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WoW Reaches 1.5 Million Subscribers
Alarash writes "Blizzard just announced that its latest video game (and first MMO), World of Warcraft reached 1.5 millions of subscribers world-wide. Blizzard is now second only to NCSoft (over 5 millions users spread on Lineage, Lineage II and City of Heroes) according to the MMOG Chart."
..if they sold the damn thing(europe).
at start of the trial they ask for a credit card number.
can you then actually buy the game at the end of that trial with that credit card? NO. is it available in shops anymore when the trial runs out? NO. has blizzard fucked up some logistics majorly here? YES.
and when's the content patch? because seriously, i'm starting to think that it's not worth getting the subscription once they get them back on the shelf, because pvp in it is pretty darn sad(and pointless except for annoying people) right now.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This news comes with mixed feelings. Lots of people playing this great game? Awesome! Poor choices in handling load? Not always so great. They currently opened channels from one High Pop server Arthas to our Low Pop server Nathrezim. This has caused much friction from Nathrezim, who chose low pop for a reason, and this influx is bound to cause issues (and they keep gold and items, so further market saturation issues). However, I feel it's worth noting, some of the Nathrezim's are being wholely inapproproate. The realm forum is full of posts complaining. And the IRC channel has had some real childish behavior.
Blizzard Character Transfer FAQ.
People from high population servers are being given the option of a transfer to a Blizzard selected lower population server free with gear. This isn't the "Pick any server" transfer people were hoping for, but it should help ease out the congestion on the high load servers.
That and there's a huge new content patch coming off the test server in a few days. Things in the game are looking good. Good news for those of us still hopelessly addicted.
Imagine you are a hero from WC3. You only control yourself, but must rely heavily on your party/guild to make real progress. You get to be in the mind of one character in the be scale of the war. I must say, it's great fun if you can immerse yourself. (And Alliance vs. Horde is well played out, from one on one fights to whole scale raids on opposing towns). This will be more so when Battlegrounds and the PVP Honor System hits.
1,500,000 subscribers. WOW! (rimshot)
1.5 million players is impressive.
But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc.
WoW may grow more, but I believe it will retract in subscriber numbers within the year. While the game world seems large at first, it really is fairly small. There are only so many places to go and things to kill. Ultimately you end up with a server full of level 60 players who are bored out of their minds. Sure they can roll another char and play it up, but even that gets old.
WoW promised to offer new content frequently, but that's not been delivered. Whether the content has gotten delayed due to constant server/network issues is not known to the public, but what is known is that features that were promised long ago have yet to appear in the game. But of course, great things are Coming Soon!
WoW will be a success overall, but the first year will remain bumpy. Us early adopters didn't begin to get what we expected, so many of us have already left.
And for any people who reply to this with comments about "every other game has had launch issues", save it. I've played a good many of other MMORPGs, and most of them from the day they opened (or the beta before). WoW's rocky start (server/network problems) is unacceptable.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Will it last? Who knows. Sad fact is that lineage 1-2 has so far been the only one who could measure its audience in the millions. None of the big western ones have passed a million before. I know only 1 person who plays it and he already seems to be getting bored with it. Also the promised but delayed content seems an all to well known mantra from other hyped but ultimately disappointing games.
A lot of people who never wanted to touch an MMO game before are playing WoW but is this going to last? Every month the bill will be coming in and when most players are already at the top level what else are they going to do?
Can someone answer me this? Is it possible to play without having a credit card? Sony has global collect for us europeans wich works very well but all other MMO games I looked at seem convinced the entire world has credit cards.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc."
I've been playing it for over a week. Seriously (I have a couple of characters, the highest of which is level 20). In that time I've not had maintenance done on my realm, any unexplained lag surges, client crash bugs. The only thing I did get was a bugged node where looting something (I kept being attacked while trying to loot, causing a dialog to come up, then be dismissed immediately) which led to me being locked in loot mode once I did get into it, but a quick logout/in fixed that. There was no damage done.
In terms of new content, I've already spend a good 30 some hours playing it this week. I've not gotten into very much of the content. I've never raided an instanced dugeon, for example. With the constant number of quests I have in my quest queue (whose max size is 20, and whose load seems to remain around 16-18), there's always something more to do. To really experience all the content in the game, you'd have to play through on both Alliance and Horde sides with a couple of characters all the way to 60, and that's probably an entire's year's worth of content (considering what you need to level as you get higher). I think complaints about content would be valid in a year, not a couple of months after its launch.
Most of your complaints seem pretty cookie-cutter. Yea, Blizzard didn't anticipate the demand that they received, but I haven't had any problems recently, nor have any of my friends who've played right from the beginning.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Its also extremely unbalanced, Alliance out numbers Horde 2:1.
Nobody is saying why.
I'm happy to spell it out, though:
Cute female avatars.
The human female is a hottie, and the gnome girls are adorable. Also, the drow elves (who are on the Alliance side) move like strippers.
Lots and lots of MMORPG players, male and female, like playing attractive female characters in these sorts of games. This is the case for a lot of reasons, but it should come as a surprise to nobody who has been paying attention to the game industry since well before Lara Croft.
Nobody likes playing a cow, which believe it or not is the very best female option on the Horde side. If WoW had made the succubus a female counterpart to one of the horde races, instead of using it for a summoned monster, I suspect that ration would be a lot more even.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Why does it do so well overseas as opposed to other games? Is the new Lineage that much better than the old one?
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