Kings of the World 2009-10-24decided to
open up beta applications to Europe earlier this year, the developer received ten times the number of expected sign-ups.
Perhaps as a result of this, Europe is now a key consideration in Blizzard's strategy for World of Warcraft - Europe will have a full local team in place shortly after the game launches simultaneously in the US and Korea this winter, all the support and infrastructure will be hosted in Europe (the servers are in France), and the game will initially support English, French and German languages, with the possibility of more being added at a later date. During a recent stress test of the game, designed to give Blizzard an idea of how the servers performed under strain, up to 3,000 players were playing concurrently - and the ongoing US beta regularly enjoys 2,000 concurrent players.
Speaking to the assembled hacks on a recent press tour stop in the UK, Blizzard producer Chris Sigaty confirmed that the long-awaited European beta could kick off as soon as this week, and said that in terms of future support, the company would "patch all regions simultaneously," so Europe wouldn't be left lagging behind. There is still the issue of players from the US and Europe being unable to play together, but as this was a design decision Blizzard is considering ways to let the hardcore world-spanning guilds get round this.
Seated comfortably in a rather grand old house somewhere in the leafy English countryside...