WoW Shadowlands launch day + 1

Last week, the greatest mmorpg in existence launched its new expansion, Shadowlands. I have been playing wow retail off and on since the end of Beyond the Dark Portal, mostly for the characters and the stories within. Shadowlands was supposed to bring the game back to its roots and legions of fans were speculating that it’s now or never and that this might be the breaking point, seeing how Blizzard seemed to have been freefalling (from a PR, NOT revenue point of vue) this couple of last years.

I was excited about it as well, but I decided to work on launch and come to it one day later, just to give it a chance to smooth out the eventual kincks and cracks. Unfortunately, on the 24th, I tried to login to my server, DraenorEU, in the afternoon, just to be greeted by a long waiting queue. “It’s fine” I told myself and just read what others had to say about it online or got back to my youtube channels. I managed to get in about three hours later, but the bad experience continued with lag which finally culminated in a disconnect about 10 minutes after finally getting in. Then I got back in the queue and only managed to reenter after midnight, but by that time the excitement had turned to disappointment and so I just did a few quests and went to bed.

But what about the game

I did manage to play a bit the next days, mostly during the morning hours, and the expansion is not bad - they introduced numerous new systems and such, and the story is a bit alien to the universe, but the overall impression is good. Too bad for all the technical issues that they have been having forever.