World of Warcraft Shatters Sales Records

Mightydos writes " An interesting article was posted on Blizzard.com today... They say World of Warcraft® has sold through more than 600,000* units to customers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The fastest-growing massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) has also shattered all previous concurrency records in North America, achieving over 200,000 simultaneous players during the holiday period. "

Comments

Some things that helped

[Dark Paladin]

I have a copy of WoW, and it's probably the first MMRPG that I've played that I've enjoyed. I tried Ultima when it came out, Anarchy later, and some others - but WoW has me.

Why?

1. Attention to detail. Ever played a game and thought "You know, this would be better if I could do X"? Well, here it is. X is 99% of the time right in WoW. Chat - easy. Macros - simple. Able to compare what you have with what you want to buy - just hover the mouse over the item.

2. Mac/PC compatible. I know, I know - Mac's only include 4% of the "new computers sold" base or some such. But I know several Unix geeks who got Macs just so they could play some games on them (as opposed to Linux, which is even less native ports than for the Mac). So after the kids are in bed, I can sit in the living room with my Powerbook and play the same game my friends are playing in my living room.

3. Performance: you don't need a brand spanking new computer to play. It helps, of course, but I know a guy with a 867 Mhz Powerbook who plays without missing anything.

4. Ease for newbies and oldies alike: Even on PvP servers, you can be a newbie and be fine. Do you lose money for dying? No. Experience? No. Just inconvience (and maybe a little equipment damage, but that's easily repaired). Once Blizzard has the true battle areas in place to stage "wars", there will be a place for those who want to kill other people to head off to.

If you're an oldie, there's lots to do as well. Elite dungeons that you share with your direct friends, not everybody and their brother (so you don't have to worry about waiting forever for some particular monster to respawn - your group and your group alone will get the chance to get him in your custom dungeon).

Most of the time the game is as hard as you want it to be. I usually challenge creatures 2-3 levels above me, where it's "hard but fair". I like that it's pretty fair. If I fail, it's because I wasn't watching what I was doing, not because some arbitrary bit got flipped that said it was my day to die.

Is it perfect? No - I do wish they'd let clerics wear leather (especially as their attacks are underpowered, which is why I switched to a Hunter), and the respawn is almost too fast (there's been a few times I'd died because I was fighting a monster, got it down to 99% dead, then a new monster spawn right on top of me and killed me before I could run off - would be nice to have a 10 second countdown before they started attacking), but otherwise, it's close enough to perfect to make it the only MMRPG that I'll play.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need go hunt some wolves so I can learn to make Lean Wolf Steaks....