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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."
Where's the response to the questions we asked the developers a week or two ago?
As stated in the linked article a paying customer could have bought the game, a game card, or a subscription. This does not tell us the number of paid accounts on the North American servers. This only tells us how many there could be.
Consider that they have around 100 servers (104 or 105?). Now if only 1000 people are on each server at a time, I think the number can be double that during primetime, this puts them at 100k simulataneous users. That is phenomenal for a US MMORPG. The standard "rule" is that there are 5 times the number of accounts as there are people online at any one time. This would put them over or near 500,000 subscriptions. Impressive by itself. There is always http://www.mmorpgchart.com/ to look at as well. He has a good disclaimer but seems "mostly" accurate in his guesses.
As for the complaints. I find that most people in MMORPGs promise themselves more than the developers do. WOW does have its share of problems but Blizzard has shown they do act. They are very good when dealing with exploiters.
It is worth noting that this news is within 7 days of Turbine announcing they are closing down AC2. The integrity of the companies is very evident in how both fared. Blizzard has done their best to promote their game, police their game, and they did an incredible amount of work so that they released a very stable and nearly complete game. Constrast that to how Turbine handled AC2 both when it was also a MS product and when it was totally a Turbine product. They released a feature incomplete game ridden with bugs and exploits, the did nearly nothing to stop the known exploits early on forever damaging the game, and then there was little promotion of the game except by web banners and a few ads. To add insult to injury one of their lead people blamed the migration from MS's billing system to their own for a major population drop! Completely brushing over the fact that people don't pay for things they do not like.
Even with all the disgruntled people, whom are more evident because of the web, Blizzard and WOW will continue to propser simply because Blizzard is not standing still. The game improves monthly and there is much more to do in this game than can be experienced in just a few months. Battlefields is important, but it is not important to everyone. This is one thing most articles ignore. Battlefields is PvP, a lot of people playing WOW will never PvP so they do not care. These people who don't need PvP or Battlefields will find their own causes to rail about. Still you have to look at it this way, if your users are in such numbers as to get other sites to post about them your game is probably doing just fine.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Another issue which is exacerbated by these imbalances is that one side's PvP players are often highly practiced, coordinated, etc. whereas the other side has a much higher percentage of 'pickup' players. The higher-pop side with the 'pickup' players will typically get beat on - which is not a problem in and of itself, but it will tend to drive away the more 'casual' gamers from that side, which will eventually lower the BG demand even on the high-pop side.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
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.
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.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
I don't think there is a problem with the number of instances...I think the vast majority of queueing problems are because there aren't enough players to fill out a particular instance. For instance (pun intended), AV needs about 25 people at least to queue on each side before an instance starts. If only 20 are queued, they are going to wait until 5 more people join. Then once that instance is full, if there aren't another 25 people to start a new instance, those people are forced to wait until people leave in the instance that is already up. So increasing the number of allowable instances (at least on a low or medium pop server) wouldn't do anything to help the queue lines.
As far as people who play off hours not able to join in the fun, should be considered a very minor problem. I would think the aim would be to please a majority of the player base with add ons.
On my server, which is a low pop server, AV usually starts up around 6pm server time (9pm eastern, where most of the players are from) on weekdays, and a little earlier on the weekends. If you aren't there at about 5:30 server to join the queue on the alliance side, you're going to miss the start of the first instance, and likely won't get on until around 7 or 8 server time. Therefore, it isn't about people who play off hours, it's that people who can't be on at 5:30 server won't get to play very often.
Overall, I think people can understand that if they play during off hours, they don't have as good a shot of getting into BG. Those people should probably play on higher-pop servers where there is always enough people on to do BG. But people on low pop servers who can't get on at 5:30 (but still play during peak times) are unfairly missing out on the BG. But it's not the fault of Blizzard -- Blizzard can't force people to join the BG queues.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
I myself can get 2 hours free, but not normally 5 hours and not five hours at the same time for multiple consecutive days. Also things like Molten Core runs tend to have to be coordinated. You are basically commiting to being in game at a certain time of day and to stay online for a long time. Running through the whole dungeon typically takes about 6 long sessions.
The reason you need to commit to the time is because the dungeon requires a group of 40 players total to run it versus 5 or 10 for the earlier dungeons.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
That article had absolutely nothing to do with how to meet women... All it was was an anecdote from some dude about how he knew this guys whose friend's fiance sent some half naked pictures in return for access to the beta for WoW.