KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Ok so World of Warcraft has never really been low on subscriptions, even recently when it was at a historic low of just over seven million, but the latest expansion Warlords of Draenor (WoD) has given it a huge boost. In just 24 hours after the expansion's launch, Blizzard sold (not shipped) over 3.3 million copies of the game, bringing subscriber numbers back above 10 million.
“We're thrilled that so many players jumped in to play Warlords of Draenor on day one and are having a great time with the new content,” said CEO Mike Morhaime (via GamesIndustry).
“We poured a lot of hard work and passion into this expansion, and we appreciate all the kind words from players and the overwhelming support they continue to show for World of Warcraft.” [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyPzTywUBsQ']
As well as putting a lot of effort into developing the expansion, which sees players entering an alternate timeline in Warcraft's history, Blizzard also went all out with promotion for the game, releasing an extended, high-fidelity cinematic and a feature length documentary which celebrated the 10th anniversary of the game's release.
WoD has brought changes to the entire game however, along with its expanded content. Blizzard worked on instances to make queueing for them quicker, which should also mean that the capacity of individual realms can be increased in the near future. By some estimates, it may even be able to eliminate realm queues altogether.
KitGuru Says: Have any of you been playing Warlords of Draenor? If so, what do you think so far?
Yeah… who exactly are the ones who are actually enjoying the new content? WoD has seen the worst issues since the launch of WoW 10 years ago, and after billions in revenue this type of release problems are what blizzard subscribers deserve…
boho keep whining please, the issue only lasted 3 days and everything is fine now, in just under a week the game is back to normal, sure it was annoying, i suffered allot from it but it’s to be expected when whole bunch of desperate trolls from china launch DDoS attacks .
Calm your farm. I doubt Blizzard could anticipate the influx of 3 million more subscriptions (on top of the 7 or so they already had) with a DDoS attack on top of that on launch night.
What they did in response to it was admirable, they implemented reduced realm pops temporarily (which made more queues) to reduce the stain on the servers so at least a number of players could enjoy the game (and with less crowding), they issued an apology and they are giving all the players with subs active as of the launch 5 free days of game time.
We’re thrilled that so many players jumped in to play Warlords of Draenor on day one and are having a great time with the new content,” said CEO Mike Morhaime” — Of course thrilled.. More players = more money..
I’m from Europe and garrison issues aren’t solved yet, in the evenings there is server lang, world server crashes and most of the time you can’t HS into garrison or login to the game if you logged out from garrison. And these are just the major issues with WoD, there are a lot of npc issues, not to mention today for example Outland doesn’t spawn any mobs/veins etc. All-in-all the worst expansion launch ever.
I’m not sure about you, but I’m an avid player and like to rush at release, after a huge wait in Panda for WoD I expect a finely polished product at launch, and with such a huge budget, I expect tech issues to be at a minimum! Not being able to play smoothly for a few evenings at launch is not acceptable at this level of experience and income. No excuses! And 5 days? Really?
If you mean people constantly complaining that it’s a babies game now & steamrolling over the new content like it’s nothing is returning to prosperity. Stuff this bring back Vanilla or TBC…
Not to mention they gave us all 5 days of free play time because of issues. At least they’re not like Ubisoft and blame other companies for their short comings, then run off and party with the money they just made.
5 days from a few hundred millions real dollars they made in a couple of days. Woooow!
Insane money tbh…
what server you on ? i play on Tarren mil and it’s been fine in last 2 days, garrison works fine and hs worked for me, i did dc twice but there isn’t any que anymore..
Cry about it, Victor.None of the expansions have had perfect releases except MoP because no one cared about it. If you were an avid player you would know by now that launch days are far from perfect as far as MMOs are concerned. Be glad they gave you ANYTHING in return. They could have just said fuck you and deleted your account under suspicion of account sharing or botting just because they felt like it, but they gave you game time back.
Learn to appreciate the things you are given. People are much too spoiled these days.
Once again they didn’t have to give us anything. They acknowledged there was an issue and worked for 3 days straight to fix the issues. You also can’t blame a company for being DDoS, its happened to pretty much every major gaming network. PSN, Xbox Live, Steam ect. Also you act like running 100’s of servers worldwide on a network that supports 10 million players is easy and going to run flawless. WoD was the same as every previous expansion that has ever came out, a little rocky. Blizzard is a good company that cares about its player base. They could be like EA and Dice and release a game like BF4 that is completely broken and rather then fixing it they just move on to the next title.
Chamber of Aspects is pretty screwed still. All 9 of my alts that can go draenor side are sitting in Garrison and any time i try to log onto them I get the lovely “world server down” message.
Plusses the phased content areas (bladespire launch night anyone? *shudder*) seem to have balanced out
3 days of crappy problems at the start but they have smooth things out now, game is alot of fun, epic cinematic and great new story line, just about to start raids so cant comment on them yet but the new dungeons seem to be weeding out the people that like to stand in stupid
The servers and network infrastructure is not put in place for worse case scenarios. They make some projections and work off that and design for some mean expectancy. Would you build a road way which could handle the entire population of a city, or would you make a road that could handle the mean traffic in that area, plus some room for spikes.
As far as bugs go, there is a saying that applies to software development:
“A good plan executed today always beats a perfect plan executed tomorrow.”
– George Patton
There are exceptions to this though… cough cough “Ubisoft.”
It was the DDOS attacks that were the problem, not Blizzards servers.