Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Hits Europe
Mikkel Tscherning writes "Blizzard has released World of Warcraft into the European market. The game was not long ago released for the Northern American and Korean audiences, and has recently hit more than 1.4 million characters."
It's seperate hardware located in EU
Forget about the login server, they can't even keep the signup server up :-(
[I'm not just trolling here, I'm actually trying to create an account]
Your question is twofold:
are allowing more subscribers now or will the EU players be on their own segregated hardware and unable to play with the US players?
French, German and English clients are restricted to european servers only. Any US account can be turned into an european one, but I have yet to see that. So yes, segregation it is (good thing imho, sometimes RPing in french is just easier).
and..
Have they fixed their problems
Heck no!!!
Most people I know can't activate their accounts, the website is knocked heels over head with the swarm of new players. I had a very hard time finishing the even most basic quests, the newbye areas are saturated with newly called heroes!
Of all the times, now is the worst to be a Trogg in Duhn Morgan!
Ummm, no. There's a 600.000 people beta going on since NOV 26, it's called WoW US :-) It's not like they'd learn anything new about server performance and the like from the much smaller EU closed/final/open beta.
They claim they know that their game servers are underperforming because of a bug they didn't catch, so the solution is obvious: either hold off the launch till you fix it, or throw enough hardware at the problem, so that even while underperforming, the servers can cope. You can do something right, cheaply and on time. choose any two.
As for the signup servers it's a joke. They KNEW WoW would sell like hotcakes: everyone on the betas would most definately try to join on launch, so would a lot of the people who were playing WoW US, from an EU IP, and more or less everyone getting the collector's edition. And that's on top of your expected 1st day sales. They did have a billing problem before they shut down the servers, so it might someone else's server dying on them, but it's their fault trying to get CC numbers now even though the game has one free month out of the box.
I know that playing armchair admin is a bit unfair, but this IS arguably the best mmorg out there, made by one of the coolest video game companies around, so my standards are a bit high
Actually, Census+ snares everyone that's online at the time that it is run, although it takes about 10 minutes to do so. It does this by using the /who command with progressively finer filters until it gets a list of characters back that contains less than 49 characters (the maximum possible to display in any /who search).
/who 55-60 /who 58-60 /who 60 /who 60 r-"night elf"
How it usually works on my server is like so:
Found 35 characters
And so on. It keeps doing this until it reaches the level 1 characters, then lets you know how many new characters it has found, and how many old characters were updated.
The user can then choose to upload their data to the WoW census site.
Still, it's not 100% accurate by any means. There are people on several servers that make a point of sampling data from several different time periods in an effort to make the stats as accurate as possible, but as with any census some people will still fall through the cracks