No more WoW disc's to be sold!

Venom

Found the below info on another site and it dosent bode well for Euro WoW fans.


No More Players for World of Warcraft
Published: 01/19/2005
Written by: Andrew Serros

If do not already have a subscription to World of Warcraft, it might be awhile until you are able to get one. To say the least, the “test run” they mentioned in their January 10th press release has not been going so well.


“We haven’t requested that any retailers pull the games they already have off their shelves,” Gil Shift, public relations representative, said. “We’re just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.”

Blizzard declined to comment on how long it would be until more copies of World of Warcraft would be shipped to retail stores.

Some rumors had been circulating that Blizzard had pulled copies of World of Warcraft currently on sale from the shelves of video game retailers across the country, specifically Best Buy, to limit subscription growth. As for now, large retail chains such as Best Buy and Walmart currently do not have any copies of the game available. Even Blizzard’s official on-line store currently says that they are out of stock.

Signs for server confidence do not look good, especially considering last weekend’s performance for the North American servers. It was so severe, Blizzard said in their press release, that “due to the extended nature of the server issues, we will be providing a free 48-hour extension of play time.” Whether or not this will quell fans’ frustration has yet to be seen, as it has quite a few of them angry about their experience.

It was enough for the authors of Penny Arcade, for instance, to revoke on Monday the award they gave to World of Warcraft as game of the year for 2004. “It's actually four and five times a week at this point that I can't even log in to the game,” Tycho, one of the two authors, said in the post. “It's not like I'm sitting here trying to connect at odd hours so I can catch them in something, either - this is in prime time, or on a weekend.”

The number of affected players is considerable, as SirBruce’s MMOG chart showed figures of active subscriptions reaching 350,000. With numbers that high, Blizzard’s on-line gaming service is comparable to other traditional services people pay for.

Clever Gnome, a user of the Evilavatar forum boards, posted that the down time was inexcusable. “People would flip sh*t if they turned on their cable TV during prime time and got a message that the "servers" were down,” he said.

][cEMAN**

I couldn't find any copies of it here anyway Was looking for one to try and get into the beta. Guess that won't be happening.

Venom

Its not due for release over here in Blizzard couldnt give a toss about us land aka Europe

The constant **** ups reguarding this game is saving me 50 yoyos and a monthly subscription

CivilServant

Well I for one am glad I bought the game off ebay. The key was sent to me straight away via email and I was up and running within 10 minutes of winning the auction. A friend lent me his discs so everything was already setup.

The servers have been stable for me so far. I've been playing for about a week, with only one noticeable period of downtime. That was a scheduled server fix.

Blizzard really want to sort out all the problems first before they release it in europe. IMO it'll be a long time before everything is running fine and they should just release the game in euroland already. The money they're getting for the game and subs is incredible. They should be able to afford a few new servers for the euro release.

Memnoch

i think the problems are prolly limited to some servers, i haven't had any problems whatsoever last week in ereday.

Drakar

Well the problem does seem to manifest itself under high load (last weekend was a holiday weekend in the US), so I think that's why Irish people aren't experiencing as many problems on the US servers as it seems US people are (at primetime). Perhaps some low population servers may operate better than the others too.

They've extended the grace period from 2 days to 7 days now I understand. At least Penny-Arcade mentioned that the reason they were so annoyed about it is that it is a genuinely great game, and that's why they were so frustrated at not being able to play it.

BKtje

I havent once had a problem on Eredar at logging in and i play a fair bit. That said its a fairly low population server.

Drakar

Penny Arcade sent off a list of questions and got extended replies, perhaps worth a read (you have to scroll down to the second article):
http://www.penny-arcade.com/

Dustaz

Yes, most of the servers are fine actually.

Its only the 12/15 high pop servers that are the problem. (and boy, its a problem )