Since June 2nd at exactly 0:00 AM, the first expansion of WoW Classic is playable with Burning Crusade. MeinMMO author Benedict Grothaus played through the release, and everything went surprisingly smoothly that night – at least until the peace was disturbed.
This was the release: At midnight, the Dark Portal opened, ushering in BC Classic, the re-release of the 14-year-old first expansion of World of Warcraft. Thousands of players were already waiting in front of the portal and wanted to explore the new areas of Outland.
Back then, in 2007, it was a huge chaos. I was there, and nothing worked. The servers stuttered, there were incredibly long login queues, and questing was nearly impossible. Even the release of WoW Classic in 2019 went like this, which is why I didn’t expect anything different this time.
Traditionally, an addon release in WoW is always a time when everything is overloaded and barely anyone can play properly. However, everything actually worked quite well with BC Classic – comparable to back then with Shadowlands. Apparently, the developers have finally learned from many years of experience.
Here’s why everything went so well: BC Classic didn’t launch exactly as it did back then but with some changes. Some of these changes helped make the release as smooth as it ultimately was. Three reasons particularly stand out that allowed us to play so well this time:
- Many players ignored the quests and directly fled to the new dungeons to level up through pure grind
- Through dynamic respawns, enemies appear much faster after being defeated
- The layering technology divides player populations into different phases where they don’t interfere with each other
The last two changes go somewhat against the “classic feeling” but haven’t trivialized questing at all. We still had to fight for mobs in our group and invited random players to quickly complete one or two quests together.
Moreover, the servers ran smoothly. Except for the largest US server, there were hardly any reports of crashes or login issues, even on the large German and EU realms. However, this only lasted for the first few hours – and the issues weren’t even Blizzard’s fault.
DDoS Trolls disrupt the gaming experience
Where do the problems come from? Around 2:00 AM German time, there were repeated larger lags and apparently even disconnects at times. However, these didn’t come from overloaded servers but from an external attack on the infrastructure.
The official Twitter account of the WoW developers informed during the night that a DDoS attack is occurring. This could lead to the corresponding problems:
In a DDoS attack (short for “distributed denial-of-service”), attackers flood their target with countless requests from various directions. This leads to an overload and ultimately causes normal users to suffer.
However, even the attack apparently did not spoil the fun for most players or even hinder them. The first players have already reached the new maximum level of 70 – not even 16 hours after release.
If you want to get a better picture of WoW Classic for yourself, tune into our stream. On June 2nd, we’ll dive back into Outland live:
