As with other online games, game server and network stability is critical. Due to failures in these, there have been times when the game has been unplayable by a large number of players. For example, in September 2005, Blizzard gave all European players two free days of play as compensation for repeated network failures. During the early days of World of Warcraft’s U.S. release Blizzard also gave out free days to compensate players for days lost due to problems on their end; a policy which was, and still is, common in the industry. The issues were suspected to be Blizzard’s upstream Internet service provider.[1]