So let’s be real here, I can’t really recall a 100% smooth launch for an expansion when it comes to World of Warcraft. For somebody who ran a website called Hunter mastery many many years ago, it’s no surprise that I’m a huge Warcraft fan. Spawning all the way back to the first Warcraft RTS game. The battle for Azeroth launch globally for the first time and whilst history and I have to say the launch was a little rocky.

Was there enough planning?

I feel like the alpha/beta phase for this expansion was extremely short. The last time I really dug into a beta was Mist of Pandora. Which is ironic because I’m launch date was about a week after I had moved out of state I logged in I looked around a little bit did a couple of quests and didn’t play again until the end of the expansion.

The last time I actually went gun hole into an expansion was actually cataclysm. Both Warlords it even Legion I only dug into it at the very beginning and then ended up dropping off for the remainder of the expansion. Of course, there’s a lot of cool stuff I wish I could have got, achievements and stuff like that but in the end, it didn’t really matter to me too much.

With battle, I was actually completely unaware that it was releasing a day early. The global release date was supposed to be August 14th, 2018.

I actually planned yesterday to log in and do a stream talking about my final preparation getting ready for the expansion launch the next day. To my surprise, it had already launched at 5 PM, right when I decided to start streaming. Blizzard decided to watch the expansion in North America at the same time that they did Europe. In the past year, I’ve always had a good day before North American.

Loading screen of death

The last time I remember blizzard releasing a game though I stared at a login screen for hours was Diablo 3. Ironically I was able to get into the game before I realize that the launch had already happened and I was frantically starting to go and head off to do the pre Quest to start the heart of Azeroth which is a new artifact necklace that you’ll have the entire expansion.

It’s basically the same concept as the artifact weapon which I actually really enjoyed that concept and it sucked at the artifact weapons or deactivate it. It makes me wonder now if you level an ALT through into Legion will you get an artifact weapon it will it be as powerful as the original?

I suppose in time I’ll level an alt through Legion now that patch 8. 0 has dropped.

What was super surprising was how bad this lunch was when it came to certain servers it seemed at the really high-end servers were the ones hit the most. I quickly took the Twitter while I was dreaming and noticed that I wasn’t the only one having issues.

Streamers get a pass

It was almost like a joke many people were complaining that they weren’t able to get into the game but yeah it seems like every single top streamer was playing the game just fine. I verified this.

Every single streamer who play World of Warcraft on a regular basis. For example, Swifty was playing. There were other players that normally didn’t play well but I’m sure they originated from the game. People like Hobbs who switched his content over to Hearthstone a couple of years ago was now back playing.

There are also two other top streamers one disguised toast who I feel is more of a Hearthstone player. Then there was Shroud who I believe I’ve never actually seen play WoW until yesterday of course. But they were all streaming just fine. I can understand the frustration.

Finally, I return to Azeroth

At the end of the day at about 10: 45 at night I was finally able to get into the game. Unfortunately my main server Illidan us was offline. It seems like the incident of the issues with server logins was mounted towards higher populated servers. Such as Area 52 and Illidan which are known to be high population servers.

So I didn’t get too many levels in because I ended up playing on my alliance character. Which I had to sadly use my boost for. [Update, even know Blizzard said

I believe I’m going to enjoy myself I think I’d be really awesome. If I got at least two or three people together to be able to do come two or three in Arena. Sure there is the random Arena feature but I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of strategy and it’s more just like random you win you lose you win you lose.

We’ll see how long I last this time, I’ll definitely give you guys updates and I’ll be streaming the gameplay regularly. Perhaps this time more rating or even dungeons. There’s always that Mythic plus thing.