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2 Million Azeroth Citizens
Gamasutra (and everyone else) has the news that World of Warcraft has hit 2 Million subscribers, making it the first U.S. based commercial MMOG to do so. From the article: "The most popular current MMORPGs in Asia are generally developed locally, but if World of WarCraft proves popular in China, as well as other soon to be launched territories such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, it could quickly become the most globally popular online game in history.
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There might be more subscribers, but there are less people playing online now. People are getting burnt out of the same old instances, and waiting for poorly designed PvP.
Your wait in queue in 3 hours, have a nice day.
Eh... I think the graphics issue boils down like this:
The actual technical feats of the graphics engine in the game are decent, but not amazing(however, in their defense they do a damn good job of running on lower end hardware...). There are people who's opinion of the graphics in a game are derived almost solely from the technical specs of the game's engine... Badly designed levels, clashing colors all over the place doesn't matter if the poly count is high with lots of sparkly effects. These sorts will not like WoW.
Second, Blizzard has a very distinctive art style. Some people simply won't like WoW because the particular style to it isn't to their liking(there's definitely a vocal group these days who want their graphics as 'realistic' as possible, and Blizzard's style definitely won't appease that group).
Attractiveness of graphics is a very subjective matter... personally, I agree with you that WoW does a really good job overall(they definitely have slipped up a little when it comes to some of the equipment for players, but everything else is really great). Different people will have different takes, and in my experience most of the complaints about WoW tend to follow the two lines I mentioned above...
That shows that you are a bit out of the loop, either because you are very low level or only play from time to time.
For instance:
Considering in games like EQ where you had to schedule end-game raid with "uber guilds" who basically controlled the high-end dungeons...
There are two world bosses that spawn once a week and usualy are owned by the uberguilds on each server. Molten Core and Onyxia requires Uber Guild tactics and dedication to get to and beat. All of this is the current end game (which in Wow comes fast as the leveling is so easy).
or farmers who ruin economies in Final Fantasy Online (and who are TRYING in WoW)...
Most "farmable" world zones are owned by the farmers atm. The prices in the Auction House are inflated by them. Doesn't that qualify as ruining the economy?
or totally UNPLAYABLE launches like Anarchy Online...
Every new patch the game becomes more and more laggy. I'm playing on a mid-high population server , and I just dont go to Ironforge to avoid the lag. The mail everywhere takes like 10 seconds to open, and like 10-20 seconds to detach an item. Trying to use the AH is almost pointless and require a lot of patience.
There are queues for everything. Battlegrounds have 6-8 hours queue for alliance (Blizzard said that all servers were balanced, bullshit). On weekends I have 10-15 minutes of queue to join the server. If I happen to disconnect for any reason, I have at least that wait. They dont give me the oportunity to move to a lower population server, and I'm not going to start a 3rd char to 60.
I agree the game's nice...but their infrastructure kinda sucks. And their customer service its a crap.