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Role Playing (Games)

WoW Reaches 1.5 Million Subscribers 51

Posted by Zonk from the even-nuns-are-playing-it dept.
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."
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WoW Reaches 1.5 Million Subscribers More

WoW Reaches 1.5 Million Subscribers

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  • could easily have reached higher.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:49PM (#11980535) Homepage Journal
    ..if they sold the damn thing(europe).

    at start of the trial they ask for a credit card number.

    can you then actually buy the game at the end of that trial with that credit card? NO. is it available in shops anymore when the trial runs out? NO. has blizzard fucked up some logistics majorly here? YES.

    and when's the content patch? because seriously, i'm starting to think that it's not worth getting the subscription once they get them back on the shelf, because pvp in it is pretty darn sad(and pointless except for annoying people) right now.
    • 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 l

  • Anyone from Nathrezim? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Surye ( 580125 ) <surye80@nOspAM.gmail.com> on Friday March 18, 2005 @06:57PM (#11980591) Homepage
    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].
    • There's also the fact that Blizzard tends to move at a glacial speed (no pun intended) with patches. Compare them to the other players in the industry, like Cryptic or even the dreaded SOE.

      I understand wanting to make sure everything is polished, but Blizzard just takes that concept way too far. The MMOG industry is just too competitive nowadays to not be light on your feet.

  • Character transfers (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lobishomen ( 810898 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:05PM (#11980647)
    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:Character transfers (Score:3, Informative)

      by Golias ( 176380 )
      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
      • 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.
  • For a newbie who loved WC1, 2 and 3, can someone please tell me how this game is related to those? Is it like thr RTS feel of the originals, or is it more of a "leveling up" sort of RPG? And what missions do you play? Is it similar to WCII on battle.net, where you basically play together against the computer? Do you control entire armies, or 1 dude, like in Diablo or something?

    • Re:Brief synposis for a newbie? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Surye ( 580125 ) <surye80@nOspAM.gmail.com> on Friday March 18, 2005 @07:13PM (#11980693) Homepage
      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.
      • WoW has some game issues right now, its not really an full RPG, its just the action part, with a little bit of trade skills thrown in.

        Its also extremely unbalanced, Alliance out numbers Horde 2:1. Fighting pre-battlegrounds is normally zerg'ed by the alliance. Will be interesting to see how they keep alliance players happy when they cap 200 players per Battlegrounds.

        Also, with all the servers broken up to about 20K players per server, you will not get to play with all friends. Thats a real shame.

        I'd say
        • Its also extremely unbalanced, Alliance out numbers Horde 2:1.

          Nobody is saying why.

          I'm happy to spell it out, though:

          Cute female avatars.

          The human female is a hottie, and the gnome girls are adorable. Also, the drow elves (who are on the Alliance side) move like strippers.

          Lots and lots of MMORPG players, male and female, like playing attractive female characters in these sorts of games. This is the case for a lot of reasons, but it should come as a surprise to nobody who has been paying attention to
        • Its also extremely unbalanced, Alliance out numbers Horde 2:1. Fighting pre-battlegrounds is normally zerg'ed by the alliance.

          I don't understand why anyone would play [horde] on PvP servers. The game is about content until battlegrounds is delivered - then you'll have all the PvP you could want.

          Will be interesting to see how they keep alliance players happy when they cap 200 players per Battlegrounds.

          I'm very curious to see how this will play out (so to speak). I'm glad I'm playing horde.

          Also, wit
    • WoW takes place I believe 5 years after the events of WC3.

  • Wow that is impressive (Score:3, Funny)

    by debugdave ( 153189 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @08:25PM (#11981190)
    1,500,000 subscribers. WOW! (rimshot)

  • flash-bang (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blunte ( 183182 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @09:08PM (#11981434)
    1.5 million players is impressive.

    But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc.

    WoW may grow more, but I believe it will retract in subscriber numbers within the year. While the game world seems large at first, it really is fairly small. There are only so many places to go and things to kill. Ultimately you end up with a server full of level 60 players who are bored out of their minds. Sure they can roll another char and play it up, but even that gets old.

    WoW promised to offer new content frequently, but that's not been delivered. Whether the content has gotten delayed due to constant server/network issues is not known to the public, but what is known is that features that were promised long ago have yet to appear in the game. But of course, great things are Coming Soon!

    WoW will be a success overall, but the first year will remain bumpy. Us early adopters didn't begin to get what we expected, so many of us have already left.

    And for any people who reply to this with comments about "every other game has had launch issues", save it. I've played a good many of other MMORPGs, and most of them from the day they opened (or the beta before). WoW's rocky start (server/network problems) is unacceptable.

    • Excuse me? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @03:09AM (#11982979) Homepage
      "But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc."

      I've been playing it for over a week. Seriously (I have a couple of characters, the highest of which is level 20). In that time I've not had maintenance done on my realm, any unexplained lag surges, client crash bugs. The only thing I did get was a bugged node where looting something (I kept being attacked while trying to loot, causing a dialog to come up, then be dismissed immediately) which led to me being locked in loot mode once I did get into it, but a quick logout/in fixed that. There was no damage done.

      In terms of new content, I've already spend a good 30 some hours playing it this week. I've not gotten into very much of the content. I've never raided an instanced dugeon, for example. With the constant number of quests I have in my quest queue (whose max size is 20, and whose load seems to remain around 16-18), there's always something more to do. To really experience all the content in the game, you'd have to play through on both Alliance and Horde sides with a couple of characters all the way to 60, and that's probably an entire's year's worth of content (considering what you need to level as you get higher). I think complaints about content would be valid in a year, not a couple of months after its launch.

      Most of your complaints seem pretty cookie-cutter. Yea, Blizzard didn't anticipate the demand that they received, but I haven't had any problems recently, nor have any of my friends who've played right from the beginning.

      • Re:Excuse me? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Digital11 ( 152445 ) <digital11 AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday March 19, 2005 @01:07PM (#11985055) Homepage
        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:Excuse me? (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You've been playing for just over a week? Sorry, but you're in no position to make any meaningful argument one way or the other.

        So you haven't seen any maintenance downtime or lag? Well, the extent of those problems is very server-specific. Some servers seem to have extensive issues, while others are relatively problem-free. So maybe you were one of the lucky ones. But I think it's even too soon to say that. If your server would go down for an entire day every 2 weeks, I'd consider that extremely una

        • Re:Excuse me? (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Here's a fun thought:

          If some servers are having lots of issues and others aren't, PLAY ON ONE OF THE ONES WITHOUT ISSUES.

          Doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure that out.

          And if you made it to 60 and can't figure out what to do, remember this: there are two sides. Choose another server and start a character on the other side.
      • As you get to higher levels, you find yourself getting a lot of quests that you won't be able to complete for several levels. Around level 30 I found the amount of game content drops off considrably, and what is there are boring kill x number of monsters quests that aren't any fun.
      • I'm glad you've enjoyed your brief introduction to WoW.

        Just because you've had no unusual maintenance situations in your 1+ week doesn't mean there haven't been many many issues. There have been numerous major outages, some lasting 24+ hours!

        I've been playing WoW since closed beta. Features that were promised to be available in release still aren't available. Some are critically important, such as a PvP honor system.

        Why did you feel the need to respond to my post when you have no real experience? You
    • Although I have not played the game myself. I have also heard many complaints on this issue. But it doesn't seem to be to big of an issue if there are 1.5 million subscribers...something must be right :)
      • Windows has 90% desktop marketshare. So by your logic, Windows must not have many problems...

        WoW is the newest big-name MMORPG on the market. It also has a great look and decent gameplay. It is definitely a success.

        However, it is far from what it could/should have been, given the company behind it. If this MMORPG had come from some unknown development shop I wouldn't expect much, but Blizzard has already demonstrated its ability to create top-notch games.

        This one falls short of their standard.
    • I'm not going to argue with you, but I will say this -- for those that leave, they can always come back later, and still have their characters.
    • WoW promised to offer new content frequently, but that's not been delivered

      THE GAME IS NOT EVEN 6 MONTHS OLD! Christ people.

  • No wonder every developer wants an MMO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @09:56PM (#11981686) Journal
    Imagine if you can manage to keep a million+ people pay you 10 bucks each and every month. Yes MMO games are big and expensive to develop AND they have recurring cost in hardware/net/support but WOW. That is some serious cash blizzard has coming in. 1.5 million boxes plus a couple of months subscription.

    Will it last? Who knows. Sad fact is that lineage 1-2 has so far been the only one who could measure its audience in the millions. None of the big western ones have passed a million before. I know only 1 person who plays it and he already seems to be getting bored with it. Also the promised but delayed content seems an all to well known mantra from other hyped but ultimately disappointing games.

    A lot of people who never wanted to touch an MMO game before are playing WoW but is this going to last? Every month the bill will be coming in and when most players are already at the top level what else are they going to do?

    Can someone answer me this? Is it possible to play without having a credit card? Sony has global collect for us europeans wich works very well but all other MMO games I looked at seem convinced the entire world has credit cards.

  • Lineage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:13PM (#11986172) Homepage
    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. Yet it has a MASSIVE subscriber base.

    Why does it do so well overseas as opposed to other games? Is the new Lineage that much better than the old one?

    • Re:Lineage (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 )
      To whatever idiot mod modded me flamebait, I wasn't flaming, I was asking honest questions because I don't know much about the game, and what I do know from my limited experience with it is negative.

      Please respond rather than mod.

    • Re:Lineage (Score:3, Informative)

      by crashfrog ( 126007 )
      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. Unfort
  • Wouldn't it be more appropriate to compare wow subscribers to any ONE NcSoft game? I mean, you wouldn't lump EverQuest and EverQuest 2 together either, they are different games and people may not like one or the other.

    Is there any SINGLE mmorpg with more subscribers than wow?

    • Wouldn't it be more appropriate to compare wow subscribers to any ONE NcSoft game? I mean, you wouldn't lump EverQuest and EverQuest 2 together either, they are different games and people may not like one or the other.

      Ah, but you missed the key phrase... they were saying Blizzard was second only to NCSoft, not WoW was second only to all of NCSoft's games combined. Blizzard, as a company is number 2 in the MMORPG bizz, which is quite a feat since they only recently started.

      • "Ah, but you missed the key phrase... they were saying Blizzard was second only to NCSoft, not WoW was second only to all of NCSoft's games combined. Blizzard, as a company is number 2 in the MMORPG bizz, which is quite a feat since they only recently started."

        You would have a point if Blizzard produces more than one MMORPG. When Blizzard has only one RPG and NcSoft has three, it becomes a farse to make the Lineage games sound more impressive.

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