Blizzard under-estimates...

[Raging Turtle]

Any reports on how many Korean servers they have up? Also keep in mind that only the most fervent Europeans are playing, and they supposedly have ~300k apps for their euro beta. I agree with the staying power problems, but I would not be shocked if WoW hits a million subs at some point between its Asian, NA, and European servers.

Doesn't seem to be making a big splash here.  I haven't seen any ads or boxes for it, although I haven't really been looking.  Still, it surprises me a little, given the ever-present 2 full walls of Starcraft and Warcraft boxes, still at full price.

Anyone know if a person can purchase this game online and download it (or EQ2, for that matter)?  I played the beta, it was mildly amusing, but I'd rather not play on a Korean server if I ever buy it.

[esad]

From the main WoW page:

With the release of World of Warcraft in North America, Australia, and New Zealand yesterday, we have already seen an incredible level of demand for the game. We launched with 41 servers in the U.S. yesterday, and we are bringing up an additional 34 servers today to accommodate the influx of players. Over 200,000 accounts were created in just a single day! Based on this, we can clearly tell that players are very excited about getting into the game, and as a result, we expect to see high concurrency on the servers for the first days that the game is available. As the rush to get onto the servers evens out and additional hardware is made available, the necessity for waiting queues will decrease.

200k is an awful lot for one day. Hmm I wonder how many will be created through the weekend.?

Let's see 200k / 41 = ~4800 acounts per server. If they are all trying to play at the sme time, I can start to see why there are queues in excess of 1,000.

[Sable Blaze]

I haven't seen a queue yet, but the game's population is increasing dramatically from day to day.

Although this is strictly a subjective impression from ingame observation, I'd say this weekend will see a substantial increase in subscribers. I was on launch night (some) and the night elf starting area had brisk business but wasn't hugely crowded. Last night, however, was a madhouse. Easily three times the population of launch night.

That's just population. The character of that population...well...that's another post...

[Shockeye]

1. Free Trial Extension | 11/25/2004 2:19:36 PM PST          
 
Since its release two and a half days ago, World of Warcraft has already seen incredible concurrency numbers across all active game servers. To keep up with the demand from our players, 47 new servers were made available, increasing the total number of servers to 88. Doubling our server capacity in such a short period of time created issues in existing servers. We immediately recognized the issues and began implementing fixes. However, some players were unable to log in and enjoy the game during this period.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and are dedicated to providing World of Warcraft players with the best play experience possible. Therefore we'll be adding a small trial-period extension for players who created accounts before or during the downtime. In the days ahead, we'll provide additional details on how the trial-period extension will be determined. As always, we appreciate your continued patience and support; we're still monitoring the servers very closely and making adjustments as needed in order to ensure that World of Warcraft continues to run smoothly for everyone playing.  

[Soukyan]

88? Wow WoW.

[HaemishM]

88 Servers? Holy Fuck.

I think WoW just might blow my modest expectations out of the water, provided even half these people stay past the free month.