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Businesses Entertainment Games

World of Warcraft Reaching Record MMOG Sales 75

Posted by Zonk from the go-dwarfs-go! dept.
Drac8 writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft has reached record sales in the first day, selling over 250,000 copies, and 200,000 accounts have been created. As of 5:00PM PST tuesday the game had over 100,000 people playing."
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World of Warcraft Reaching Record MMOG Sales More

World of Warcraft Reaching Record MMOG Sales

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  • You ain't kidding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Thursday November 25, 2004 @12:16PM (#10918343)
    Tuesday night they had freaking wait lines just to join certain servers. The starting newb zones were a crush.
    • Actually, I'm very impressed by how Bliz handled the newb zone rush. I can't say I ever had a problem waiting for spawns. It appears they somehow created a ratio in which if there are more players in the area, more monsters/items spawn. A very good idea on the part of Blizzard.
    • Tuesday night they had freaking wait lines just to join certain servers

      I wonder if we'll see a fork of bnetd by someone in a nonpersecuted country. Or does it work with World of Warcraft already? Google shows many mirrors around the world.

      • Re:You ain't kidding (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Bombcar ( 16057 )
        bnetd ain't gonna cut this one. The servers contain hordes of information, but bnetd just facilitates an IP connection between the computers. The WoW servers are massive, backed up by a huge Oracle database. If you can rewrite them, you'd probably get a job at Blizzard.

  • What about the other 50,000? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SammyJ ( 590557 ) <samuel.johnson@NospaM.gmail.com> on Thursday November 25, 2004 @12:25PM (#10918383) Homepage
    Were they just waiting for the servers to come back online? ;)

  • Blizzard one of the few left.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @12:29PM (#10918405) Journal
    It's not surprising the launch is going so well. Blizzard is proving that developer reputation does matter. This is one of the few developers that I can count on getting my $$s worth with. For me it started with Warcraft 2 and then Starcraft which I played somewhat competitively. The only other PC devs I'd put on their level are MS Games, Id, and maybe Epic.
    • And Id and Valve, now that we are at it.
      • Valve, yes
        Id no.
        Id has pretty much proven they make great engines but lousy gameplay.

        Actually Valve has given ID a one-two knockout punch by making a great game *AND* a great engine. I think Id Software may have seens it glory days
        • Don't count your chickens before they hatch. ID may not have great games IMHO, but they surely have a lot of in-house talent in developing the engines people actually use.
          • Thats great if you want to buy an engine. Most people here want to buy a game.

            When was the last time you went though the "Engines" part of BestBuy?
            • Good luck playing a pc game without an engine, I think they call that a coaster. You may not be shopping for an engine, but you are most likely getting one. ID's Quake III engine has been used in a number of games, notably Jedi Knight II and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Raven software is using the Doom 3 engine to make Quake IV. As long as developers keep using ID's engines, ID is not down for the count.

        • Re:Blizzard one of the few left.... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Uh? Valve makes two good games, and you suck their dick. ID makes 8 or 9 and you get all pissy because your machine wont run doom3?
          ID made it so sidescrolling games are possible on the pc (they invented the buffer swapping trick you can see in commander keen)
          ID made it so First Person Shooter games are possible at all (too many tricks to name, all thanks to John Carmack)
          ID made it so games based on their engines are both possible and the norm, lowering the devel cost
          ID made a ton of great games. Commander K
          • uh, thans for the reply A*C*

            anyway, I will say it again. ID has likely seen its glory days. IT makes good engines, but having seen both and used both, Valve is now way ahead of ID.

            I know for a fact that Id hasnt made a decent game since doom.

            plese post with your identify if you are going say who sucks dick as you obvious suck IDs more.

            • Valve is way ahead of Id in two regards:

              Firstly releasing a game that takes 3 hours to install and get running, and requires you to re-install practically every driver on your system. In contrast Doom3 ran smoothly out of the box.

              Secondly in intrusive copy protection: CD Key *and* online authentication every time you play *and* you still have to keep the DVD in the drive.

              Bugs. Doom3 never stuttered, it ran first time and it never crashed to the Desktop. HL2 does all 3.

              • You know, I would have more respect for the people who complained that Valve requires you to authenticate everytime you play Half-Life 2, IF THEY WERE IN ANY WAY RIGHT!

                1. No, they don't. Nope. Nada. They DO NOT.
                2. The CD check isn't Valves doing, it's Virindi's. They use the same mechanism on ever game they publish. Bitch to them if you want, don't lay it at Valve's feet.
                3. I have NEVER, EVER had to reinstall drivers for any game I've played unless I had previously borked the system due to futzing around w
                • 1. Yes they do. Your mindless fan-boi act doesn't change the facts. 2. Of course it is: or are you saying "Virindi" (sic) put a gun to their heads? 3. And I care about your system why exactly?
                  • Prove it. Unplug your net connection and attempt to play the game. Amazingly enough, you can! Why? Because THEY DON'T REQUIRE YOU TO AUTHENTICATE EVERY TIME YOU LAUNCH THE GAME.

                    And yes, they had a contract for distribution with Sierra. Sierra was acquired by Virindi. Valve had to produce the game for Virindi under the contract that they had with Sierra. They had no choice in the matter of distribution. That was in Virindi's corner. Perhaps if you actually read up on the situation instead of stomping your f

        • Nah, ID no and Valve: Hell NO!

          After the HL2 bug ridden POS that installs Steam and insists I authenticate with their servers AND use a CD key AND have my DVD inserted. And the dumb fucks can't even keep their servers up, nor deal with bugs which must have been obvious long before release (stutter and simple start up bugs and corrup install files).

      • I honestly wouldn't get too excited about the source "engine". Any company that can afford to add in Shader support and most importantly the Havok Physics engine can produce something that is along the lines of the Source "engine". With that said though its not the engine that matters but how you use it and Valve was able to do a lot with it which is why every "joe gamer" thinks that its the greatest thing since free internet porn :)
    • I'd rank Bioware and Valve in that kind of category as well though. Both companys have a penchant for producing great quality games and both have released games that have helped define their specific genres. I have great confidence when I get a game by some companies and I respect the amount of effort Bioware, Blizzard and Valve put into making their games great.

    • Re:Blizzard one of the few left.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 25, 2004 @01:20PM (#10918755)
      It's not surprising the launch is going so well.
      - Launch going well? You have a very weird definition of "well". 5 minutes to loot a corpse is not "well". 20 min wait on 700+ queue is not "well". Regular server reboots is not "well".

      Blizzard grossly underestimated the number of people that will buy the game, also their database architecture is pure crap. Plugging many servers on the same database is just asking for trouble. Especially with 200k+ accounts.
    • I've been playing Blizzard games since Warcraft I (PC) and Blackthorne (SNES). I haven't played them all, but I can't think of a single "bad" game they've ever released. Flawed or unbalanced gameplay, sure. That's bound to happen in multiplayer games. Blizzard puts in the time to correct the problems though, and that's what really sets them apart (sad comment, I know).

    • By "well" you of course mean "well for Blizzard." It's not entirely smooth for those ppl who made characters only to see their realm go down for 1-2 days: Server Status Forum [worldofwarcraft.com]

      Also, and I realize this is not the main point of your post, but MS games? What have they developed themselves that's been good?

  • more like 10,000 playing (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With the other 90,000 waiting for their server to come back to life...

  • Play WOW for free here! (Score:5, Funny)

    by darylp ( 41915 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @01:28PM (#10918824)
    http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance .html [leagueofpirates.com]

  • What about Europe? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Red_Deth ( 733789 )
    250,000... and thats 2 months before Europe even gets a look in. :(
    How about SKorea? Do they have WoW yet?
    /me counts the days untill he can play WoW again.

    • Re:What about Europe? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dude just sign up using a Visa card and use a random address in the US. I live in Mexico and I wasn't going to fucking wait for a localized Spanish version (which will never happen) to play which Blizzard keeps telling me is the best option so that I can enjoy the game. I even signed up using the White House address, hehehe.

  • only 100,000? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkmayo ( 251580 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @01:45PM (#10918951)
    So what happened from open beta where they where stating they had 500,000 signups and for the most part (with less servers) had very little problems (I only recall a few times where there was a queue to get into a server but that was when other servers were down)

    Now they have more servers but the queues are really bad to get into alot of them.. what happened, did the open beta numbers of people playing online at one time never hit 100,000?

    • Re:only 100,000? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Slime-dogg ( 120473 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @02:24PM (#10919227) Journal

      I don't think that all of the open beta accounts were created at near the same time, nor were they all trying to get on-line all at the same time.

      The DB is probably chugging to create the user accounts, but then you have close to 5,000 users in all the same area... it probably causes problems. Even in the stress test, I don't remember seeing more than 200 or 300 people in a newb zone.

      Thank goodness that my copy isn't arriving until December.

    • Re:only 100,000? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @02:44PM (#10919362)
      One thing to keep in mind is that you never actually had to download the open beta client in order to create an account during open beta. I suspect that a whole lot of people have crappy connections that severely throttled their client download, and before they had a chance to download the entire thing, the open beta closed, and they never had a chance to log in.

      What with installing from CDs now, everybody who buys the game is (obviously) able to create an account and log in within minutes of cracking open the box seal. So, rather than having 500k accounts and 100k people playing (strewn throughout the day), you have 250k accounts and 100k playing at any one time.

      Much of the lag on Tuesday and Wednesday was caused by a database issue, where anytime an action occurred that caused a new slot in your inventory to become occupied, you'd lag out for up to several minutes waiting for the database to catch up. During OB, this seemed to be a "threshold" issue - that is, once the server had more than a certain threshold of people logged in, the problem quickly became bad. Wednesday night they brought down most of the servers, and after they came back up this problem seemed to be mostly solved (though this may be because the threshold wasn't met afterwards due to people going to bed).

      Supposedly there was also an issue with insufficient bandwidth at the east coast data center. That'll learn AT&T not to underestimate the power of the nerd.

    • I would be surprised if even a third of the 500,000 open beta signups played much at all. I know personally that four people in my house signed up, and only two of us played for any respectable amount of time. The big differences between open beta and retail is that now people are paying for their characters, AND their characters are permanent, so there's no real reason *not* to play. *shrug*. I think over the next week, the queues will dissapear, the lag with whisk itself away, and we can all go back to p

  • Servers have been better since last night (Score:4, Interesting)

    by prator ( 71051 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @02:48PM (#10919383)
    Ever since they restarted the realms last night, I haven't had a problem. I'm sure that the people with characters on the 4 servers with extended downtime are upset, but they can start alts while they wait.

    This launch is still better than any MMO launch I've played in.

    -prator
  • They should impliment some sort of bit-torrent style system for all the people downloading the patches and environments from the server. With so many people all creating accounts at once and downloading a ton of stuff their servers must be fire-starters by now. When EVE-Online launched their Exodus Expansion on Tuesday/Wednesday they set up some .torrent seeds for people to use instead of killing off their servers. It's a 500 meg or so download and with so many people all doing it at once the torrent was

  • Linux petition (Score:4, Informative)

    by debrain ( 29228 ) * on Thursday November 25, 2004 @04:07PM (#10919878) Journal
    Anyone interested in passively promoting development of World of Warcraft on Linux through a petition can have a look at this site [blizzpub.net]. With a Mac port already, they're more than halfway there.
    • Why would Blizzard waste months of their time (which the WoW subscribers are paying for) on porting WoW to Linux which will only make a few hundred people happy? Besides, they couldn't afford to give technical support for Linux, because so much s*** on Linux can go wrong and, again, hardly anybody would be using it anyway. It just wouldn't be a reasonable investment.

      If you really want to use Linux to play World of Warcraft, then use Cedega, or whatever that thing's called.
    • Just wanted to say that you can run it on linux using the latest cedega.

      However there are a couple of bugs, they're not that bad:

      1. Mouse cursor not visible in direct x mode, must use -opengl flag
      2. crashes when under roofs with minimap open in opengl mode: just close it when going under a roof.
      3. crashes when you die and leave your body in opengl mode: Don't die : )

      If you get stuck inside a building with map open or in a cemetary after death you have to start it in normal mode (direct X, not opengl) move out

    • How does "a Mac port" mean they are more then halfway there? As long as you don't program the game using DX, how is a Mac -> Linux port any easier then a Windows -> Linux for a video game? I am not trying to be an ass, I just want to know. I have made plenty of programs for Windows, Mac and Linux and it is either just as easy to go from Windows to Linux as it to go from Mac to Linux because I used a common API (like QT) or it just as hard to go from Windows to Linux as it is Mac to Linux because I us
      • it is either just as easy to go from Windows to Linux as it to go from Mac to Linux because I used a common API (like QT) or it just as hard to go from Windows to Linux as it is Mac to Linux because I used a native API.

        You have answered your own question. :) The implication of a Mac and Windows port is that they, for purely economic reasons in the least, have a created common API. Were it purely a Windows game, it is less likely that they would have used a common API. The existence of a common API is che

  • Not surprising in the least (Score:5, Insightful)

    by couch_potato ( 623264 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @10:42PM (#10921668)
    Why am I not surprised? I played in the open beta, and it was, hands down, the most impressive MMORPG that I've played, ever.

    Everything in the game smacked of polish, polish, polish. Making a character was super-easy, pretty, and fun to do. From there, getting into the game is a snap, and your first mission is placed right in front of your face. I barely had time to experience any of the multi-player aspect of the game before the beta was over, because I was so busy doing missions.

    As I'm sure you've heard by now, it's hard to feel like you're on a level treadmill in this game. The mission system gives the game the feel of a single-player RPG, and the amount of polish/smoothness that Blizzard put in helps retain that feel, but you can't ignore all of those other players running around killing. Despite the hordes of beta-testers, I never once had to wait for a spawn or do any 'spawn-camping' or anything mind-numbing of that sort.

    All in all, a great game, and I would recommend it to anyone who doesn't have any other priorities (job, family, politics, etc), because once you start playing, all of those other not-so-important things in your life (like eating, bathing, and face-to-face socializing) will suddenly not be so important anymore.

    Get your free Nintendo DS! No BS! http://www.ds4free.com/default.aspx?r=64402 [ds4free.com]
    • Everything in the game smacked of polish, polish, polish.

      Except - for my part - the interface, the fonts are far too small. Though there was a scaling feature it didn't work well enough to allow me to read a lot of the screens. Funny how so many games allows you to set resolution, but not font size.

  • Got my collector's edition (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Thursday November 25, 2004 @10:46PM (#10921689) Journal
    I picked up my collector's edition today (knowing the guys at EB pays off - I got a cancelled preorder). Now the debate becomes 'do I sell it or keep it?' - as much as I'd like to have it, it seems like I could make some good cash selling it off... I mean, it only cost me $90 or so for something very rare, but opportunity cost dictates that if I can sell it for $200, then keeping it costs me $200, and I don't think it's worth that much to me.

    Sigh. The tragic life of a geek.

    Still, judging from the absurd lag and inability for the servers to keep up, it gives a chance to find out - I don't want to try it now anyway, it'd be too much of a pain.
    • Opportunity cost is a non-financial economic term. It is the opportunities you pass up on when you commit to a certain course of action.

      The opportunity cost of playing a game could be that you can't go to the pub etc...

    • I mean, it only cost me $90 or so for something very rare, but opportunity cost dictates that if I can sell it for $200, then keeping it costs me $200, and I don't think it's worth that much to me.

      Actually, the explicit costs (which don't factor in anything non-financial) of not selling it would be $110. Opportunity cost would technically include implicit and explicit costs/benefits such as the pleasure of playing the game would give you, the things you could do while not item/quest whoring, et al. ;)

  • WOW in Europe (Score:1, Informative)

    by randalx ( 659791 )
    FYI, for those in Europe the launch will be beginning on November 26th 2004.
  • My Undead Warlock made a mistake with choosing to be a Tailor. I've worked the skill up to a decent level. Now I can't get a break! I spent the night filling orders for Linen Bags! "Make me a bag, NOW!" "I said THREE bags Newb! You deaf?" *sigh*

    I signed up to have fun. Now I realize that this is work. em/ crying

    To top it off my Voidwalker just stands there not offerring a single word of support. Basterd!

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