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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."
You mean the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-slashdot dept.?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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...