World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor launched throughout the world on Thursday. Thus far, the expansion has been a very bumpy ride for players.
Warlords of Draenor experienced the same launch-day issue as a lot of other online-only games: a huge amount of players trying to log on all at once. Though this is the fifth expansion pack to WoW, Blizzard community manager Josh Allen says they were caught off-guard by the amount of players trying to play on day one:
This is an ideal problem for Blizzard to have. WoW's subscriber numbers have dipped quite a bit over the past few years. There are now 7.4 million active players as of late October, down from 12 million back in 2010. A busier-than-expected launch for Warlords of Draenor suggests that the expansion was successful in luring back a lot of these former players - or perhaps bringing some newbies into the fold. Maybe that free level 90 character boost helped in swaying people?
However, this influx of players resulted in a really unstable launch. What compounded the issue is that all of these players were in the Blasted Lands to start the Warlords of Draenor questline. Blizzard was able to solve this overcrowding somewhat by allowing players to access the new content through other locations, such as the shrines in Pandaria and faction capital cities.
"While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency," explained community manager Micah Whipple in a forum post on launch day. "To help correct for this and other issues, we’ve temporarily lowered maximum realm populations. This means there will be high queue times experienced on high-population realms."
The queues meant that players would have to wait upwards of one hour before being able to log into the game. On Friday night, I checked my old server and was told that there was an expected wait time of at least 120 minutes.
Even if you do wait that long to log in, though, you weren't guaranteed a smooth experience. Several aspects of the game were having problems. Instance servers were timing out, making players unable to access dungeons. Players couldn't find their characters on their login screen and were frequently disconnected due to continent servers going down. The various services of garrisons, the personal fortresses players gain in the beginning of Warlords of Draenor, were inaccessible.
Blizzard was forced to take down the servers for hours at a time on Friday and Saturday mornings. The servers were just recently brought back online and Blizzard sounds optimistic.
"We’re continuing to monitor realms and track any individual issues as they occur. We’re still seeing some issues occurring now that Europe is in their peak playtime, but with greatly reduced frequency compared to before maintenance," Whipple said. "All realms are now set back up to their normal population caps. Queues being experienced now are due to demand beyond what the realms are normally capable of handling, and we’ll be looking into how to reduce them further."
Warlords of Draenor's early problems end a week filled with poor game launches. Halo: The Master Chief Collection's multiplayer was crippled by matchmaking bugs. Assassin's Creed Unity has been experiencing frame rate issues, crashes, and several other problems.
