World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is now live all around the world! And of course, it wouldn’t be a Blizzard launch without an equal amount of bugs and QQ. So join me as we scour the Internet looking for reaction to Blizzard’s latest!
The game only went live in North America a few hours ago, at midnight PT, but people in Europe had been able to play the game for several hours before the North American servers went live. Apparently somewhere along the line American schools forgot to teach students about time zones! Blizzard said the game would launch (servers permitting—see Oceania, which plays on North American-based servers) at midnight. Folks, when it’s midnight in Paris it’s 6pm in New York and 3pm in California. It’s really not that hard to understand.
But no, message boards were filled with plenty of QQ along the lines of, “THIS IS SO UNFAIR, WHY DO EU PLAYERS GET IT FIRST ARRRGH.”
EU gets Cata 9 hours earlier than US?! I mean seriously WTF?!? If anything they should get it 9 hours later!
This is what Blizzard is dealing with on a daily basis. It’s crazy-talk, pure and simple.
But hold on there, partner, EU gamers didn’t exactly have a smooth launch. Within minutes of the servers going live, message boards filled with EU players complaining about server queues and full servers, random disconnects, lag, and other game-breaking aggravation.
This is partially why I didn’t bother staying up all night waiting for the servers to go live: these launches are always cataclysmic.
I just logged into my server (Aggramar, though I will be started a new life on a new server later today… still deciding what to roll) and everything seemed okay to me. No queues or anything. Then again, it’s 11am, 10am server-time. Some of the game’s textures took a second to appear but that’s to be expected with so many people bum-rushing the servers.
Said one upset Orc Hunter:
Blizz i just wanna say thanks for all the bugs, and not letting me actually do anything with the content since questing is the main thing, and i can’t get my bar back, simply amazing sitting here in icecrown just waiting, after 2 hours of servers being live, and i still can’t quest. I kinda bought the digital so I could do these things, but nope.
I do love the idea that people think Blizzard has purposely gone out of its way to ruin people’s game-play experience.
Chill, folks.
You could always use these first few glitchy hours to read the novel The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm so you know how and why Azeroth exploded.
Well met, traveller. From Parts Unknown, Nicholas Deleon is now very heavily learning toward rolling Worgen Priest. He’s counting down the hours till he can play. Cncouraging words can be sent via “the Twitter.”