World of Warcraft's astounding numbers

[The Overlord]

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/world-of-warcraft-s-astounding-numbers/1355608

With about 12 million subscribers, chart-topping sales and enough pop culture cred to warrant both an Emmy-winning turn in South Park and shout-outs from William Shatner and Ozzy Osbourne, we knew World of Warcraft was big.

But during a game conference in Austin covered by Gamasutra, the game's developers dropped some stats that make it out to be, well, really, really big.

To operate a game as massive as Warcraft, Blizzard employs over 4,600 staffers and uses 20,000 computer systems, 75,000 CPU cores and a staggering 1.3 petabytes (that's over 1 billion MBs) of storage. And you thought your 32 GB iPhone was cool.

The game itself, when viewed from The Matrix, would take up about 5.5 million lines of code, made even safer by the fact that the QA crew has flattened over 180,000 bugs If you were actually wandering around in Azeroth, you could find over 1.5 million art assets, from wall torches to wheels of cheese, and would have the opportunity to chat up 40,000 NPCs (non-player characters). They could then dole out 7,650 quests, which you could complete using a handful of the game's 70,000 spells.

The craziest stat of all? In the five years since World of Warcraft launched, players have earned a McDonald's-threatening 4,449,680,399 in-game rewards.

Man, that's a lot of loot.

[Lone]

The game in itself is good, but after a while I just got bored with it....


Well made, but not for me and looking at those stats I am honestly amazed no idea it took up that many Peta's I was thinking several hundred thousand Tera's at the most!

[The Overlord]

In terms of actual server populations and staffers to handle them, Warcraft is going to wins hands-down.

However, compare that code and number of art objects to a true veteran MMO such as EverQuest, things are going to be different. At last count, EQ had 90,000+ objects alone, and of those a good 3,000 have allegedly yet to be discovered by a community that’s in its eleventh year.