WoW Reaches 1.5 Million Subscribers

Alarash writes "Blizzard just announced that its latest video game (and first MMO), World of Warcraft reached 1.5 millions of subscribers world-wide. Blizzard is now second only to NCSoft (over 5 millions users spread on Lineage, Lineage II and City of Heroes) according to the MMOG Chart."

Anyone from Nathrezim?

[Surye]

This news comes with mixed feelings. Lots of people playing this great game? Awesome! Poor choices in handling load? Not always so great. They currently opened channels from one High Pop server Arthas to our Low Pop server Nathrezim. This has caused much friction from Nathrezim, who chose low pop for a reason, and this influx is bound to cause issues (and they keep gold and items, so further market saturation issues). However, I feel it's worth noting, some of the Nathrezim's are being wholely inapproproate. The realm forum [worldofwarcraft.com] is full of posts complaining. And the IRC channel has had some real childish behavior [worldofwarcraft.com].

Character transfers

[Lobishomen]

Blizzard also recently started offering the first batch of selective server transfers.

Blizzard Character Transfer FAQ [worldofwarcraft.com].

People from high population servers are being given the option of a transfer to a Blizzard selected lower population server free with gear. This isn't the "Pick any server" transfer people were hoping for, but it should help ease out the congestion on the high load servers.

That and there's a huge new content patch coming off the test server in a few days. Things in the game are looking good. Good news for those of us still hopelessly addicted.

Re:Brief synposis for a newbie?

[Surye]

Imagine you are a hero from WC3. You only control yourself, but must rely heavily on your party/guild to make real progress. You get to be in the mind of one character in the be scale of the war. I must say, it's great fun if you can immerse yourself. (And Alliance vs. Horde is well played out, from one on one fights to whole scale raids on opposing towns). This will be more so when Battlegrounds [worldofwarcraft.com] and the PVP Honor System [worldofwarcraft.com] hits.

Re:could easily have reached higher..

[WIAKywbfatw]

Uh, it might not be in every games store, but I came back from a trip overseas in early March. Last week, I walked down my local high street and while the branch of GAME didn't have a copy (and didn't expect any more until April), both HMV and the Virgin Megastore did, both at the same price as GAME was selling it (£34.99). And they didn't both just have a couple of copies either: one store had 9, the other had "at least 12", when I enquired.

So, you can get a copy if you want one, but it might mean looking around a bit. Getting hold of one in central London might not be too easy but here in the suburbs it took me all of half an hour to get my hands on one. This almost a month after the February 11th European launch date.

As for the content, and the upcoming patch, well I for one find plenty to do apart from PVP. Even if you hate PVE, you need to do some to start levelling and find some decent equipment so it's not as if there's nothing for a dedicated PVPer to do until Battlegrounds is put into place. And, for anyone not familiar with WOW, I'll just point out that it is possible to PVP right now, albeit without any reward apart from stroking your ego.

Be patient. WOW has in the space of a few months become the second largest subscriber-based game ever. I don't even think that Blizzard expected it to be this popular this fast. You didn't think that it was possible to acheive that level of success seamlessly and without any hitches at all, did you? And give credit where credit is due: Blizzard gave everyone in Europe who registered in February and extension of three days to their initial month's trial: they're doing their hardest to get things right, big and small.

Re:No wonder every developer wants an MMO

[Confessed Geek]

Is it possible to play without having a credit card?

In the US at least, they sell 3 month access "cards/gift-certificates" for 29.99. I'm not sure you can use them to register, but you can definatly use them instead of a credit card to pay.

I think the credit card thing is used as a tracker/identity verificatin method. *shrug* I wasn't too happy about it myself.

Re:Excuse me?

[Digital11]

A suggestion: Shift Right-Click will auto-loot, thereby causing you to not have to worry about grabbing every item individually. It will pick up everything off the corpse.

Re:Character transfers

[Golias]

Forget the quests, the refinements, the character transfers, and Blizzard still wins over EQ and/or EQ because of four little words:

Cross
Platform
Mac
Support

Yes, I know that almost no serious gamer uses Macs anymore, but almost everybody has a couple of friends with nothing to game on but a G4 iMac, and WoW allows you to log in and have those friends game along with you. EQ and EQ2 do not, and from the looks of things, they never will.

Speaking of which, I'm almost done constructing my home theater, using a Mac mini (1.42 version) as the media console. I will soon be logging in to the Silverhand server on a 119" widescreen! :)

Re:Lineage

[crashfrog]

Can someone please explain the appeal of Lineage to me? I played the original, and while I liked the anime style graphics, there was zero variety between characters, no customization really, it was laggy as hell, and not very exciting.

I tried it for like a couple of days (until I realized how slow the leveling was). What attracted me to the game was that a certain class of character could assert a claim to the throne and attract followers, take over castles, battle other leaders, etc. Sounded fun. Unfortunately it was going to take almost a year to get involved in that. Not fun.

World of Warcraft has a lot of that gameplay, and will have even more when Battlegrounds come out. And I'm nearly lvl 60 after only a few months of casual play.

Re:Character transfers

[Wyatt Earp]

This the only MMORPG I've played because, it works on the Mac and because none of the other ones really made me want to buy them for my PC.

Its rock steady on my G5, Cosmos works and I can play 8-12 hours straight without it crashing.