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Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft Hits Europe 65

Posted by Zonk from the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-france dept.
Mikkel Tscherning writes "Blizzard has released World of Warcraft into the European market. The game was not long ago released for the Northern American and Korean audiences, and has recently hit more than 1.4 million characters."
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World of Warcraft Hits Europe More

World of Warcraft Hits Europe

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  • from the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-france dept. (Score:5, Funny)

    by game kid ( 805301 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @09:39AM (#11641219) Homepage
    You mean the orcs-in-britain-trolls-in-slashdot dept.?

  • How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Deekin_Scalesinger ( 755062 ) * on Friday February 11, 2005 @09:55AM (#11641376)
    "Login server down" in? It seems to be one of their favorites as they appear to have every Blizz system hooked into their Access DB haxxored together authentication system. Prepare yourselves Europe - our beta test is still going on here, 3 months after Blizz went to retail.

    With that smal tirade out of the way (the login server thing really does annoy me), Blizz is set to rake in even more cash. Europe seems to like RPGs, especially in the UK and Germany, both lands of various fairy tales. Welcome to Azeroth Europe - Dark Lady watch over you!
    • Forget about the login server, they can't even keep the signup server up :-(

      [I'm not just trolling here, I'm actually trying to create an account]
    • "Login server down" in? It seems to be one of their favorites as they appear to have every Blizz system hooked into their Access DB haxxored together authentication system

      I've been playing for one month, and I go on almost every day, I've only seen their login server down once. I've seen it lag a few times, but this is nothing compared to the login problems at launch of NeverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies.

      The login server only seems to struggle when individual realms are brought down. For example, last

    • Re:How many languages can Blizzard type the phrase (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They aren't using Access, as you probably know.

      The real problem is that they ARE using Tomcat [apache.org], which is well known for its stability and robustness.

      We know this thanks to stack traces the account server has, at times, given. You can also tell by going to www.worldofwarcraft.com [worldofwarcraft.com] and seeing it try to set a cookie named JSESSIONID. JSESSIONID? Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like what Tomcat uses for session management...
  • Have they fixed their problems and are allowing more subscribers now or will the EU players be on their own segregated hardware and unable to play with the US players?

    • Re:I thought they said no new subscribers (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's seperate hardware located in EU
    • In addition to it being seperate hardware. It is quite easy for European players to play with American players right now. My guild has at least 3-4 players from germany, 1 Irishman, 2 English players, and several Army folks playing from Korea. You just need a copy of the game to be bought in America, and the code from that copy.

    • Re:I thought they said no new subscribers (Score:4, Informative)

      by palad1 ( 571416 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:19AM (#11641636)
      Your question is twofold:

      are allowing more subscribers now or will the EU players be on their own segregated hardware and unable to play with the US players?

      French, German and English clients are restricted to european servers only. Any US account can be turned into an european one, but I have yet to see that. So yes, segregation it is (good thing imho, sometimes RPing in french is just easier).

      and..
      Have they fixed their problems

      Heck no!!!
      Most people I know can't activate their accounts, the website is knocked heels over head with the swarm of new players. I had a very hard time finishing the even most basic quests, the newbye areas are saturated with newly called heroes!

      Of all the times, now is the worst to be a Trogg in Duhn Morgan!
    • Have they fixed their problems

      I got my copy on Tuesday and have no problems logging in. I also have noticed any large crowds are been disturbed in any way by my fellow newbs. There may be problems on other servers, but not the one I'm on. And no, I'm not going to say which =P

  • Done a foolish thing. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've just done a very foolish thing. I'm a relatively hardcore FFXI player, with a level 59 character, a wide network of contacts in the game and no intention whatsoever of quitting. However, I've just bought WoW.

    I played WoW in beta and, while it seemed nice, I don't think I'm ever going to give up FFXI for it. However, I keep being told by friends in the US that the great thing with WoW is that you can play it in small doses and progress far more than you would in another MMORPG in the equivalent time. T
    • This isn't a bash on FFXI. But for me, once you've gone WoW there is no point in playing the others. Everything you'd want is in it.
    • I played FFXI for almost 2 years. When I started playing WoW I kept my FFXI account. After 3 months of not even logging into FFXI I decided to just sell everything off, give my gil to friends and cancel.

      Personally I started to get mad at how Square-Enix made FFXI to sink time. 3+ hours to actually get started doing anything (yes I had a couple jobs into the mid 60s) just seemed wasteful after WoW.

    • Exp bonus for not playing. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @11:18AM (#11642602) Journal
      Therefore, I'm hoping I'll be able to use this as a "quick blast" MMORPG when I need a break from the FFXI grind (and above level 55, the experience-grind does get pretty heavy going).

      World of Warcraft gives you an experence reward for NOT being logged in, up to a max of one and a half levels (which takes about 7 days to gain). So if you don't log in for a week, when you come back you will earn double experence on every kill you get until you gain one and a half levels. You get this bonus just for logging out at night too. It's a good way to discourage bots and to make hardcore grinding less of an issue.
    • I was the same as you... had friends playing WoW too but I found I just could'nt keep both going... and I ended up dropping WoW (shock gasp!) not that it's a bad game, it's a great game, but I had too much invested in FFXI and I still find it a fun game. Lots of anti-ffxi'ers on here, but... /shrug, play whatever whichever one you enjoy more
    • I play WoW pretty casually, compared to the people in my guild anyways. I can play for a few hours, not play for a day or so, and then play for a few hours again, and that way I stay in a constant rested state so that I am always gaining double xp and somewhat keeping up with my guildmates. I think the reward xp for being logged out is one of the features that keeps me playing the game. I don't have the time or desire to play this game 70 hours a week, and when Blizzard made WoW, they knew that. It's ni
  • ... most RPG-players like the WoW-World more then AD&D stuff, but maybe thats because of the quality of the game. it would be great if wizardry 7 came out as MMRPG, still the best game in that Genre IMHO. maybe we could give blizzard a hint..

  • Learning seems a difficult task. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I cannot believe that the signup serveres didn't even last a day.

    Fine, launch day is always ridiculously overstressed, but they should have anticipated this.

    I guess no web service can withstand such traffic (slashdotted phenomenon being an excellent example) but still no excuse. Implement a queue for all I care, everything is better than a 404.

    Some people will always say "don't buy at release" but that is still not an excuse that Blizzard can use. They should have dealt with this in a better way. I co

  • Just a FYI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheOnlyJuztyn ( 813918 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:09PM (#11644087)
    The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the ./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW. It only covers a very small fraction of players who are online and nearby at the same time players are running the census program. It should be taken as a very rough estimate at the very most.

    • Re:Just a FYI (Score:3, Informative)

      by MonkeyBunker ( 858589 )
      Actually, Census+ snares everyone that's online at the time that it is run, although it takes about 10 minutes to do so. It does this by using the /who command with progressively finer filters until it gets a list of characters back that contains less than 49 characters (the maximum possible to display in any /who search).

      How it usually works on my server is like so: /who 55-60 /who 58-60 /who 60 /who 60 r-"night elf"
      Found 35 characters

      And so on. It keeps doing this until it reaches the level 1 characte
      • Actually it only captures eveyone in your faction, at the time you are logged in. Which means that from a statician's point of view, esp when they don't track the time or date each census was run, the data is about as useful as a dancing frog that's recently lost both legs.

        It is a wonderfully beautiful attempt at collecting data, and once Blizzard patches the client to allow you to set the cap to the amount of memory the UI can use (promised in the next patch after this 'localization' patch coming next wee
        • The current version allows you to capture the date by entering /setdate MM-DD-YY in the chat window.
        • Actually it only captures eveyone in your faction, at the time you are logged in. Which means that from a statician's point of view, esp when they don't track the time or date each census was run, the data is about as useful as a dancing frog that's recently lost both legs.

          That shouldn't matter, really. The Census mod records the most vital variable, the character name. Since those names are unique, it doesn't matter if you only see those who's logged on. The census website counts all unique names, and th
      • Certainly there is a degree of accuracy, but I have seen some servers go from "4000 horde, 1000 alliance" to "5000 alliance, 3000 horde" to "2500 horde, 7500 aliance" all in the span of a few days. I'm not sure why this is, but I certainly doubt that it's people deleting and recreating opposing faction characters.

        I think it's a useful tool for an estimate only, but not real hard data.
    • The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the ./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW.

      Not to mention, many players have 4-5 characters, and use them as mules, or to use other professions to support their main character. A popular tactic is to make an alternate character who stands at the auction house all the time. Then if your main character doesn't want to run to the auction house (time consuming, and expensi

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