Over in Korea NCSoft's Blade & Soul has entered open beta. In doing so the game has skyrocketed in popularity amongst gamers and at internet cafes where they report that the new MMO has topped charts with 20.35% of the market share, while Diablo III has dropped to 17.74%.
According to ThisIsGame [via GeekoSystem], NCSoft opened 32 servers to more than 240,000 players with no service interruption, this is opposite of Diablo III which launched in the region to 300,000 players and immediately went down due to server overload.
[[ br. br ]] The beta for Blade & Soul also took place over the weekend when Diablo III was down for maintenance due to patch 1.0.3.
It's no surprise that Blade & Soul would trump Blizzard's ARPG behemoth due to Diablo III being highly unstable in the Asian regions, with a lot of players complaining about lag and the inability to login regularly. This resulted in the Korean FTC coming down on Blizzard, as well as internet cafe owners attempting a class-action lawsuit against Blizzard.
Realistically, what we can take away from this has more to due with the circumstances in which Diablo III doesn't operate to consumer standards and gamers moving towards Blade & Soul instead. This is opposed to Blade & Soul simply being a more anticipated release or generally being the bigger game (although that's still a possibility).
Also, a lot of people are quite tired of not being able to play Diablo III reliably, and while a lot of gamers are able to get in some decent playtime, many others are not. With NCSoft advertising Blade & Soul as having stable servers that you can actually log-in and play when you feel like it, it becomes a huge step up from a game like Diablo III where playing the game becomes a gamble between getting an error message or having to wait in a server queue just to play.
NCSoft has yet to set a release date for Blade & Soul here in North America but the word around block is that they want to see how well the game does with its premium rate of 23,000 Korean Won a month (or $19 a month) before they consider porting it over. The premium charges for Blade & Soul won't kick in until June 30th.
Since you won't be able to lay the game anytime soon (in English) you can at least check out the new open-beta trailer below to see what you're missing.
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