What's the Seismic Impact after Five Servers Shutting Down?

The biggest subscription-based massively multiplayer online role playing game in the world marks its 13th anniversary this month. Each year players and pundits predict its death, and each year it keeps on slaying those dragons. Despite a decline in overall subscriber numbers -– until Activision Blizzard stopped reporting them two years ago -– player engagement is up year over year, and the game still brings home a substantial chunk of Blizzard Entertainment's bacon.

You found a quest giver with an exclamation point or a central gathering point where players' avatars interact in your shooter? Thank WoW. You enjoy adding permanent gadgets and abilities to your Jedi so they grow in power and mercilessly defeat other players online? The gorilla in the MMO marketplace and others like it cast their shadows.

To understand the seismic impact the fantasy MMO had on its parent company, put yourself in Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Morhaime's shoes on opening night. The company had a little midnight signing event at Fry's Electronics in Fountain Valley.

Five servers went down altogether, not to be revived for days. Queues to log in stretched to the thousands of players. Looting a creature you killed could take minutes.

The entire game hardware architecture was re-engineered in the first week to handle the demand. Raiditem, the best site to buy wow gold, has known that the game was still live, and all that redundancy is frantically turned into capacity for a roaring tsunami of players.