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."

Comments

How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

"Login server down" in? It seems to be one of their favorites as they appear to have every Blizz system hooked into their Access DB haxxored together authentication system. Prepare yourselves Europe - our beta test is still going on here, 3 months after Blizz went to retail.

With that smal tirade out of the way (the login server thing really does annoy me), Blizz is set to rake in even more cash. Europe seems to like RPGs, especially in the UK and Germany, both lands of various fairy tales. Welcome to Azeroth Europe - Dark Lady watch over you!

Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't using Access, as you probably know.

The real problem is that they ARE using Tomcat, which is well known for its stability and robustness.

We know this thanks to stack traces the account server has, at times, given. You can also tell by going to www.worldofwarcraft.com and seeing it try to set a cookie named JSESSIONID. JSESSIONID? Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like what Tomcat uses for session management...

Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase

[Cookie3]

Actually, no, they didn't know WoW was going to be selling like hotcakes. For the Release party at Fry's Electronics, they knew a few things:
1. When Warcraft III came out, 700 fans came to buy copies and meet the staff.
2. Warcraft III had a good deal of hype, and had great reviews.
3. World of Warcraft was also getting great reviews.
4. The US Open Beta limited itself to 500,000 ("free") accounts.

IIRC (but don't have any sources), analysts were suspecting 40-50% of the beta accounts would roll over to purchase the game (== 200k-250k, over the first 3 months). Knowing those things, they prepared to (optimistically) sell 2500 copies of the game. Instead, _5000_ people showed up to the release party. Oops.

They broke their sales expectations for the _year_ in the first _two weeks_. They doubled their number of servers in a _month_. They've upgraded hardware for the largest servers SEVERAL times now, and are still constantly getting pushed against the ceiling.

I would be inclined to call WoW's sales as a catastrohpic success.

As for their performance... well, dumping 12 months of server rollouts and upgrades into a 1 month period ain't half bad. Now they're playing catch-up with other aspects of the game.

Still, they've got a lot of ground to cover.

Exp bonus for not playing.

[JavaLord]

Therefore, I'm hoping I'll be able to use this as a "quick blast" MMORPG when I need a break from the FFXI grind (and above level 55, the experience-grind does get pretty heavy going).

World of Warcraft gives you an experence reward for NOT being logged in, up to a max of one and a half levels (which takes about 7 days to gain). So if you don't log in for a week, when you come back you will earn double experence on every kill you get until you gain one and a half levels. You get this bonus just for logging out at night too. It's a good way to discourage bots and to make hardcore grinding less of an issue.

Re:Done a foolish thing.

[Reapman]

I've played both, and although both have their pro's and cons, I play FFXI mostly just because I've invested so much into it, but WoW is a pretty great game too.

Not sure what you mean by lousy atmosphere... yes the game does force you to group (unless your a Beastmaster of course) but on the flip side that means you have to have those darn annoying social skills too.

WoW is good for some people.. I call the game noob friendly just because it's so.. well.. freakin easy. Lets see... level 1-50 in cooking? that took me... oh... 30 seconds? Click a button, wait, presto level 50. Which is pretty sweet... but makes me wonder when everyone has reached "end game" within the first year, what people are going to be doing after that I don't know.

Yes FFXI is instituting a new fishing system... long overdue and I imagine they took a look at WoW and borrowed some ideas... but if you actually rtfa it's not the same system as WoW's... I would dare say it's superior.

now the day I hear "daboo" or whatever the orcs say in all the Warcraft games in FFXI, then I'll buy the FFXI turn into WoW theory :-)

In the end, play whatever game you want, heck play UO or EQ1 if that floats your boat.