No More Players for World of Warcraft - For Now

Chris writes "FileFront has broke the news from Blizzard that they are no longer placing their highly popular MMORPG on store shelves, due to the recent server problems reported by Slashdot on Tuesday. Denying rumors that they had asked several stores to pull the game from shelves, Blizzard rep Gil Shrif is quoted as saying: 'We're just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.' The online store on Blizzard's website shows the game to be out of stock. No word on whether or not this will affect the Korean release."

Comments

Remeber diablo 2?

[Nova1313]

I guess no one remembers when Diablo 2 came out. The first few months it was released in the US the Realms were crowded. They crashed all the time, most people couldn't get on. They had to implement a queue much like WoW has. It's not the first time blizzard has had these problems and they always took care of the server problems in the past. at least they are trying. It's just amazing that they don't forsee the ammount of people. Especially right at launch and the months surrounding when you have most people logging on. But you live you learn..

Re:Remeber diablo 2?

[Bacardi151]

What one second. If a game is going to keep me playing it and it only costs me 15 bucks a month to do so, i will take it in a heartbeat. It sure beats spending 200 bucks a month on 4 games alone(having all 3 current generation consoles). WOW has done that for me. I thought the same thing before i started playing MMORPG's, but the simple fact is that if you are actually going to play it, and continue to do so, it costs less in the long run.

Better than AC...

[chris09876]

Good for them for taking some initiative to limit the damage. I used to play asherons call back when Microsoft was calling the shots. Practically every update they needed to reset the server, do a rollback, etc. At least blizzard is acknowledging the server issues and doing what they can to limit the number of people inconvenienced.

bandwidth or bugs?

[Suburbanpride]

Blizard is not a small company. you would think that they would have the resources to buy the appropriate bandwidth/server capacity. I wonder if this is more of a problem with how the software itself is written. A rewrite in order to scale better is the only I reason I could see for a major delay.

As good as it is to make money

[Datamonstar]

It's gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the "best" problem Blizzard could have had with this game.

Re:As good as it is to make money

[nuclear305]

" It's gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the "best" problem Blizzard could have had with this game."

No, it better be the WORST feeling for them. They can't even keep the servers up for the existing players to play.

Many will tell you that the servers were "down" from Thursday through Sunday regardless of whether or not the official status was "up." That's in addition to the 16 hours of scheduled downtime on Thursday.

The kicker? The 16 hour downtime to fix the problem actually made it even worse. That's when they introduced even more population caps without first informing the customers. Now players can sit in queues for anywhere between 1 to 3 hours...and if they're lucky enough to wait that long and log in, they may get 10 minutes of actual playtime before they get booted out of the game or lag out and forced to sit in the queue yet again.

This isn't just a problem for the high population servers, it's affecting even the low population servers. What does this mean? Nobody but Blizzard themselves can say with any certainty...but I'm willing to bet this has nothing to do with the popularity of the game and how many copies were sold. My guess is they have a poorly designed backend/database system that is simply broken and cannot be fixed even by throwing more hardware at the issue.

Doesn't Blizzard Deserve Props?

[dancingmad]

This actually seems responsible to me. Rather than sell the promise of server space along with the game or selling a game that has no value without the ability to long onto the server, they are holding copies back until they can fix the issues properly. If this is what they are actually doing, kudos to Blizzard; certainly the backlash they've been getting has something to do with it, but this is more responsibility than many game companies will take (and I say that as someone who isn't really a fan of WoW or the company's RTSes). To a large degree, WoW is like a forum or chat service and I've known forums to freeze new accounts to fix mySQL problems.

Of course, this could be a ploy just to drive up sales with rumors of a new player "blackout." But Blizzard is really well known for taking drastic actions to make sure their games are as good as possible. Is there any reason Blizzard should be bashed for this?

This will create a huge blackmarket for people selling their characters and accounts, though...

Re:Not at all

[RvLeshrac]

Actually, the current monthly WoW take is ~$6 million.

Releasing the game in Korea may improve that stream, but unless they have plans for cafe usage... not by much.

Aside from all that, someone on Evil Avatar pointed out that WoW has ~85 servers, and FFXI has 33. WoW has all these problems, FFXI doesn't. Yet FFXI has 200,000 more subscribers, not limited to the US. The lag on FFXI is almost nonexistent, only rearing its ugly head when you enter an area with an obscene number of people.