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New news posted on www.worldofwarcraft.com.

The part you actually care about:

That's incredibly disappointing given how long those 4 servers were down for and how servers are still crashing on a daily basis.

Well, EQ2 servers aren't crashing but they do go down every morning at 7am PST for 'maintenance' that lasts 1-2 hours.

I like how no matter what game companies give out, there's always someone who's "terribly disappointed" because it's not enough.

Jayce, it's not enough. Even Earthen Ring - one of the most underpopulated servers goes down at odd times every day. Odd as in, whenever i seem to want to play. I was expecting at least a week if not 2.

Player Retention > 1/2 of 1 months revenue in the long-term MMORPG market.

I'm on Proudmore, its a normal PvE server with a medium pop. I've yet to have it go down on me when I wanted to play since last Thursday. I've never seen a queue. I can only assume this is a specifically PvP problem, so I don't care about the bitching.

Like 15 minutes into my first play experience with the game last night. At 8pm eastern, on the aforementioned eastern time server. Nice move.

I'll grant that it was back up pretty quick and didn't really disrupt my playtime at all, but it wasn't a very good initial impression.

Argent went down last night too, tho we got a 5 min warning and it came back up rather soon.

I love this game, but I want more free shit.

Folks would notice the downtime less if they weren't playing so much. Since downtime is usually noticed, it suggests that people are largely happy enough to play. Therefore they need less compensation. If people had decided to play again next week rather than endure the shitstorm of an MMOG launch, it would have required greater compensation from Blizzard. You brought the inadequate compensation on yourselves by being a bunch of MMOG addicts desperate for your fix.

No, the problem is that the downtime is during primetime hours. 8-3am eastern. Don't kid yourself, MMOGs are timesinks and as such people play them at the same time every day to make a religion of it. When the daily routine gets fucked up, compensation is deserved. If the "downtime" happened at like 2-5 pm eastern, I'm pretty sure no one would be bitching about the number of free days.

Oh you know better than that. This is the Intarweb. People will bitch about FUCKING ANYTHING, even when you give them free shit.

Less = Better. I didn't mean "no one." I meant "no one of importance."

That term would cover the ENTIRE WOW FORUM USER LIST.

There has only been one day that I couldn't get into Sargeras during primetime.  But I haven't been playing every night.  

So I'm probably not sufficiently pissed off to comment on how much compensation is enough ;)

Even the notably stingy SOE, then Verant, at the time, gave another free month to all the players in EQ, and their opening wasn't near as rocky as WoW's, mostly involving bandwidth issues on Worldcom's main link to San Diego. which really was out of their control. So, this free 4 day extension for day one customers does seem a bit niggling to me.

The WoW release reminds me a lot of the Diablo 2 release, where, once again, someone holding the purse strings, refused to believe marketting's sales estimates and underbudgetted for servers. Combined with what would appear to be either poor database design or possibly just weak hardware there as well, it left the launch in the not so good category as far as mmog launches go.

Fortunately, this is made up for, in my mind at least, by the remarkably bug free release as far as the game is concerned. Having weathered so many incomplete, buggy, EQ expansions over the years, just having a game where the quests work and the content seems finished and polished goes a long way to keeping me hooked. Plus the obvious attention to detail in zone design, and a solid job on the art.

See, that's why I waited a week before I bought the game. That one downtime, which was a couple minutes total, was all. No queues, no overcrowding, no downtime at all (during my play session), since.

I promised myself I'd give the game my usual first month to sort out the problems wait but I got hooked in open beta and put in a pre-order anyway. Sigh. I blame lack of willpower.