http://articles.filefront.com/No_More_P ... ticle.html
If do not already have a subscription to World of Warcraft, it might be awhile until you are able to get one. To say the least, the “test run” they mentioned in their January 10th press release has not been going so well.
“We haven’t requested that any retailers pull the games they already have off their shelves,” Gil Shift, public relations representative, said. “We’re just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.”
Blizzard declined to comment on how long it would be until more copies of World of Warcraft would be shipped to retail stores.
Some rumors had been circulating that Blizzard had pulled copies of World of Warcraft currently on sale from the shelves of video game retailers across the country, specifically Best Buy, to limit subscription growth. As for now, large retail chains such as Best Buy and Walmart currently do not have any copies of the game available. Even Blizzard’s official on-line store currently says that they are out of stock.
Signs for server confidence do not look good, especially considering last weekend’s performance for the North American servers. It was so severe, Blizzard said in their press release, that “due to the extended nature of the server issues, we will be providing a free 48-hour extension of play time.” Whether or not this will quell fans’ frustration has yet to be seen, as it has quite a few of them angry about their experience.
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It was enough for the authors of Penny Arcade, for instance, to revoke on Monday the award they gave to World of Warcraft as game of the year for 2004. “It's actually four and five times a week at this point that I can't even log in to the game,” Tycho, one of the two authors, said in the post. “It's not like I'm sitting here trying to connect at odd hours so I can catch them in something, either - this is in prime time, or on a weekend.”
The number of affected players is considerable, as SirBruce’s MMOG chart showed figures of active subscriptions reaching 350,000. With numbers that high, Blizzard’s on-line gaming service is comparable to other traditional services people pay for.
Clever Gnome, a user of the Evilavatar forum boards, posted that the down time was inexcusable. “People would flip sh*t if they turned on their cable TV during prime time and got a message that the "servers" were down,” he said.