The launch of Warlords of Draenor was definitely one
of the most anticlimactic moments of the year in gaming: thousands upon
thousands of players world-wide, eager to sink their fangs into the new content
and to re-immerse themselves into the World of Warcraft – were essentially left
frustrated and unable to actually join the game upon launch. The backlash over
the issue was massive and the potential PR pitfalls that it entailed weren’t
lost on Blizzard either. A couple of days ago, Executive Producer J.Allan Brack
officially admitted that the launch was indeed a subpar experience for players,
in a post on the official WOW forums. While he expressed satisfaction with the
way the community has received the new expansion, he said that the quality of
the product could not serve as an excuse for the poor form of the launch.
Fortunately for the legions of players affected by the
launch problems, Brack didn’t stop there: he said that for all subscriptions
that were active on November 14, 5 additional days of play-time would be added
as compensation for the problems incurred.
While the launch problems were bad as they were with
hundreds of thousands of new and returning players flooding the servers of the
game, they were exacerbated by an alleged DDoS attack, which obviously made
matters much worse. Blizzard reacted to the problems by expanding its
instancing, as a result of which, realm capacity has been doubled. Still,
problems due to overcrowding persisted.
Wrapping up his arguments, Brack offered an apology to
the WOW community, saying once again that Blizzard loved their product and that
the launch fiasco therefore doubly hurt them.
Frustration over the failed launch ran so high within
the community that the main World of Warcraft subreddit got shut down at one
point by the moderators in protest.
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