World of Warcraft’s Warlords of Draenor expansion release was one of the biggest MMO events of the decade. However, the transition to release did not go as smoothly as planned following a plague of unexpected errors and a severe DDOS attack that saw the servers crumble on more than one occasion.
Players from both the European and North American regions reported staggering server queues with numbers nearing 10,000 players reported. Even with the queuing system in place the servers were not up to the task of handling the millions of players trying to log in, with some remaining in the server queue for over 12 hours. As a result of the unexpected downtime and lack of access many of the World of Warcraft community took to the sub-Reddit to express their disappointment.
The page was quickly flooded with duplicate topics, flame filled posts of pure hatred and enough screenshots of the server queues to fill the Metropolitan Museum of Art from wall to wall.
One of the moderators of the sub-Reddit posted the following statement after taking the page down:
[quote cite=”r/WoW Moderator “]From this moment forward, post whatever you want within our normal rules. I am calling the other mods off and giving them a break. Post your experiences, if it clogs up the sub and turns everything into a mess, so be it.
Since I won’t be able to play tonight (7500 in queue, only moved a few hundred in a couple of hours) and won’t be able to before work tomorrow (maintenance again), I’ll check back in 24 hours. If I unable to play after work tomorrow, this sub will go private until I am able to log in.[/quote]
Blizzard have since posted on the official World of Warcraft forums in an attempt to appease disgruntled players with regular updates on the status of the servers and the estimated time frame for any potential fixes.
Things have improved slightly but many of the same problems still remain. Stay tuned for further updates.
Source: Gamer Headline