Blizzard extends WOW trial period due to bugs

Blizzard plans to give certain users an extension on their free trial period for massively multiplayer title World of Warcraft, which launched in the States last Tuesday and became available for pre-order in Europe on Friday.

The gesture comes in response to criticism of technical issues surrounding the game's launch. It seems that despite running a couple of "stress tests" in the run-up to release to make sure the game could cope with demand, the developer was forced to almost double its server capacity in order to keep up - and this created some issues that made it impossible for some players to log in for a short while.

"We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and are dedicated to providing World of Warcraft players with the best play experience possible," a rep for the Californian dev said in a forum post on the game's official website. "Therefore we'll be adding a small trial-period extension for players who created accounts before or during the downtime. In the days ahead, we'll provide additional details on how the trial-period extension will be determined."

"As always, we appreciate your continued patience and support; we're still monitoring the servers very closely and making adjustments as needed in order to ensure that World of Warcraft continues to run smoothly for everyone playing," the rep added.

World of Warcraft is expected to launch in Europe during the first few months of 2005. While it is possible to import the game and play it from the UK and Europe, it requires a US address for sign-up and billing, which is likely to cause problems for eager beavers, and Blizzard has already said that it's reluctant for US and European gamers to play together and has set up separate infrastructure in France for the game's launch over here next year.