If past experience is any indicator, the software will be in the back room of the stores 2 days prior to release. Be there the morning of, or get to know someone at the store :D

Yeah, get up at a reasonable time on release day and you'll be fine.

or u head to ebay and buy some overpriced copies ;)

I tend to agree with this view.

I saw what happened from a 4 hour stint as Blizzards "recommended server" the day after Christmas last year- We were taken off quickly (because we weren't actually low pop to begin with, we were a very solid medium pop server- I think they intended to promote some of the 3rd gen PvP servers). We shot up to high pop permanently for 2 months and it took us almost 4 months to get back out of queue's. If even a third of the Christmas babies from last year come back combined with our surprisingly stable growth (We went back to queues this November+ from 6-8pm server that we hadn't seen since April) and THEN combined with all the people who've quit until the expac... I expect Skywall to crash like a tonne of bricks on release day. Repeatedly.

One of the other posters remembers back to the box shortage in Feb- I was part of that boom as well. I live in a major metro area. I went to 4 shops before I found one with copies, and then there were only 4 total hidden behind other boxes (It looked like someone from the store was "reserving" their own copies from the last shipment). We bought all 4 and read the keys over the phone to 2 to our friends in ANOTHER city that had been looking through shops for 2 weeks and couldn't find a copy.

This wasn't even release day. We skipped release day, AND the Christmas immediately after- my other half was fairly sure (and reasonably so in retrospect) that the servers would be crowded, unstable, and a total mess. We figured that it would all be settled down by Feb... boy were we wrong.

I think Blizz learned from the past. I think there will only be temporary shortages (just enough for publicity!). But I think there will be shortages, and that their servers will crash under the load.

I've got my collectors edition pre-ordered. I just hope I get it one release day and can play it =( I'll be just another one of the 5 million players trying to log on.

Yeah, the initial Oceanic servers (Frostmourne/Khaz'goroth) were lagged into unplayability by Blizzard's lack of foresight for a long time. Not only did it quickly become apparent even prior to the Christmas '05 rush that the demand for Oceanic servers was more than FM/KG could handle, but they were left not marked as full (Blizzard was still just using "high" then as their maximum population rating) and as the only Oceanic servers for the Christmas '05 wave of new people.

I have a level 41 druid on Khaz'g that I levelled between the server launch and Christmas. I was lagging out in the middle of STV every half hour when I tried to play during January and February and just gave up.

Intentional undersupply is probably going to be needed to help spread out the congestion. And I hope that this year for both Christmas and TBC release, the recommended servers list are all true low-pop servers...

Well, of all the game comparisons done so far I would say that HL/HL2 is the most valid. They've combined to sell over 12 million copies, so while WoW may be an unprecedented success, we've already seen major titles succeed with online sales (and the fit-pitching that ensued).

I pre-ordered the game at the local EB after confirming that it would indeed be available for me to pick up on the release date. If I arrive there that morning and it is not available then I'll just chargeback the money on my credit card and go get the expansion somewhere more able to fulfill my needs. ^_^

Honestly, I'm not going to particularly care if I have to wait a week or two to get a copy. For the first several months of release Tichondrius had terrible queues and crashed multiple times a day. I think I'd prefer to let people filter out of Hellfire before I even log in, rather than fight for a decent ping and hope Outland doesn't crash as much as Kalimdor used to.

In my experience, EB is notoriously bad at getting their shipments when they intend to. It may just be my luck, but in the case of Final Fantasy 12 and a handful of other console games they didn't have it in stock on release day because of "shipping errors". In all cases I was able to walk to a Gamestop or Software Etc in the same mall and buy a copy without a preorder. Especially funny considering Gamestop / EB are the same company.

Is Calgary just special? I hear abut all these online pre-orders. Personally, I went down to EB. Paid the full price and on release day, I just have to bring in my receipt. I have 3 days to collect the game before they try to sell it again. They know how many pre-orders they have at each store and I have yet to be disappointed by them.

Of course Calgary is special ;) I thought that went without saying!

As a totally unsupported statistical anomaly though; Calgary (that's in Canada, south of the oil and east of the pot) has had a higher representation in every single online game I've ever played than can easily be explained. Oh indeed I am well aware of the reasons I would notice this (being a resident and all) and overthink the results but seriously... we just must have nothing else worthwhile to do.

</derail>

I live in a suburb just north of Toronto, went to a local EB back in October when everyone was freaking out about CE preorders being sold out, and walked out with a receipt bearing my preorder for a CE. Not feeling so special now, are you? ;D

Really though, I remember Guild Wars: Nightfall selling out in a very short amount of time in my area. Considering WoW is a lot more popular than GW... yeah, it's probably going to be a real pain in the ass for most people if they don't have it preordered and just plan to pick it up after work/school

The answer is: Super Walmart at midnight. That's how I got my copy of the original.

Yeah, Walmart is my backup plan if my "reserved" copy ends up being shorted.

I bought my copy of the original at EB right on release day. Strolled in, grabbed one of the 20 or so off the shelf and walked back out again, not a problem.

Of course, WoW's popularity here in Aus has skyrocketed since then, I'm not sure if I should be anticipating trouble getting a copy or not. I reserved a copy at the local EB, but due to a change of plans will be moving to another city a couple days before release, so I'll hope for the best I guess.

Born and raised in Toronto as it happens =)

Although my post was tongue-in-cheek of course, there really is a kernel of truth there. I don't mean so much availability (although I picked up WoW from a Walmart on launch day myself, no preorder or any fancy stuff... after being in beta for a good while I didn't feel in a rush but it worked out anyhow) but I do mean that I travel a lot and have played many of these sorts of games a lot as well. For whatever reason, Canadians as a whole and Calgarians specifically seem to have been overrepresented in every game from EQ to WoW for me. Maybe it is the cold, perhaps the connectivity. I don't know the why but damned if there are not a lot of us cluttering up every game from EQ to AO to AC to EVE to DAoC to WoW and so on. Way more than I could reasonably expect from a country with less than a tenth of the US's populartion. Even in betas that are lucky to ever have a thousand people online at one time, I still see people several from Calgary alone and regularily at that. Hell, my present guild (which I joined solely on merit and with no prior knowledge of the players involved at all) has four people from my city alone. That's getting a bit spooky.

Weird and most likely not a good comment on my community but hey.

(No cheap shot intended Brad, it might still all come together somehow!)

</derail> and feel free to delete my late-night ramblings. I'll be the first to admit they don't really add shit to the thread at this point.

I wonder if they take into account when you pre-ordered an item. For example, I pre-ordered BC from Best Buy on 10/21/2006. Does this put me in the front of a line? In other words, if someone ordered later than me and Best Buy can't fill all of the pre-orders with initial copies, do I get mine first?

I'll just go to a few stores in the morning and see if they have it. If not, no big deal, it's not like I still can't play regular wow until I can get my hands on a copy. In some ways it might be better, to let the initial rush fade.

I smell a red herring.

No one said HL2 didn't sell a number of copies online. We're saying that globally and commercially, WoW kicks all ass, and it's naive to think that Blizzard wouldn't support a symbiotic relationship with retailers when so much money is switching hands.

From a monthly revenue figure (aka subscriptions) WoW is the most powerful video game franchise ever, but from a boxed sales figure its pretty weak - less than 2 million in North America over 2 years, less than 1 million in Europe, and the rest in Asia which is almost all purchased online via account creation (no retail boxes).

By comparison Halo2 sold over 2.5 million copies ON ITS FIRST DAY of sales. I don't really recall anyone having trouble getting Halo2 the first week either. Halo2, GTA, Sims, etc all have gone on to sell over 12 million copies each.

I think whoever said its really Blizzards decision is right - they can easily push out the 2-3 million boxed copies of the game to stores if they want, thats how big the US market is (there are not 7 million North American subscribers, less than 2 million). However that could lead to huge server instability, so they may scale back and only ship a few hundred thousand copies and trickle it out. Remember when WoW launched for a few weeks Blizzard actually stopped selling the game to play catch up with the servers. Ahhh, the good old days of not being able to play for days are coming back soon...

When they say WoW got 7 million subscribers I assume it actually sold a lot more than 7 million games worldwide, and a lot more than 2 million in US, right?

Anyway, yes, it would be great if you could buy it online, but commercially its probably better for Blizzard not to do so :/

What they probably mean is that there were 7 million total accounts activated. It's a popular game, but I'm not sure there are 7,000,000 concurrently active accounts right now.

Remember that while a lot of people are coming back for the xpac, unlike launch, *most* of the people purchasing the expansion are already subscribers and already accounted for in server load figures; server instability really shouldn't be too bad. It'd be far worse for them to underdeliver, given that people who are already subscribers will get pissed if they can't play.