It’s Wednesday again, and anyone who has accessed the internet at least once last week has probably noticed the biggest annoyance of the week in the gaming world: The launch of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor.
There’s no secret about it: Whatever could go wrong did go wrong. Partly, I attribute this directly to Blizzard, but on the other hand, there were indeed some factors that were unforeseen. But let’s start from the very beginning…
The most sought-after person in Azeroth: Khadgar
I really had to laugh when I realized that all players had to gather at a fixed point to get started when the expansion launched. They had previously said after “The Burning Crusade” that they want to split the player masses into at least two groups to keep performance and player experience consistent.
What happened at midnight at the “Dark Portal” took on proportions that reminded me strongly of the opening of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj – thousands of players tried to click on poor Khadgar and then push through the portal into the new world. Disconnects every minute and a lot of burned-out graphics cards were the result of this action. At least: A few hours later, they multiplied the good gentleman and placed him in other locations in the game world. Blizzard responded quickly and well, but this does not hide the fact that this rush was already foreseeable in advance.
First click, first serve
If you survived the intro intact, you were released back into the big world with all the players again. Here, there was the usual problem: Too few enemies for way too many players. But well, I expect that with a new expansion, I don’t want to blame Blizzard for that – if you want to jump right in on launch day, you just have to be prepared that everything goes a bit bumpier, a bit greedier, and less friendly. I don’t even want to know how many people’s mobs I “took away” just because I applied my “Shadow Word: Pain” a fraction of a second earlier than they could use their abilities.
Continuous frustration: The Garrison
Of course, there were occasionally lags, server crashes, or brief “rollbacks,” but absolutely nothing was as terrible as visiting your own garrison. Or no, let me rephrase that: Nothing was as terrible as the attempt to visit your own garrison.
Since every player has their own main base, a separate instance is set up for each player – and the servers couldn’t handle that, making no difference whether you were playing on a small or large realm. Masses of players formed in front of the garrison, unable to enter their home base, receiving the error message “Instance not found: Transfer aborted” every time. But well, then you just keep away from the garrison and do a few other things, right? Not at all! This problem caused many other aspects of the game to suffer: Pet battles couldn’t be started, the various story scenarios of the addon couldn’t be completed, and I don’t even want to begin with all the phasing on Draenor.
Even though Blizzard was probably also battling strong DDoS attacks, this doesn’t change the fact that these problems with the garrison are still occurring even now, almost a week later, and you occasionally find yourself standing in front of your own base unable to get in. The launch of this expansion went thoroughly wrong, and even the five days of free game time that will be gifted to all players as compensation can only slightly alleviate the situation. At least I was spared from the queues… which is probably mainly due to the fact that I’m practically never logged out (thanks to my roommate’s spacebar-pressing slave). It’s more than disappointing what has happened because the expansion itself has many wonderful things to offer, but you will read about that in my detailed review this coming weekend.
What was your biggest annoyance at the launch of Warlords of Draenor? Let me know in the comments!
