The Blizzard Dine & Dash??

Pay for the box, subscribe to the game… but unless hardcore PvP is your style, no North American servers for new players? It's a silent problem that affected as many as 15,000 new players since the new server lockdown late last week; 'silent' because new players tend to lack the old timers' ... shall we say, forwardness? TenTonHammer has your back, novice nukers and fledgling fighters!

Will Blizzard make timely improvements as locked servers continue to burst under the strain of concurrency, or simply continue its tradition of lip service and haphazardly adding less-than-popular PvP realms that to fix old problems? Enquiring minds want to know.

And to make matters worse, French conglomerate Vivendi Universal Games (the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment and a handful of other developers) reported income last year in excess of $762 million (at current Euro => $US exchange rates, source), a 35% increase over 2004 earnings due in large part, as Vivendi readily admits, to World of Warcraft's international success. This kind of money is unheard-of for any MMORPG developer to-date. Hardware lead times notwithstanding, most players fail to understand why there seems to be so little tangible investment in better server infrastructure and code optimization, especially since Blizzard has repeatedly offered its apologies about performance over the game's entire lifespan. Many believe that a simple solution is to merge lower concurrency PvP servers and use the spare resources to enhance or increase the number of 'normal' ruleset servers.

Check out Ethec's unabashed take on World of Warcraft's character creation and performance meltdown right here at TenTonHammer Main!