Warlords Live

Warlords of Draenor went live at 11:46 PST last night, and boy howdy has it been an interesting day.

The servers had it pretty rough - in fact, I expect that we might continue to have issues with them for the next day or two. According to Blizzard, there was a DDOS (direct denial of service) attack against their servers - essentially a huge number of bots that try to interact with the server in order to overwhelm them. It's probably the work of some trollish hackers.

But there's also the fact that an expansion's release is the heaviest time for traffic in WoW. Everyone is heading to Draenor - people who haven't played in months are coming back to do so - and the fact of the matter is that things are just swamped.

Unfortunately, for all the calls for Blizzard to update servers to be able to handle this load, the fact is that they only really get this one day every two years, so even if they have the capability, it's really not worth it. Very soon - possibly even tomorrow, after the initial excitement has cooled down, and very likely in a week, once the mad rush to 100 on people's mains is over, things will be far better.

Actually, the rush to 100 will probably be over far sooner than that. I've been taking nice long breaks to do productive things like work and sleep and wait for the servers to come back online, and I'm already about halfway through level 94 on day one. In previous expansions I never expected to make more than a level a day (and that includes Wrath, which was a fellow ten-level expansion.)

They have definitely made the climb to 100 far faster than previous expansion leveling climbs. Admittedly, the fact that I've done all this before on the Beta means that I'm naturally going to go a bit faster (I know my way around, for one thing.) But I also think that this is intentional. The only hiccup I've hit is that after completing seemingly every quest in Gorgrond and Shadowmoon Valley, I still had a chunk of 93 to get through (though actually, I lied. I hadn't done the "Rangari in Red" chain.)

I have now run Bloodmaul Slag Mines and Iron Docks. BSM (oh dear, is that the acronym?) I actually liked a bit better than when I tried it on my abortive attempt during the Beta. Still, I wasn't able to get a full sense of the difficulty given that the group was all Pandaria'd out with epics. It's a reasonably quick dungeon.

Iron Docks will probably be really cool on heroic, but at the moment one out-gears it as well. That said, I was able to pick up some upgrades - a 550 ring and necklace with bonus armor on both. (The necklace was actually lower in iLevel by a bit, but I'm going to see what it's like to stack armor.)

Things will get smoother as time goes on. It's day one, so I don't think we have to worry too much.