World of Warcraft Continues To Grow

Lots of tidbits for you about WoW today, to get you through the weekly downtime. Gamespot is reporting that there are now over 1 Million players in North America, and over 4 Million players worldwide. If you're one of those 4 Million players, perhaps that special someone is out there in Azeroth. Tom's Hardware has a guide on meeting women in World of Warcraft, for the lonely druid or warrior. For a view of what the game is like now, Mogg wrote to mention a 9 months later review at GamerGod. Finally, not everyone is happy. As we mentioned earlier this month, China is planning on forcing MMOG vendors to build in time restrictions for their games. GameDaily.biz reports that players have already begun to protest the separation from their game. From the GamerGod article: "The main dilemma preventing battlegrounds from being a break away hit is the queue required to join one. It is best compared to standing in line at a grocery store. The bigger and busier the store... the more lines and more cashiers there is. The smaller the store the fewer. On low population servers there is literally no battlegrounds open outside of prime time leaving off hour gamers unable to enjoy battlegrounds. High population servers often have five or more of each instance activated during peak hours and rarely struggle for players to battle."

Comments

Re:Whoops! Addendum

[interiot]

One reason: player names aren't unique across servers. I would imagine that, internally, things like player-UID and other UID's wouldn't be unique across servers as well.

Can you trade items or money in Battlegrounds? If so, that would be a huge reason not to allow cross-server BG (as it would make gold farmer's job easier (they wouldn't have to make sure to farm gold on every single little server, and it would definitely help the money-laundering phase of gold farming), and it would increase the impact of dup bugs, if any). Though obviously they could disable trading in BG's to make it easier to span universes.

Limits won't work

[HD Webdev]

It's like trying to stop people from developing an addiction to a drug by only allowing them to use the drug for 2 hours at a time. And yes, it's a fair comparison. I've seen many an Everquest player do things that usually only seriously drug addicted people do. (grossly distorting the amount of time playing the game, loss of jobs because of lack of sleep or refusal to stop playing, paranoia that people are trying to interfere with their 'precious', losing their children in custody battles because of the game, theft to make up for money spent on computer equipment/monthly fees, etc...)

Time limits won't do what they are intended to do. In fact, it will often have the opposite effect because the person is left wanting at the end of each session instead of naturally getting bored or making the conscious decision that it's time to do something productive like mowing the lawn.

The forbidden fruit of playing longer than X hours will tempt a lot of people especially children to work around it...even if they wouldn't have wanted to play that long anyway. It's rebellion against authority. They'll rent multiple accounts if all else fails.

It's up to family & friends to intervene when someone has this large of a problem. Time limits won't do anything at all except make people Feel Good[TM] about what they've (allegedly) done to stop gaming addiction.