The problems besetting World of Warcraft has cost them an influential award - the PennyArcade.com 2004 Game of The Year Award. This comes at the same time as news that Blizzard are now limiting the amount of new copies of World of Warcraft being sold due to server problems.
The sheer success of the title (more than 600,000 sales in the weeks after release, with over 200,000 concurrent players) appears to have been ill-prepared for, and the game servers have been regularly suffering problems:
Every week, there is some new calamity that necessitates some huge response on their part, servers are coming down, but if you think that the servers coming back up again will represent an improvement in the basic functionality of the game you're mistaken. They took them down most of the day Thursday (and again for "emergency service" on Sunday), and when they came back up it should have been something supernatural but it was actually utterly imperceptible. It should have been like when the Genesis device hit and a lifeless rock became a fucking paradise. That didn't happen. So, if I say, as I'm about to, that their emergency service amounts to parlor tricks, what evidence can they give to the contrary? Because near as I can tell they've been doing "emergency service" since release, only they used to credit people's accounts for it.
PennyArcade.com
Wired: Dealing with Great Expectations
Blizzard denies shelf pull, software slowed. (20 Jan)
No More Players for World of Warcraft - For Now (19 Jan)
World of Warcraft "oversold", pulled from shelves. (13 Jan)
A Blizzard of Unhappy Customers
A Comic Strip Takes Video Games Seriously (Almost) (N.Y Times on Penny Arcade)
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