Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Hits 9 Million Users
Wowzer writes "Blizzard today announced that their MMORPG World of Warcraft is now played by more than 9 million gamers around the world. From the article: 'That's half a million more than the number of monthly players WoW had back in March five months ago. — It's interesting to note that if the World of Warcraft were a nation, CIA's World Factbook says that out of 236 listed countries it would be the 90th most populated country on Earth above Haiti, but behind Sweden.'
Also revealed this week was that DC Comics are creating World of Warcraft Comic Books based on the MMORPG, with the first issue appearing on November 14th. The ongoing monthly series will be written by industry veteran Walter Simonson (Thor, Orion) and feature art by Ludo Lullabi and inker Sandra Hope."
Meridian 59 and The Realm preceded UO. Not to mention The Shadow of Yserbius and, of course, MUDs.
Anyway, if you like UO so much, then stop referring to it in the past tense and go play it - it's still around, and the client was just overhauled.
Taken from http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml
Nope. Non-paying accounts, such as inactive accounts (in countries where it's charged per month), accounts not played in the last 30 days (in countries where it's charged per hour), and trial accounts, aren't included in the total. This 9,000,000 number is really for active, paying accounts only.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
You could own a house, put vendors there to sell stuff, you had trade skills that were fully independent of fighting, you had an economy of "rare" artifacts with no use at all people just wanted them to have them, you could kill other players and take their gear.
...)
EQ2 has everything but 'taking their gear'. EQ PVP servers have everything but 'owning a house'. Non-PVP EQ didn't have the gear stealing.
And it was so much friendlier to the casual player: you could teleport to where your real-life friends were, you could play with your friends even if they played 40 hours a week and you played 2, you could macro when you were away to keep up with your friends or do things like craft armor to support a guild. EQ has a cool system called shrouding, where a high-level player can 'shroud' into a different form and descend to a lower level; and change classes even. Its nice to play with friends leveling alts or, as you say, friends that aren't as hardcore.
Never played UO, I got sucked into EQ, just wanted to agree with you that WoW really is a dumbing down of the oldschool MMO's but that EQ offers basically everything UO offered, and is still alive and kicking (new expansion in a few months, baby! I think its #14 now
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules. Source: http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml
Apologies on behaf of the poster you replied to. He shouldn't expect anybody to actually click through to the Blizzard press release. This is Slashdot, after all.
Here's a few links for people who are worried about WOW addicts:
http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-fr
http://wowdetox.com/
http://wowrecovery.com/
http://deletewow.com/
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/WOW_widow
http://www.wowrecovery.com/
http://www.wowdetox.com/view.php?number=13640
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/06/23/boy-dies-after-
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/11/04/wow-online-fune
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,195236,00.htm
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/20/news_6127
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_warcraft#Pri cing
As you can see the pricing structure, especially in Asia, is very fluid. They're pulling in a lot of cash, but not nearly as much as you calculated.
$15.00ish a month for US subscribers, not sure about EU. But the chinese, etc. do not pay nearly that much... they pay about $0.04 an hour. And the Chinese account for an excess of 5M subscribers. source
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that World of Warcraft has every ability to be just as destructive to someones' life as, say, heroin.
I actually have friends who have tried to hit me up for their membership fee when they couldn't afford it, and others who actually spent time and talked to me more when they were on heroin than when they played WoW. It's amazing, but the behavior patterns are the same, in my opinion (although IANA-whatever). I even know someone who lied to their wife about how many accounts he was actively playing ...
Every time I hear about some awful DDoS attack, some small part of me hopes that it's the WoW servers... I imagine millions of dateless wonders and pimply faced teens who have never seen the light of day, jonesing for their digital fix.
Brilliant, Blizzard, brilliant. You managed to create a dangling carrot of a game with no perceivable ending, where millions and millions of people slave away to do ... absolutely nothing. Substance W anyone?
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
I played muds for years. I played EQ1. I've played EQ2. I've played UO and I've played WOW.
I really hated UO. It was very, very boring for me. There was nothing to do and every moment of every day you were getting killed or robbed. It seemed completely pointless. There are a great many people who enjoyed UO. That's great. I just found it most definitely was not for me and I'd never have suggested it to friends.
I played EQ2 when both WOW and EQ2 was out. I stuck by EQ2 for two years. Any game(WOW) that that many people liked had to suck bad (yes, my flawed logic)
For various reasons I gave up on EQ2 for a short while and I tried WOW. I had to admit, grudgingly, that WOW is a superior game to most MMORPGS. They've gotten a tremendous amount of things right. I realised that it actually most closely matched Everquest 1. It's hard to explain exactly why, but the feeling is there.
Is WOW better than UO... really a matter of choice but I would never suggest someone go play UO. And I would recommend WOW to just about anyone who wants to play an MMORPG.
The situation in which you describe is the ONLY way, according to the ToS, that an account can be shared by more than one person. Technically, within the wording of the ToS, your wife is not able to play your account. While I doubt you are entirely unique, I don't think the number of people sharing their account with someone who they are legally responsible for comes close to matching up with people with multiple accounts.
Night elf hunters seem quaint to me now. It's the Blood Elves who I find completely unbearable.
I remember when the Horde was generally the underdog, underpopulared but with the more mature players (Barrens Chat nonwhithstanding.) The introduction of Blood Elves changed the Horde entirely, and I think all the immature players who made the Alliance so unbearable have switched sides to play their beautiful pseudo-Anime toons (looking at wowcensus.com, many realms actually have more Horde than Alliance players now!)
I'm sure there are millions of players who are perfectly functional, social, and productive members of society.
That said, I'm also sure there is a much higher portion of people who play compulsively, to the detriment of all else, in WoW and other MMO*s than in any other form of entertainment past or present. Anyone who's known someone who's played, and anyone who themselves has played, can name at least one person either in person or in game, who is online nearly every waking minute, habitually stays up well into the early morning, and/or neglects real world responsibilities for "play" time. Anyone who says otherwise is either a newbie, woefully naive, or willfully ignorant.
The parent is not a troll for pointing this out, and I can't help but wonder about the state of mind of people who dismiss the addictive nature of MMOGs out of hand. The problem, as I see it, is that much of the population has no experience with WoW, and is rightfully skeptical. The number of active players who will actually admit the addictive nature of the games is small. But eventually the collective knowledge of society will better match reality, once enough people have been affected. 9M may sound large, but it's probably the number of accounts rather than unique individuals, and it's a worldwide number. Even if they're counting unique individuals, 0.05% of the population is orders of magnitude smaller than the margins of error for most polls.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
English only in general. Reported
Reported? Are you serious?
Anyway, in Swedish: "They have caught up with us! Start copulating for god's sake!"
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You know actually fully reading the article and following the links might help. That failing maybe the -dozens- of comments above yours dealing with this exact point.
So of course you are completely wrong.
I had to look it up, myself.
Obviously you have not played many MMORPGs. Leveling in WoW is extremely fast...even at higher levels. Are you going to keep up with friends that have no lives? Of course not, but a few hours a week will get you somewhere fine if you know what you are doing. The problem is that a lot of people don't understand that the fun is in the journey, not in maxing out your character. If you don't view it as a race (and you shouldn't, you won't win it) and just a game...it is a lot of fun.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com