World Of Warcraft Frenzy: Two-Hour Lines For Lich King

Eric Krangel | November 14, 2008 9:29 AM

blizzard-lichking.jpgWe don't yet have first-day sales numbers for what's the most hotly anticipated videogame release of the year, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard Entertainment's $40 expansion pack to World of Warcraft. But if geeks camping out for up to 24 hours in freezing weather isn't a good enough indicator that demand for the game is hot, here's another:

So many people were trying to log on to Lich on its first night Blizzard's servers buckled under the load, with wait times of up to two hours to get into the game.

Blizzard could have prepared for the login rush better than it did. But it would be hard to call the launch a flop.

Apple's (AAPL) first iPhone had some activation snafus, and just like the iPhone, while out-of-the-gate bugs may convince some of the faithful to wait a few days, it won't scare any of them off. WoW is a game where an "average" player is one who's put in hundreds of hours of gameplay.  "Hardcore" WoW gamers put in thousands. Unless Blizzard is beset by these problems for weeks on end -- something we very much doubt -- most of Blizzard's over 11 million paying subscribers are going to upgrade.

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See Also:
World Of Warcraft Geeks, Other Gamers Throw Down $1 Billion On Subscriptions
Geeks Camp Out In The Cold For New Warcraft (Photos)

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20 Comments

Sillyness said:
I am glad to see Blizzard do well, they make great products and deserve the business. Unlike the iphone dopes, there won't be a few hundred dollar price drop on the game shortly after it was released.
Sean said:
That's because the game does not currently cost hundreds of dollars. perhaps you should have said, a percentage drop. For example, 50%.
Kraum said:
Anyone who called in sick today should be fired.
tekno_boy@hotmail.com (URL) said:
Well I'm just waithing for WWW for the iPhone.

:)
dustyBin said:
$15 per month after I pay for the $40 game? And iphone users are suckers?
jason said:
I no longer play due to time constraints but I must say the $15 a month fee is well worth the entertainment return. Well made game with constant improvements and options for play.

Curious however how many people pay and have not played for months. I know of a few. Great business model; get people addicted but at the same time not to the point where their spouses nagging doesn't trump their playing time. ;)
Thinker said:
They could have compensated for the que times by not overloading the servers in the first place. Most of us waited 60+ minutes after the hour install. They are making millions, if not billions...they can afford to double their server farm with ease.
Ryan said:
"$15 per month after I pay for the $40 game? And iphone users are suckers?"

...and how much do iphone users pay per month?
geshp said:
Yeah, but the game was crowded as it was WITH the population controls. And the server farm isn't an issue. They offered free transfers to any of the low-population servers for the past 3 weeks. There were still plenty of servers available, just people didn't want to move from the popular ones.
Big Chicago said:
MMO's that are well-managed and frequently updated like Warcraft provide tremendous value for that $15/month. What is that, a movie ticket + concessions?
BustyDin said:
@DustyBin:

I can't possibly believe you made that statement. Then again in this day and age, I can.

I'm sure your $100+ monthly phone bill plus the $300 or so you plunked down for that glorified iPod were worth it. Now you can use it to get on here and make absurd statements ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!!111!1!!!!!
Travis said:
I think Blizzard actually lowered the allowed login caps on all the realms to keep things stable. I know when the game launched 4 years ago, they had big issues with having too many people concentrated in key areas which caused no end of problems even though the realm as whole should have been able to handle the total number of people online, or at least handle it better then it did. I suspect that once people start to spread out across the realm again, Blizz will start upping the login cap and allow more people online at any given time. I'm basing off of what I was actually seeing once I logged in last night, as the server was running well, it just took about 80 minutes to get logged in. I would rather wait longer to login and have fun while I'm actually online, then have to deal with game breaking stuff like loot lag and what not like I did 4 years ago at launch.
Brittany said:
Congratulations! Wow has been like this for the last 2 months...and the november-january months the year before that...and the year before that...Unless you are on a revamped server this is normal. There are in-game holiday events and new titles to achieve, thus more people are online collecting these accomplishments. In addition to having the expansion, people play more during the holiday season. Smart people were in the beta, already got into their new raiding guild, and know exactly when they'll hit max level and start gear progression and are used to huge waits to log on from being on big raiding servers. Unless you quit, like me. (seriously, once you hit raid content the new play dynamics blow...so i bought an xbox and a gamefly subscription and me and my boyfriend haven't looked back)
hehateme said:
WOW is great. But it shows how consumers are stupid. In Asia they do it proper. Either the game is free or the WEAPONS are not. But the game player has multiple ways to pay for the game. And dont get TRIPLE CHARGED!
skim said:
My queue last night was 1200 and I waited 2 hours.. ridiculous.
name said:
The problem is that Blizzard NEVER adequately prepares for these rollouts. The same problems happened with the last expansion (Burning Crusade), as well as with every major patch that adds new content.
KrisDM said:
I'm on one of those servers that were queued up for over an hour. They didn't offer free transfers from my server to a lower population, I looked into it, even went to the account page to do it since they were advertising so much about the free transfers. My server wasn't eligible, I would have had to pay 25 bucks for each char, even to go to a LOW pop server.

Once I got in though, I was impressed. The new area was really nice and I was able to up my profession skills very quickly.

Oh...and I avoided the lines, pre-ordered from Amazon and it was waiting for me when I got home from work. And I went to work today!
Aaron said:
The long wait to get on was well worth it. I started with a 1500 queue and it took me about an hour and a half to get on. Blizzard capped how many people could be on the servers for a reason. If they wouldn't ahve put a cap in place everyone would have all be on at the same time in the same place making their death knights and everything would have just been slow as hell. At least we were able to play smoothly once we got on. Besides you can use that wait time to do something else, I personaly watched a couple of episodes of deep space 9.
Fluoric said:
Hey, if you are ally, move your char to Blackwing Lair. There are soo many horde here that its easy to forget its a pvp server.

I haven't seen a login wait since I came to the server.
Sallaia said:
Yes, they offered free transfers...our US server was offered free transfers to a Latin server. Smart!

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