January 24, 2005

World of Warcraft Growing Pains

World of Warcraft has been growing faster than a bad weed in recent weeks. It has gotten so bad that Blizzard has stopped shipping games to stores to deal with overloaded servers. It seems the company expected to hit this target of 600,000 users with 200,000 playing at onces in a year's time, not six weeks. Unfortunately the infrastructure wasn't ready as the game has suffered from major down-time due to bugs and scaling issues.

After playing for a month, I decided not to renew my WOW subscription purely because of productivity issues. Never before in my life have a played such an addictive game for 50-60 hours in a month's time (initial 15 hour marathon Civilization PC game session included), my real life was getting impacted like a bad case of achololic addiction, so I had to cut it off. I didn't want to pay $15 a month to Blizzard to ruin my life. Be careful WOW buyers, don't lose your life to this game. :)

"The success we've been experiencing since launch has been more than even we expected or hoped for," said Blizzard community manager Paul Della Bitta. "Unfortunately, that uncovered a few hardware issues with our infrastructure." "We sort of got enough of a load where we considered it successful," said Blizzard's public relations manager, Gil Shif. "But instead of it happening in a year's time, we got it in six weeks." [Discuss]