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World of Warcraft Hits Europe

Posted by Zonk on from the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-france dept.

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."

43 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. from the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-france dept. by game+kid · · Score: 5, Funny

    You mean the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-slashdot dept.?

    --
    You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
  2. How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by Deekin_Scalesinger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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!

    --
    "As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
    1. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by pyrros · · Score: 2, Informative

      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]

    2. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by Deekin_Scalesinger · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I have played MMORPGs since 1999. I was referring to the boards DB being linked to the login server DB, which is ridiculous. On this point, there has been no communication as to unlinking this or even that they acknowledge the issue, even though it has been reported hundreds of times as a suggestion. I don't care whether you listen to me or not - seems you are having a bad morning if all you wanna do is lash out and be a fanboi that wants to be blind to major issues such as not being able to post your concerns on a boards that their staff reads because their massive login system will neither allow you to play nor post comments about it. I love the game, but there are still major concerns that need to be addressed, and we as paying customers deserve to have them acknowledged. Why don't you step away from the keyboard, get some coffee and settle down a bit...

      --
      "As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
    3. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by JavaLord · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "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

      I've been playing for one month, and I go on almost every day, I've only seen their login server down once. I've seen it lag a few times, but this is nothing compared to the login problems at launch of NeverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies.

      The login server only seems to struggle when individual realms are brought down. For example, last night around 7 ET they brought down about 10 realms (servers) for emergency patching. This triggers a "Herd of Nerd" on the other servers, as everyone on the 10 servers that went down try to log into their alternate characters on servers that are up so yeah there is going to be some lag then.

    4. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by antifoidulus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Heh, the biggest problem is that the "open beta/load testing" period was WAAAY to short, esp. given how long it took to download the whole thing. By the time most people got it, they pretty much got to run around a little bit and that was it.
      If they would have kept the beta servers up for another week or 2, they may have caught a lot of these problems in the beta, were they are easier to fix(not to mention in betas, people don't have nearly the expectation of service that they have in production systems.

      --
      Monstar L
    5. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by pyrros · · Score: 2, Informative

      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

    6. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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...

    7. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by KevinKnSC · · Score: 1

      I think what he meant was that the US beta period should have been longer, so that the bugs would have been more ironed out before any of the retail releases, and then the rest could go smoothly.

    8. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by Cookie3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      present day... present time... hahahaha...
    9. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by pyrros · · Score: 1

      I was talking about the EU launch

    10. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by KevinKnSC · · Score: 1

      I meant bug in a larger sense that would encompass hardware problems and shortcomings; not just specific problems with software. Since you mention it, though, I've found a handful of small bugs during the three months I've been playing. Nothing show stopping, but there are quests with disappearing NPCs and such.

    11. Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase by C0rinthian · · Score: 1
      Fuck I hate apologist fanboy asshats.
      I hate people who assume someone who disagrees with them is an "apologist fanboy asshat".

      I play the game regularly, and I have little to no problem with it. I swear no allegiance to Blizzard, (I hardly played their games before WoW) so I don't have any reason to defend them.

      The game works for me. If you have problems, that sucks for you. It doesn't change the fact that I enjoy the game.

      (For the record, I also hate the vocal minority who are stupid enough to assume they speak for everyone else)
  3. I thought they said no new subscribers by dubiousx99 · · Score: 1

    Have they fixed their problems and are allowing more subscribers now or will the EU players be on their own segregated hardware and unable to play with the US players?

    1. Re:I thought they said no new subscribers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It's seperate hardware located in EU

    2. Re:I thought they said no new subscribers by glowimperial · · Score: 1

      In addition to it being seperate hardware. It is quite easy for European players to play with American players right now. My guild has at least 3-4 players from germany, 1 Irishman, 2 English players, and several Army folks playing from Korea. You just need a copy of the game to be bought in America, and the code from that copy.

    3. Re:I thought they said no new subscribers by palad1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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!

    4. Re:I thought they said no new subscribers by Moby+Cock · · Score: 1

      Have they fixed their problems

      I got my copy on Tuesday and have no problems logging in. I also have noticed any large crowds are been disturbed in any way by my fellow newbs. There may be problems on other servers, but not the one I'm on. And no, I'm not going to say which =P

  4. Done a foolish thing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I've just done a very foolish thing. I'm a relatively hardcore FFXI player, with a level 59 character, a wide network of contacts in the game and no intention whatsoever of quitting. However, I've just bought WoW.

    I played WoW in beta and, while it seemed nice, I don't think I'm ever going to give up FFXI for it. However, I keep being told by friends in the US that the great thing with WoW is that you can play it in small doses and progress far more than you would in another MMORPG in the equivalent time. 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). Anybody else trying to play WoW alongside another MMORPG?

    1. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Moby+Cock · · Score: 1

      This isn't a bash on FFXI. But for me, once you've gone WoW there is no point in playing the others. Everything you'd want is in it.

    2. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Fr05t · · Score: 1

      I played FFXI for almost 2 years. When I started playing WoW I kept my FFXI account. After 3 months of not even logging into FFXI I decided to just sell everything off, give my gil to friends and cancel.

      Personally I started to get mad at how Square-Enix made FFXI to sink time. 3+ hours to actually get started doing anything (yes I had a couple jobs into the mid 60s) just seemed wasteful after WoW.

    3. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Reapman · · Score: 1

      I was the same as you... had friends playing WoW too but I found I just could'nt keep both going... and I ended up dropping WoW (shock gasp!) not that it's a bad game, it's a great game, but I had too much invested in FFXI and I still find it a fun game. Lots of anti-ffxi'ers on here, but... /shrug, play whatever whichever one you enjoy more

    4. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Drawkcab · · Score: 1

      Once you get to 60, some of the content does require well organized raids. I think the cap on a raid group is 40 people, but that just adds more strategy since you can't compensate for poor tactics by just adding more and more people. Getting 40 of the right people to operate as a well oiled machine is as much of a social puzzle as you would want.

      But to progress in the game you don't have to get a group like that together for every play session. You can get to 60 on your own (though you would miss a lot of group oriented content), and if you like to explore and quest it doesn't even take any grinding to do so.

    5. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Reapman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Done a foolish thing. by dmauro · · Score: 1

      I play WoW pretty casually, compared to the people in my guild anyways. I can play for a few hours, not play for a day or so, and then play for a few hours again, and that way I stay in a constant rested state so that I am always gaining double xp and somewhat keeping up with my guildmates. I think the reward xp for being logged out is one of the features that keeps me playing the game. I don't have the time or desire to play this game 70 hours a week, and when Blizzard made WoW, they knew that. It's nice to have an MMORPG that doesn't only cater to the hardcore. "Quick Blast" indeed.

    7. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Reapman · · Score: 1

      Very good points all around... And yes your right, the atmosphere is a lot better in WoW, much less static then XI's.

      Don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying WoW is a bad game, it's actually pretty damn good. And from a technical standpoint, I'd say quite superior (like the lack of zoning you mentioned, that kicks ass), and I'm quite confident WoW is going to overcome these growing pains like most MMO's before and become one of the top rated MMOs ever.

      I just find it too easy for my tastes. Yes I know it goes far beyond 100 for crafitng in WoW, i've actually gone higher, but the fact I get what would equal roughly level 12 in FFXI, in 30 seconds... sorry that's still way WAY too easy, imho. Is FFXI too hard? perhaps a bit... but I still enjoy myself.

    8. Re:Done a foolish thing. by Quikah · · Score: 1

      All the skills (including cooking) max out at 300. The secondary's are raised above 225 at lvl 40 or 42 via quests.

      Cooking to 50 isn't a 30 second endeavor either, the parent is exagerating a bit. You need to collect ingredients for the skill; you need 50 raw ingredients to skill up to 50. You need to kill at least 50 things (meat doesn't always drop) or fish up 50 fish, and often you will fish up stuff that is too high level to cook until you get to 50. You can't do that in 30 seconds.

      --
      Q.
  5. looks like... by boeserjavamann · · Score: 1

    ... most RPG-players like the WoW-World more then AD&D stuff, but maybe thats because of the quality of the game. it would be great if wizardry 7 came out as MMRPG, still the best game in that Genre IMHO. maybe we could give blizzard a hint..

  6. Exp bonus for not playing. by JavaLord · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. MMORPG's by JavaLord · · Score: 1

    For the worse. After a half day of release the signup (!) servers are down.

    Has any popular MMORPG anywhere ever had a release date that went smoothly?

    1. Re:MMORPG's by RenHoek · · Score: 1

      One wonders why they didn't take the lessons of the US launch to heart. I mean I read that they didn't expect any problems at all, after the previous fiasco.. I'm sure they had a more realistic view on subscribers this time round...

    2. Re:MMORPG's by dubiousx99 · · Score: 1

      EQ2 was actually a pretty smooth release as well. They where ready and very quick to bring up more servers during those first few days as well.

    3. Re:MMORPG's by JavaLord · · Score: 1

      This might sound a bit pessamistic but I wonder if they just don't care. After all, they have your $50, they know you are going to sign up and if you can't the first day you have the game, it might piss you off but you will get over it once you start playing.

      The money for additional bandwith/servers to handle the two to three day period where people are registering and logging in at the same time might not be worth it.

    4. Re:MMORPG's by guru42101 · · Score: 1

      Probably for the same reason that there is still original release boxes on the shelf of EQ2 at my local Target, Walmart, CompUsa, Best Buy, and EB Games. While WoW was sold out at all locations by the end of the 2nd day. WoW was expecting half the # that they got and EQ2 was expecting 2x the # they got.

  8. Learning seems a difficult task. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I cannot believe that the signup serveres didn't even last a day.

    Fine, launch day is always ridiculously overstressed, but they should have anticipated this.

    I guess no web service can withstand such traffic (slashdotted phenomenon being an excellent example) but still no excuse. Implement a queue for all I care, everything is better than a 404.

    Some people will always say "don't buy at release" but that is still not an excuse that Blizzard can use. They should have dealt with this in a better way. I could have lived with it if only for an hour, but now it is getting into several hours. Not good.

  9. Just a FYI by TheOnlyJuztyn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the ./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW. It only covers a very small fraction of players who are online and nearby at the same time players are running the census program. It should be taken as a very rough estimate at the very most.

    1. Re:Just a FYI by MonkeyBunker · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

      How it usually works on my server is like so: /who 55-60 /who 58-60 /who 60 /who 60 r-"night elf"
      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

    2. Re:Just a FYI by Chyeld · · Score: 1

      Actually it only captures eveyone in your faction, at the time you are logged in. Which means that from a statician's point of view, esp when they don't track the time or date each census was run, the data is about as useful as a dancing frog that's recently lost both legs.

      It is a wonderfully beautiful attempt at collecting data, and once Blizzard patches the client to allow you to set the cap to the amount of memory the UI can use (promised in the next patch after this 'localization' patch coming next week) I plan on using it to keep track of what sort of people are on when I am so I'll have a better idea about what sort of groups are around.

      Since the current client is hard-coded to cap at 32 megs for the whole UI, it's a bit pointless to use it now however, combine it with the LootLink addon and you'll hit the cap in less than a week and have to purge both databases.

    3. Re:Just a FYI by MonkeyBunker · · Score: 1

      The current version allows you to capture the date by entering /setdate MM-DD-YY in the chat window.

    4. Re:Just a FYI by JavaLord · · Score: 1

      The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the ./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW.

      Not to mention, many players have 4-5 characters, and use them as mules, or to use other professions to support their main character. A popular tactic is to make an alternate character who stands at the auction house all the time. Then if your main character doesn't want to run to the auction house (time consuming, and expensive if you fly) you can just email your alt the items you want to sell. :)

    5. Re:Just a FYI by TheOnlyJuztyn · · Score: 1

      Certainly there is a degree of accuracy, but I have seen some servers go from "4000 horde, 1000 alliance" to "5000 alliance, 3000 horde" to "2500 horde, 7500 aliance" all in the span of a few days. I'm not sure why this is, but I certainly doubt that it's people deleting and recreating opposing faction characters.

      I think it's a useful tool for an estimate only, but not real hard data.

    6. Re:Just a FYI by ymgve · · Score: 1

      Actually it only captures eveyone in your faction, at the time you are logged in. Which means that from a statician's point of view, esp when they don't track the time or date each census was run, the data is about as useful as a dancing frog that's recently lost both legs.

      That shouldn't matter, really. The Census mod records the most vital variable, the character name. Since those names are unique, it doesn't matter if you only see those who's logged on. The census website counts all unique names, and that is the number you see reported.

  10. World of Warcraft hits Europe by Golias · · Score: 1

    Thousands dead, millions left homeless, as Berlin lies in ruins at the site of the impact. Global weather patterns disrupted for weeks. Emperor Ming unavailable for comment.

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    Information wants to be anthropomorphized.