World of Warcraft European sales rocket!

[Nick]

It seems that us gamers this side of the Atlantic are biger fans of all things fantastical than our American cousins.

Sales of WoW, Blizzard's MMORPG, have exceeded even Blizzard's wildest expectations.... even passing the number of units shifted in the States!

Last week, we welcomed a whole new continent to the World of Warcraft, and by all accounts, the game was an absolute success from day one. In just its first day of release, throngs of fans lined up in stores throughout Europe to purchase an estimated 280,000 copies of the game, a number that far exceeded what other experts estimated as the overall size of the European MMORPG market. As World of Warcraft's launch proved, those estimates were clearly too low. By the end of the weekend, the number of World of Warcraft players only grew, with over 380,000 copies sold in its first weekend. By this first weekend, peak concurrency had hit over 180,000 players. We're thrilled that our neighbors in Europe are enjoying the game as much as we are, and are excited at the successful launch of World of Warcraft in just its first weekend.

Here's hoping that the massive response doesn't cause the same server problems the game had in America.

They should've known it was going to be so popular, after all, HEXUS has it's own thriving WoW community, right here !

[Allen]

Originally Posted by Nick

Here's hoping that the massive response doesn't cause the same server problems the game had in America.

It has! The first day the signup servers went down from early afternoon to late evening and they have been on and off since then. We're getting random server crashes in game (last night Arathor was like a yo-yo!), and servers are reaching their individual maximum limit very quickly and queues are forming (mainly PvP servers though).

All in all, you can't fault Blizzard for what is an absolute cracker of a game in every way. But, you can fault them on their lack of ability to see they would have these problems.

[TiG]

I'd love to know what they are running these systems on...

TiG

[Zak33]

/\ they brought my old Celeron 366 @550 with 256 ram to run the servers.

Are they having trouble? ....worked for me in Q2 no worries. Amateurs

[wedge22]

I too would love to konw what they are using for their servers, they must be pretty amazing, I remember that they had to update the US ones pretty quickly.

[Defiant]

Well I wish they would upgrade my one (Burning Legion), I have to wait about 20-30mins during the week to log in and 80mins at the weekend

[Allen]

Originally Posted by Defiant

Well I wish they would upgrade my one (Burning Legion), I have to wait about 20-30mins during the week to log in and 80mins at the weekend

Ouch! Come and join us on Arathor then, no waiting times there!