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Paying $50 for the privilege of paying someone another $15 a month is explotation of spoiled children.
$50 for a fully-featured single player game with online capability? Maybe (if it rocks). $50 for a MMORPG? You're freaking nuts. And don't give me that whole "development costs" speech. This game will generate a very respectable profit for Blizzard from the monthly fees alone (regardless of what anyone tells you).
As that fine capitalist and purveyor of entertainment to the masses put it,
there's a sucker born every minute.
This game's sales proves it.
It's too bad too, because I'd like to play the game. It looks like a quality game, and I'd pay more than the average fee. But I'll wait until the price drops and have the benefit of a much more stable and refined game.