World of Warcraft Surpasses 10 Million Subscribers (Again)

[Charli]

"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

AHAHAHAHA

Because the forums aren't awash with tales of individuals unable to play due to massive login queues and server instability. Easily the worst expansion launch. I eagerly await to see the sub numbers in a month's time. Maybe despite the negative backlash WoD has something going for it?

It does. The quests and garrisons are quite enjoyable so far.

Also BC and Wrath had their own launch issue. The WoW fanbase is loud, vocal and easily perturbed. The issues though are largely fixed now and free game time to make up for the issues has been given.

All in all, now that these numbers were revealed everyone's kind of let out a collective 'oh.' and 'really!?'

We did not expect to go back up to 10 million. 8 was the high mark prediction for most. TEN though, no wonder the servers broke, so many realms have been merged and the instance servers downgraded in capacity to save on power and cost. This surge of players caught Blizzard off guard make no mistake.

It's more or less fair to say it's one of the worst launches ever. Literally over 6 hour queues, lag bad enough to render the game unplayable and a quest that relied on the severely overtaxed instancing tech and was impossible to turn in, rendering you unable to progress. The game could not be played for the first two days. But 5 days free time for a couple of days of inconvenience is more than fair compensation in my eyes.

Sorry, have to disagree with all of you. I've been playing since Vanilla and this wasn't the worst opening. I got to play on the second day with no problems. I remember the first couple of expansions where queues were -expected- for weeks. You can get on and play whenever you want now.

I don't know what it was like on lower pop servers, but on Draenor EU, the game was literally unplayable. Constant 5 to 10 second lagspikes, phases not working, quest turn-ins missing, obscene queue times, etc. You simply could not play the game. A launch cannot get much worse than that if it doesn't come visit you and physically spits you in the face.

Spoiler

This is how the quest turn-in to get your garrison looked like for 2 days.

Haha oh god you play on Draenor, you poor sap. I thought Emerald Dream had it fairly bad but I saw the footage off draenor and it was a case of 'woo boy glad I'm not them!' My sympathies.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Honestly, the launch seemed pretty smooth on Shandris. I was able to log in within minutes of it launching (woohoo for being a night owl?) and played it for a couple hours with no problems whatsoever.

The following day after work, once again, I was able to log in and play with no issues. Still no queues or disconnects as of this morning.

The only times to date that I've ever had issues playing the game were during the initial launch and during the single-starting-zone-clusterfuck that was Burning Crusade.

 

[Waaghpowa]

Of course, anything World of Warcraft related is going to get some haters who don't have much experience with the game spouting crap about worst ever.

This is far from the worst launch considering Vanilla and Burning Crusade launches. In fact, I would say they've done really good considering many realms were getting DOS'd.

I was also never in queue to get online. Never, not since BC.

The game is a decade old and still has a player base in the several millions. Clearly they are doing something right and I've been playing it every since the release.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

This about sums up the launch:


Let's not downplay how bad Thu-Sat was. The game was figuratively unplayable on a lot of servers before they brought the server caps down dramatically, and then it was literally unplayable for a lot of people as queues sprang up to 2-3 hours on "ghost town" servers and upwards of 10-12 hours on major hubs.

However, come Sunday and the instancing they put in place, the game is not only running smooth but is relatively polished and bug-free, perhaps as much as any expansion launch in their history. And the general reception amongst players seems to teeter on "glowing".

 

[Random Gamer]

You mean you feel this strongly about something you haven't experienced first hand?

When it comes to queues, anyone can could check if it was bad or not. Just make a starting edition account - with cap at lvl 20 - and try to join a server.
I haven't seen queues this long since BC release, definitely. WOTLK release was mighty fine by comparison - can't tell for Cata or MoP though, but I don't remember my friends bitching about their releases much (complaints about Cataclysm's content is another matter obviously).

Well, I saw one far worse once, but that was LOTRO when they wanted to test their F2P system; I think I was in a 10K+ queue then.

Thing is, it all depends on the server. If you're on an old server where you've played since Vanilla, you might have a ridiculously long queue. If you're on a low-pop server, you might well not have any queue except the very first day.

I also think that they didn't expect such growing numbers and were unprepared.
The growth actually began before the release; I think many people used the 7-days trial or just got their subscription back 1 to 2 weeks before release, because I actually used my 7-day trial in the very first days of November; weekend went smoothly, but then I had the last 2 evenings, on weekdays, with 500+ queue already.
Though I won't complain, because they had the good and nice sense to update my frozen Cataclysm-level account to MoP, so that I could actually level up all the way to 90.

Well the article fails to mention that was 3.3 million copies on the first day and also doesn't include one of the largest regions for WoW's playerbase, China which got the expansion launch today.

Thanks, that explains it. I was wondering if 2/3 of WOW players had decided to stick with Pandaria for now, because I'd have expected the bulk of paying players to have updated to Warlords.

 

[Jburton9]

I found it to be a decent/solid expansion release overall. Not having all those blue ! dailies and shift to a garrison is not bad so far. The super house - Garrison idea is an interesting move and a change in the game dynamics.

I can see a lot of prior expansion flavor being inserted in the different Draenor regions, npc's color pallet choices and theme.

Also with the super house they have added some hooks, a community of npc's that wave at you as you go by, make comments etc. Also being able to change the Garrison based on playstyle or needs is nice though it does have a small time cost and a larger expense.


For myself unless they really launch some surprises I do not see myself sticking around very long. I do not believe it is a design problem, just that I have played WoW for so long hehe, maybe I just wanted to get a few key characters to 100 is all? hmm.



Side note for Titanfall: I read or heard somewhere that the materials we see in Overwatch is the assets from Titanfall? Man, now I really would have liked to have seen what they had planned. One comment was it was six games in one and lacked direction being some of the reasons they shut it down.

I wonder if it was an instanced based shooter with MMO style population and game environment with different connected zones. Honestly I would have rather tried that then another arena competitive shooter Team Fortress type thing... sigh oh well.

 

[Shjade]

You obviously weren't around when BC launched and servers broke for days.

I was.

I don't remember being shut out of the game for days. A few hours, at most. And I would have remembered: I had only just started playing the game about a week before BC's launch. If it had had the issues people are saying WoD is having, I'd have dropped it and never looked back - I wasn't invested in it yet.

 

[Godhead]

"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

AHAHAHAHA

Because the forums aren't awash with tales of individuals unable to play due to massive login queues and server instability. Easily the worst expansion launch. I eagerly await to see the sub numbers in a month's time. Maybe despite the negative backlash WoD has something going for it?

Not gonna lie, every time I see WoD, I have to stop and tell myself that we're not talking about World of Darkness.

OT: I hope that they clear up the instability issues soon, so people can play what they paid for.