War, war never changes.

In which history repeats itself for the upteenth time.

WoD launch was staggered, as usual, where the EU got first dibs.  Well, more like they are the guinea pigs for the west.  To get access to the new content, you’re sent to the Blasted Lands and then to meet Khadgar.  This NPC is a bottleneck as you need to click on him to proceed.  Blizz, in their wisdom, put a buffer around him so that you can’t stand on him and a larger buffer than auto-dismounts you.  What you end up with is a few hundred people in orbit around an NPC.  Still…. issues.

End result is that he’s cast mirror image and has multiple clones.  Yay?

And this is before even logging into the game.  I’ve mentioned that Stormrage is an old server (launch) and that it’s heavy on alliance (something like 90%), which causes tons of fun.  Stormrage has been brought down multiple times, queues are massive (over 1200 at 9EST), disconnects are all over the place (which compounds the queue issues) and just zoning through the portal seems to be an event in itself.

But hey, wait a couple days.  There are going to be hotfixes and realm restarts for the next 48 hours, that’s the way with every WoW expansion.  It’s a 10 year old game after all.  And even though there are already a bunch of level 100s before the day is up, they really don’t have anything to do once there.  Raids won’t open for a while.  Dungeons are horrible experiences when the server is laggy/crashing. Even realm first achievements are gone.   Waiting a few days will let stuff sort out, reduce the queue times (well, not on Stormrage at least!), and provide for more open leveling space.

Launches are fun.