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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."
...but what did it hit them with.
WOW is fast to hit that many people. I hope the injuries aren't serious.
How many individuals? 9 million accounts, 6 million people?
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
80% of them are farming gold for the upper 20% :) Gold farmers shouldn't count...
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
I find it fascinating that all the later, more popular mmorpg's seem to be far inferior to the "original": Ultima Online.
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.
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.
PvP made you actually have REAL friends and REAL enemies, instead of "You're an orc and he's an elf so you hate each other". It also made guilds have value, as you needed protection and could benefit from a guildmate making your armor while you made him potions.
Basically, I just can't stand that WoW is worse than UO in almost every way but has about 8.8 million more subscribers. UO was ahead of its time.
80% of them are farming gold for the upper 20% :)
That just proves the realism of the game.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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
Each issue of the WoW comic's gripping storyline will be interrupted by the characters running around shouting misspelled racist and homophobic epithets at the reader for two solid pages.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
I knew WoW was a HUGE MMORPG and that's about it but if my calculations are correct 9M Active Accounts * $10/monthly subscription fees(that's my guess, I don't know the actual figure) * 12 Months = $1.08 Billion a year! Holy Cow, that's insane!
I get amused by the people that claim WoW is "inferior" because of its friendly environment and no-penalty PvP. Well it's not, that is actually what makes it superior to most people, and is the reason they have 9 million players. Most people aren't hardcore, they don't want a game that punishes them for failure, they don't want to have to deal with keeping up with those who make a game in to a life and so on.
If you want games like that, they are available. I'm made to understand EVE is such a game. Extremely hardcore, real loss, etc, etc. That's great if that's what you like, but don't pretend like it is "superior". One of the reasons WoW is so great is it treats things more like a single player game. When I die in a SP game I don't lose anything but time, I am set back to whatever my last save point was and must replay from there. The nearest MMORPG experience, since you can't reload, is to just have you have to wait a bit as you head back to your body. No loss of anything but time.
That's what has kept me interested in WoW. It is the 5th MMORPG I've tried (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE, Starwars Galaxies) and the only one that has lasted more than 6-9 months or so. All the rest got boring fast for various reasons. For example in EQ the problem was it felt like they hated you. The game was setup to punish you severely for failure, and to be very unhelpful.
WoW gets it right for me, and for many others because it is extremely easy to get in to (I've never seen a more friendly start than WoW's newbie quests), doesn't punish you, and has lots to do for whatever it is you like doing. I realise that's not for everyone, but you need to realise that if a more hardcore experience is your preference that is a different preference, not a superior one. There is nothing wrong with wanting an easier, more friendly experience. After all, the whole point of games is to be entertaining. They are not for proving or accomplishing something, they are there to make you happy and let you have fun. Whatever it is that does that, that's what you should play. For 9 million of us (and counting) WoW is that kind of game.
There are only 9 million players but 11 million night elf hunters. Go figure.
Am I out of touch, what is this World of Warcraft thing?
And its crafting system, which required a ton of grinding out the same crap over and over again for a .1 skill gain (I GMed blacksmithing, bowcrafting and tailoring on several characters over there.) And you still couldn't create an item that was as good as various world drops you could find.
And the constant griefing, from the flock of pickpockets at the bank before the Trammel split to the flock of PKers who kept a stranglehold on the dungeons on the PvP side where the best items dropped.
And the game balance, which was fine right up until EA threw it out the window with the new loot system and artifacts.
Other than that Ultima Online was a pretty good game though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I recall the same thing said about space invaders. Before that, it was probably tv.
One man's pastime is another's OCD.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I would wager that this number is highly inflated...
Personally, I own and maintain 3 accounts and my girlfriend has her own as well, so 2 players, 4 accounts... If you take a look at my guild of 50+ active members you will find an impressive roster of well over 200 characters many of which are on seperate accounts. I know I have at least 15 players with more than one account, and our biggest account holder is sitting around 8.
Take a look at Dual Boxing and evaluate how many multi-account users there are out there... Many claim (and have video proof) of 5, 10, and even 50 boxes running at a time... with one of the contributors to the community boasting over 200 wow accounts on one server...
I figure that without even counting farmers, we have made a significant notch in the 9 million number...
Zanthor
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. i pasted this to a friend who pointed out that while the taxes are much lower the death rate is significantly higher...
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
The Department of Education reports 9M new drop-outs.
De är ikapp oss! Börja kopulera för guds skull!
Particles, stuff that matters.
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!
We get bored, I think, so that we won't end up in situations like the WoW addicts, endlessly repeating a few short actions. We get bored so that we won't get stuck. It's a protective instinct. However it's done, MMORPGs are excellent at short-circuiting that. You have a quick succession of rewards at the beginning, and an endless series of ever more time-consuming tasks to be performed to achieve the same high that was at first so simple and so easy. I'm sure most addicts didn't start out intending to play for ninety hours a week, just like no one starts drinking with the intent of being an alcoholic.
I liked Warcraft III, and I enjoyed playing it all the way through. But it had an ending. It could be completed, finished, done with. WoW has no ending, and that's why I won't go near it, no matter how much fun it looks like--it's similar to the reason I didn't start smoking when I was younger: loads of cautionary examples walking around hating themselves for their habit.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think it's more that the average old lady could kick the ass of the average WoW addict. ;-). Meredith is a 6' 2" good looking blonde, and her husband isn't someone you'd like to pick a fight with - he's built pretty well. All of the people I mentioned are also above 30 years old.
While it makes for a good joke, I'm pretty surprised how much the WoW players I've been exposed to DON'T match that steriotype. Quick rundown of the people I know who play WoW. Brandon is 6' 5", and works out a lot (huge arms), owns his own plumbing company, and isn't generally a gamer. My ex-wife (and litterally all of her family) was anything but geeky - she was introduced to WoW by her step father, and got me into the game (I am a gamer though). I own three businesses, generally in ok shape (working my way to 'good' shape now
Most of the people (not all) that I know who play WoW are surprisingly normal people who have interests outside of the game, and it's another fun diversion to play. Very few of them are the obsessive geeky gamers you normally associate with video games.
Of course, this could be saying a lot more about the people I associate with - but based on the spread of people I saw standing in line for the release of Burning Crusade, the 'common gamer' image doesn't seem to match up with reality nearly as much when you start talking about WoW.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
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.
I also tried getting back to it, putting in a few hours a week. Unfortunately once you get past a certain point, a few hours a week won't get you anywhere and I think that's the biggest fallacy in WoW. Games shouldn't turn into full time jobs just to keep up, and if you're a fresh player you're gonna have to put in that kind of time. On the other hand, CounterStrike is a game that you can play 30 minutes a day and get your fix. Heck, I'd recommend Diablo II any day of the year over WoW. It only gets time consuming on Act 5 the third time around...
And the remaining 5.991 Billion people *still* don't give a fuck.
Ahh, perspective...