World of Warcraft Dragonflight: An Expansion Like All Others

No laughing at my gear ok 😉

The day has arrived, like so many WoW expansion launch days over the past 18 years. I only joined WoW at Burning Crusade but that still means I’ve been here for WOTLK, Cataclysm, MoP, WoD, Legion, BfA and Shadowlands.

And of course, today’s launch of Dragonflight. Now, you’d think a company that’s launched these games over nearly two decades may have learned a little about how things tend to turn out on launch day, but once again we see:

  • World Server is down
  • Inability to start expansion content if you do get in
  • Lots of disconnects

I’m not unsympathetic, balancing server loads on a launch of new content is NEVER easy, but what I’m seeing here is an absolute wilful ignorance in communicating those issues. It’s coming up to three hours since launch, the world servers have been down on all my realms, and the official World of Warcraft Twitter account has no updates since this:

Given the overall player numbers are significantly less than at the game’s peak, it seems to me this lack of attention gets less defensible and perhaps explains increasingly why people give up?

Let us know your thoughts.

Post-script: 10 mins after posting this article, I made it to Stormwind harbour to join the queue:

This is slightly more understandable – I understand that there’s only so much bandwidth but this is where some improved queuing mechanic is needed methinks…