World of Warcraft: Retrospective
Paul Sams and Rob Pardo look back on five years of success - and how it happened
The Beta Test
As the game progressed and entered its first beta stages, plenty about it was materially different from the way that it was at launch. Pardo recalls the very early days, when only friends and family were given access and the player cap was still level 10.
"There were things like the whole ghost world death penalty - early on in the beta, wherever you died you just teleport automatically back to your bind point. So what people would do, when they were done questing they would kill themselves so they could get a free teleport.
"It was really funny - we'd go to certain quest areas, I remember by Sen'Jin Village you'd be playing a troll and you'd go dive into a lake to drown yourself... and your whole system would block out because there were a thousand other corpses at the bottom of the lake.
"Then there were all kinds of other features that went in - the auction house went in during beta, the talent system was revised several times, the whole system for being able to attack other people's towns and guards... a lot of those things weren't necessarily pre-designed during the beta, they were things that we were trying to continue to evolve in the game towards what we hoped it would be."
That emergent behaviour is something Pardo's watched with interest over the game's lifespan, working on a philosophy that players will in general take the 'path of least resistance' when working through content.
"It's really important as a game designer to know that your game population is always going to use the path of least resistance. If you realise that, stop fighting it and actually make the most fun in that path, then I think your game stands a chance of being much more successful."
High Class Problem
Finally, in the latter stages of 2005 the game was ready for release, and few would argue with Sams' characterisation of the post launch period when he says: "I guess the rest is history." But what does he remember of the big day itself?
"I was at the midnight opening," he smiles, before getting to the crux of the matter. "And I was watching the performance of our servers, and stressing out because we were having what I like to refer to as a very 'high class problem' - that was that the servers were filling up far faster then we expected.
"We sold more units than we expected by far, and in that first period... fortunately we'd learned some very hard lessons back with Diablo II - that also sold significantly faster than we thought it would, and back in 2000 we got caught with our pants down a bit, not having enough capacity to accommodate demand. That was a very, very painful experience for us, and potentially limited the success of the game - although it was a mega-hit. Had we had more stable capacity with that product at the beginning it probably would have done better than we did.
"With World of Warcraft, because of the investment that we'd made, because of the heart and soul, blood, sweat and tears we'd put into it - and, candidly, the risk we took to do something this big - we didn't want to find ourselves in that circumstance.
"So we were excited to see how quick it was going, but we were also pretty freaked out because it was moving so quickly. The good news is that we'd bought, built and installed enough capacity for what we thought was unlikely, but could happen - and that was basically hardware for what we thought we'd do in the first year, but we doubled it.
"That was the learning from the Diablo II lesson, and thank God we did, because we had to light the second year hardware in just a small number of weeks from launch. Had we not planned for the worst, we'd have been in the same circumstance as Diablo II - maybe not with the stability challenges, but certainly with the capacity challenges.
"Within a couple of days I placed more orders for hardware and set up more data centres together with our IT team, to accommodate what was becoming a runaway hit. We started dropping millions of dollars more within launch to start pulling in more hardware, in anticipation of what we felt was going to happen. It was mind-blowing to be honest."