As it was gearing up to launch the game, the company hired about 200 employees to work on the game’s support team. Most of those new hires will be the virtual world’s equivalent of cops, prowling the realms of Warhammer and responding to players’ complaints about software glitches or offensive conduct.Players take on the game’s assigned missions to win loot and buy better weapons, armor or spells, so that they can, say, take on a more powerful class of monster in their next adventure.

But Mythic’s new game has a few innovations, as well. In many online titles, the worlds’ virtual cities remain perpetually controlled by one side or another. In Warhammer, by contrast, players banding together in online battles can grab control of parts of the game’s virtual world and claim them for one side or the other—for the Empire or for Chaos.EA says it shipped an initial 1.5 million copies of Mythic’s new game to retail stores. Recently, Warhammer Online spent days at the top of Amazon.com’s sales chart, beating stiff competition such as Rock Band 2, a much-hyped new Star Wars game, and Spore, the latest title from the creator of The Sims. Then Amazon started taking advance orders for a coming addition to World of Warcraft, scheduled for release in November, and that new version of the game quickly grabbed the top slot at the online retail site.