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Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft Continues To Grow 58

Posted by Zonk from the it-can't-be-stopped dept.
Lots of tidbits for you about WoW today, to get you through the weekly downtime. Gamespot is reporting that there are now over 1 Million players in North America, and over 4 Million players worldwide. If you're one of those 4 Million players, perhaps that special someone is out there in Azeroth. Tom's Hardware has a guide on meeting women in World of Warcraft, for the lonely druid or warrior. For a view of what the game is like now, Mogg wrote to mention a 9 months later review at GamerGod. Finally, not everyone is happy. As we mentioned earlier this month, China is planning on forcing MMOG vendors to build in time restrictions for their games. GameDaily.biz reports that players have already begun to protest the separation from their game. From the GamerGod article: "The main dilemma preventing battlegrounds from being a break away hit is the queue required to join one. It is best compared to standing in line at a grocery store. The bigger and busier the store... the more lines and more cashiers there is. The smaller the store the fewer. On low population servers there is literally no battlegrounds open outside of prime time leaving off hour gamers unable to enjoy battlegrounds. High population servers often have five or more of each instance activated during peak hours and rarely struggle for players to battle."
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World of Warcraft Continues To Grow More

World of Warcraft Continues To Grow

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  • Q&A with the Devs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bradbeattie ( 908320 ) <bradbeattie@alum ... a ['loo' in gap]> on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:59AM (#13436688) Homepage Journal
    Where's the response to the questions we asked the developers a week or two ago?
  • Do instance meeting stones queues have the same behavior? On my server, they're almost completely unused, which puts in place the vicious cycle mentioned for battlegrounds.

    In my mind, instances are the most fun part of the game, but you have to allocate 4-5 hours to do an instance currently, because it takes so long for people to form a group, then get over to the instance. The fact that instances take more than an hour or two to do is fine, but the extra wasted time is such a drag, as it makes it much

    • I always found that to big a problem with meeting stones, they only work if other people are using them, you wait just as long with a meeting stones as you spamming channel 4 for group members

      I think channel 4 is the LFG channel, i could be wrong.
  • To fix the Queue problem, all I would think they need to do is increase the maximum number of instances being run at a time. That may just be adding more hardware or changing code limitations.
    As far as people who play off hours not able to join in the fun, should be considered a very minor problem. I would think the aim would be to please a majority of the player base with add ons.

    • Re:Battlegrounds (Score:3, Informative)

      by HarvardAce ( 771954 )
      To fix the Queue problem, all I would think they need to do is increase the maximum number of instances being run at a time.

      I don't think there is a problem with the number of instances...I think the vast majority of queueing problems are because there aren't enough players to fill out a particular instance. For instance (pun intended), AV needs about 25 people at least to queue on each side before an instance starts. If only 20 are queued, they are going to wait until 5 more people join. Then once tha

      • It's not only that, it's the way they put people through - first come, first serve. Meaning if I have a full raid group ready and waiting, and there's two guys in line ahead of me, the game is going to wait until there are 38 more single players before it starts a game, rather than putting my raid in.
      • First off, there's a factor beyond population size which we used to see all the time in DAoC; some realms are more PvE-oriented and it becomes very hard to convince people to go to the frontiers. Same thing in WoW: not every server has an equal percentage of people interested in the battlegrounds.

        Second of all, it is Blizzard's fault. They designed a system that doesn't handle population mis-matches (whether caused by desire or physical numbers). There are ways to help deal with population issues in batt

  • They need to be more honest with their numbers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @12:19PM (#13436907) Homepage Journal
    As stated in the linked article a paying customer could have bought the game, a game card, or a subscription. This does not tell us the number of paid accounts on the North American servers. This only tells us how many there could be.

    Consider that they have around 100 servers (104 or 105?). Now if only 1000 people are on each server at a time, I think the number can be double that during primetime, this puts them at 100k simulataneous users. That is phenomenal for a US MMORPG. The standard "rule" is that there are 5 times the number of accounts as there are people online at any one time. This would put them over or near 500,000 subscriptions. Impressive by itself. There is always http://www.mmorpgchart.com/ [mmorpgchart.com] to look at as well. He has a good disclaimer but seems "mostly" accurate in his guesses.

    As for the complaints. I find that most people in MMORPGs promise themselves more than the developers do. WOW does have its share of problems but Blizzard has shown they do act. They are very good when dealing with exploiters.

    It is worth noting that this news is within 7 days of Turbine announcing they are closing down AC2. The integrity of the companies is very evident in how both fared. Blizzard has done their best to promote their game, police their game, and they did an incredible amount of work so that they released a very stable and nearly complete game. Constrast that to how Turbine handled AC2 both when it was also a MS product and when it was totally a Turbine product. They released a feature incomplete game ridden with bugs and exploits, the did nearly nothing to stop the known exploits early on forever damaging the game, and then there was little promotion of the game except by web banners and a few ads. To add insult to injury one of their lead people blamed the migration from MS's billing system to their own for a major population drop! Completely brushing over the fact that people don't pay for things they do not like.

    Even with all the disgruntled people, whom are more evident because of the web, Blizzard and WOW will continue to propser simply because Blizzard is not standing still. The game improves monthly and there is much more to do in this game than can be experienced in just a few months. Battlefields is important, but it is not important to everyone. This is one thing most articles ignore. Battlefields is PvP, a lot of people playing WOW will never PvP so they do not care. These people who don't need PvP or Battlefields will find their own causes to rail about. Still you have to look at it this way, if your users are in such numbers as to get other sites to post about them your game is probably doing just fine.

  • Problems arise from imbalanced populations as well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sierran ( 155611 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @12:59PM (#13437317)
    Battlegrounds are not only problematic from a total server population PoV, but from the balance PoV as well. In order for a Battleground instance to spawn, if I understand the system correctly, there have to be enough players from both sides in the queue. Those players are only drawn from one server. As a result, on servers with imbalances in their population numbers, the lower-pop side of the fight often doesn't have enough players willing to fight. Consequence: lots of people sitting in queues for nothing.


    Another issue which is exacerbated by these imbalances is that one side's PvP players are often highly practiced, coordinated, etc. whereas the other side has a much higher percentage of 'pickup' players. The higher-pop side with the 'pickup' players will typically get beat on - which is not a problem in and of itself, but it will tend to drive away the more 'casual' gamers from that side, which will eventually lower the BG demand even on the high-pop side.

    • One thing I've never understood (someone please edumicate me) is why Battlegrounds, as an entirely separate instanced system, couldn't be shared among server populations? It would make sense for non-world-consequence PvP to share player populations among servers. That would also tend to minimize server-local population or use pattern imbalances.

      Of course, it's quite probable that the BG, being simply a server-tied instance, *can't* handle player integration from different servers...but still, it would see

      • Re:Whoops! Addendum (Score:3, Interesting)

        by interiot ( 50685 )
        One reason: player names aren't unique across servers [thottbot.com]. I would imagine that, internally, things like player-UID and other UID's wouldn't be unique across servers as well.

        Can you trade items or money in Battlegrounds? If so, that would be a huge reason not to allow cross-server BG (as it would make gold farmer's job easier (they wouldn't have to make sure to farm gold on every single little server [ige.com], and it would definitely help the money-laundering phase of gold farming), and it would increase the impact

        • They could do it. Only allow trading of conjured items (mage's food/water, healthstones, etc). Add a server tag in front of everyone's name (WSG-Materi, DKI-Innovation, etc).
    • So you're saying that things will tend to balance themselves in the end, but somehow still make it sound like a complaint. I'm confused.

      But hey, I play da bad guys, no queues for me.

  • Limits won't work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HD Webdev ( 247266 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @01:33PM (#13437697) Homepage Journal
    It's like trying to stop people from developing an addiction to a drug by only allowing them to use the drug for 2 hours at a time. And yes, it's a fair comparison. I've seen many an Everquest player do things that usually only seriously drug addicted people do. (grossly distorting the amount of time playing the game, loss of jobs because of lack of sleep or refusal to stop playing, paranoia that people are trying to interfere with their 'precious', losing their children in custody battles because of the game, theft to make up for money spent on computer equipment/monthly fees, etc...)

    Time limits won't do what they are intended to do. In fact, it will often have the opposite effect because the person is left wanting at the end of each session instead of naturally getting bored or making the conscious decision that it's time to do something productive like mowing the lawn.

    The forbidden fruit of playing longer than X hours will tempt a lot of people especially children to work around it...even if they wouldn't have wanted to play that long anyway. It's rebellion against authority. They'll rent multiple accounts if all else fails.

    It's up to family & friends to intervene when someone has this large of a problem. Time limits won't do anything at all except make people Feel Good[TM] about what they've (allegedly) done to stop gaming addiction.
    • That's a load of crap. Time limits are what parents do to kids to make them get outside and do other things so they don't fail school and get fat. And if they are doing a good job parenting, it works. If you can put a limit on something, it could stop a lot of people from going overboard with these games. While I don't really think it can/will/should be done...your arguments are contradicting themselves. On one hand you say they should let people play as long as they want and that is how they get bored
      • Time limits are what parents do to kids to make them get outside and do other things so they don't fail school and get fat.

        Exactly, parents - kids. You do see the big picture even though you don't think you do.

        Try doing that with adults and for bonus points add a 'this hurts us more than it does you' message for them and see how they react to being treated like children.

        They'll rebel against a Government authority limiting their access.
        • Everything you're saying is true, but you're thinking like an American/westerner. The kind of paternal oversight of daily activities that would make you and me chafe is accepted in China.

          The truly hardcore will no doubt work around the limits, but many more will be stopped before they get to the point where they would be so motivated.
  • The readers of slashdot has been declining, because...

    THERE ARE NO REAL NEWS!

  • How to meet Women in Warcraft? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rafikki ( 818387 ) * on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @03:02PM (#13438473)
    That article had absolutely nothing to do with how to meet women... All it was was an anecdote from some dude about how he knew this guys whose friend's fiance sent some half naked pictures in return for access to the beta for WoW.

  • This original article doesn't really detail the two major reasons why battlegrounds have queues.

    Reason #1: Faction Imbalance

    You require basically the same number of alliance and horde players to play in a battlegrounds. On many servers the ratio of alliance to horde is 2:1 or 3:1. This means the horde can get into battlegrounds easily, while the alliance need to wait a long time (can be hours). Furthermore this disparity leads to unethical behavior, like horde exiting a battleground to find an easier team t
  • Disclaimer: I have not played WoW.

    What's with the long queues? In Guild Wars, you pick the type of PvP arena you'd like to enter, click Enter Mission, and you're playing in 30 seconds or less. What makes the battlegrounds on WoW so much slower?
    • Guild wars servers are broken up into districts that take 45 seconds to switch. Warcraft servers are broken in general and once you pick a server you are stuck with it.

      Thus I pay $15 a month for the ability to play with a fraction of the playerbase available do to poor planning. VS guildwars one time fee and unlimited play, that you can actually play. But, its just not as fun.
  • The company also counted "Internet Game Room players [who have] accessed the game over the last seven days" as paying customers.

    Does Blizzard really think they can to get away with this kind of bulls***? Thats like saying 'if customers have test driven a Toyota car within the past month, they're a Toyota owner.'

  • The server populations are quite misleading. It can say high one day, low the next, medium the third time you look. So the range they use to decide these categories is quite small. I don't understand why they need to keep the actual numbers a secret unless the intent is to mislead people and exaggerate their subscription numbers. Then again, they also hide many other numbers, maybe they have some designers that helped with the windows xp interface; hiding anything "complicated" from the average joe.

    And

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