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

from the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-france dept.

[game kid]

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

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

[pyrros]

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]

Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase

[JavaLord]

"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.

Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase

[pyrros]

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

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.

Re:I thought they said no new subscribers

[palad1]

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!

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.

Learning seems a difficult task.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Just a FYI

[TheOnlyJuztyn]

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.

Re:Just a FYI

[MonkeyBunker]

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

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.