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For the most part, World of Warcraft (WoW) has lived up to that hype by having 500,000 people sign up for open beta and having sold nearly 240,000 Copies on its first day! This has not come without some teething troubles; the huge number of players trying to log on and play made nearly all the servers virtually unplayable. While it is my belief that Blizzard should have expected such numbers, I have to give credit where it is due and say that Blizzard responded quickly - increasing server capacity to nearly 90 Servers and gave players credit toward their bill for those days where the game was not playable. More than a week of free play time has been added to many users accounts. I must say Blizzard has acted well and responded to player complaints in a reasonable manner, owning up to the faults in the game and working hard on correcting those issues.

Adding more server capacity hasn't fixed some of the issues that have existed since launch. In particular, you can still run into significant lag when the game has to go into the backend to do something like generate an item.. While this was some what alleviated with the addition of server capacity and spreading the population out amongst more servers, it did not fully disappear. Again I must give credit to Blizzard in that they worked hard and had many of these issues addressed within a couple of weeks of launch.

That being said, many other issues have continued including problems with the login, the game server crashing or having moments of severe latency. Blizzard has addressed these issues by nightly server resets on many of their more populated servers as well as several of those that were not as populated but were linked in some way to the problem servers. Blizzard took the initiative and upgraded the most affected servers after nearly a day's downtime by bringing them back up with there new configuration. This didn't fix the issue though and in some cases seems to have created new bottlenecks that have not decreased the downtime but in some cases seem to have increased it.

Recent interviews granted by Blizzard have also seemed to indicate that they didn't expect such a large response and that while they could support the nearly 600,000 copies sold (at the time of this article) they didn't expect so many users at once - and appeared to indicate that they believed it would take several months to reach this level of users based on the subscription numbers of previous US MMO launches. That it took only 6 weeks to sell all these copies seems to have caught them by surprise. Now with another game I could accept this as possible but with all the hype leading up to this game over the last several years and the response from fans being what it was (over 500,000 registered beta testers) it seems they would have turned a blind eye not to have expected the volume of response they received. While I doubt anyone would have predicted the current level of subscriptions, a number near that was never out of the question and not only should have been expected but should have been prepared for.

Launch aside, the game - when the servers are up - has been a lot of fun to play and is one of the most complete MMOs I have had the pleasure to play. Blizzard is working toward several solutions to relieve player congestion and overpopulation by evaluating several options including a possible one time character transfer from high population servers to lower population servers.

WoW had a lot to live up to with a large world-wide following of the wildly successful strategy game, putting Blizzard in a tough spot. Blizzard has delivered a game though that not only is well-crafted but continues the story of the war between the Hoard and the Alliance taking place not long after the events of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. They did a magnificent job putting together a game that pleases not only the eyes but has requirements that don't hurt the wallet either. When I first saw the game I found the graphics to be rather cartoonish and was not impressed; that soon changed once I had an opportunity to play and experience first hand what they were trying to achieve. In this area, the designers have not only succeeded but have exceeded themselves. Entering the game world, you truly get the feeling that you are playing Warcraft. The small touches and familiar sites from the strategy games, when combined with the continuing story, really immerse you in the world. The designers didn't stop with the visuals; they further brought the feel from the original series by reusing much of the game's most familiar audio. These combine both visually and acoustically making what is in this gamer's opinion one of the most immersive MMOs yet.

Perhaps the greatest feature of the game is its quest system; there are truly hundreds of quests available to players on both sides. This plethora of quests, combined with an innovative quest management system, allows players to manage what quests they are working on and keeps them organized not only by level but where you stopped in the quest. This is can be very helpful in letting you know what you should be working on at any given time. It's also useful for causal gamers as it serves as a nearly instant reminder of what you were working on and where you need to go. There are several types of quests that are available; some are simplistic single steps kill or delivery missions, many are complicated multi-part quests that finish with a nice item and serve not only as a method to give the player a reward, but to as an avenue of introducing players to much of world and its lore. Perhaps the nicest feature added around questing is the addition of an ability to share select quests; it's very useful when grouping with people who might not have the quest your group is working on. Questing is one of the most productive methods of leveling and is a major part of World of Warcraft and the tools that Blizzard has provided not only simplify this but go along way to adding to the enjoyment.

Quests and immersive graphics and audio are not all that this game has going for it, if that was all it would be a successful game but the designers have also included an amazingly detailed crafting system. There are two types of crafting professions in WoW, the nine Primary Professions which include blacksmithing, alchemy, skinning, etc. - The Primary professions come in two varieties, gathering and crafting. Gathering professions are what you would expect; they are used to gather the components used to make much of what is needed for the crafting professions, and the crafting professions are as they would indicate being used to make items for players or quests. There're also three secondary professions available to players these are fishing, cooking and first aid. Players are allowed to select two primary professions and can have as many secondary professions as they wish For example a gnome warrior might have Engineering and Mining as his Primary Profession and take all three secondary professions. Blizzard has done a great job with the crafting experience in World of Warcraft and has made it so that even the most casual crafter can get to a place where they are happy and can feel useful. Hardcore crafters may find the system overly simple and the fact that the crafting system is tied to level will be disappointing to others. That said the crafting system has been one of the areas I have enjoyed most in the game and I generally have never been a big crafter, shunning that aspect of most games in favor of adventuring.

One of the areas that is currently lacking in the game is the PvP system is currently incomplete and while Blizzard has some fairly interesting plans for the future there is no set date as to when players can expect to see these features introduced, especially with the current stability issues that the servers are suffering. The system as it is currently implemented while fun, is definitely filled with a variety of holes which griefers can exploit, and that takes much of the luster off what should be an important component of the game. Some areas of concern to PvP and future PvP are the imbalance between the numbers of players playing on opposing sides with the number of Alliance players on some servers outnumbering the Hoard players up to three to one. If Blizzard can implement their current plan for Instanced PvP battlegrounds as they have described it, it will add not only an entertaining end game but perhaps one of the better PvP experiences out there.

Overall I highly recommend World of Warcraft though there are sometimes severe issues with the servers and the game can be difficult to obtain. Yet, I find I can do nothing but recommend this game if simply for the game play alone. If you're willing to wait for an even better experience I would recommend waiting a few more months while Blizzard gets a handle on the server issues currently plaguing the game. However, if you're lucky enough to find a copy of the game and want to play I would suggest playing on a lower population server as this will increase your enjoyment of the game profoundly. I will say that Blizzard does appear to acknowledge to some extent that the state that the game is inexcusable and they do seem to be working toward a resolution. This only makes me wonder why the game was not further delayed; many of these issues were clearly evident in their stress tests to anyone who even tried to play the game and should have been apparent to Blizzard then. Server issues aside, this is probably the one of the most complete MMOs released to date and should be played by every fan of the genre.