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.?

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.

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: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.