WoW Launch Disaster

It was so bad last night I couldn''t play. PLayed for a few minutes this morning and it was fine. Hopefully it will be tomorrow...

They expect upwards of 500,000 accounts by the end of the holiday season - that is phenomenal.

I was on the west coast Shadowsong server for a couple hours this morning and was having loot lag problems off and on. It wasn''t anything serious, though, and the lag time lasted less than a minute each time it happened.

I ended up staying away from the Blackhand server again and may continue to do that until things settle down and even out a bit. Its population load is always listed as high when I''m playing, while the Shadowsong server I started on is always low. When I got on there this morning there was hardly anyone else in the area. But after an hour it did get kinda busy with some competition for kills.

Being new at this MMORPG stuff, I need to practice with the chat feature. Someone sent me an invite to join his party this morning but I declined it (I can''t see any benefit to partnering up with someone in the newbie area where combat is super simple). I just hit the Decline button and moved on but it ocurred to me later that I should have said something to him and it probably looked really obnoxious that I just walked away. Is there any sort of correct protocol for that sort of thing?

Also, when I logged in this morning, there were several player corpses scattered around the area and no one was around retrieving them. Is that common? I haven''t even come close to dying in the newbie area, yet it looked like a lot of other people sure did and then just bailed before retrieving their corpse...maybe it has something to do with the servers going down off an on last night.

I''ve logged into blackhand twice today with no problems. In fact it''s been fine since they finally got it restarted last night. No queue either. I think it might be safe for people to return to Blackhand.

Of course as soon as I say that, it''ll act up again. I probably just jinxed it.

Ah well, off to eat turkey dinner. Have fun all!

I''ve been playing all day on Hyjar and its been ok. Weee! Let the good times roll.

Slambie,

Real simple protocol - say thanks, but not right now, but note who it is... Later on down the line when you get to a quest that requires ""help"" send them a tell and ask if they want to group for such and such a quest... Make a note of who you like to play with and try to group with them - good groups and friendly players can really enhance the experience... What type of character are you playing - I am going to make a couple of alternates so I will make one where you are...

Blizzard are extending the free trial because of the server difficulties.

A pretty classy move in my opinion.

Since its release two and a half days ago, World of Warcraft has already seen incredible concurrency numbers across all active game servers. To keep up with the demand from our players, 47 new servers were made available, increasing the total number of servers to 88. Doubling our server capacity in such a short period of time created issues in existing servers. We immediately recognized the issues and began implementing fixes. However, some players were unable to log in and enjoy the game during this period.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and are dedicated to providing World of Warcraft players with the best play experience possible. Therefore we''ll be adding a small trial-period extension for players who created accounts before or during the downtime. In the days ahead, we''ll provide additional details on how the trial-period extension will be determined. As always, we appreciate your continued patience and support; we''re still monitoring the servers very closely and making adjustments as needed in order to ensure that World of Warcraft continues to run smoothly for everyone playing.

Good customer relations and fan support is a Blizzard hallmark and I figured they would extend it... I expect then to double the servers in the next month or so given the expected load of customers through the holidays... 500K +, anyone know what the record is for an MMORPG (non-Lineage BS) subscriber base is?

If you read this Sanjuro, I am sorry. I had my first desktop crash since release and now I am in 250 person queue wait. I can''t get back in yet to do our quest!

Doing the ALT+TAB thing to keep posting here and watching the queue.

Sanjuro if you are reading this and Flux if you see him - tell him to sign up on the Football League on Live :)...

I just crashed to desktop too in the middle of a gryphon ride. Malv if you see this, now you know why I cut out on you! Waiting in 400+ line right now to get back in.

Holy sh*t, I signed up for football already

Warlock, if you see this...

Oh wait. I do, because it''s me. And I''m at WORK.

I hate you all.

I am with you buddy I am back in the 5 sided building unti late tonight... I feel your pain :).