It's been 10 years since Blizzard released the first title of its massively successful World of Warcraft franchise, but the game publisher has yet to get used to the huge online crowds that flood the WoW servers every time it launches a new title.
The Nov. 13 release of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is no different. The fifth expansion of WoW has been met by gamers excited to get access to Draenor, a new planet fully controlled by orcs.
Unfortunately, Blizzard was visibly not prepared for such a huge turnout, causing its WoW servers to crash under the burden of too many gamers trying to log in to the game. As if that wasn't enough, the server was barraged with distributed denial of service attacks, frustrating even more players who were either able to access the game but were experiencing lagging issues or who were unable to log in altogether.
"Our current biggest hurdle is the concentration of players in specific areas and zones, and an unexpected effect of that concentration on the realm stability," wrote WoW community manager Bashiok on the Battle.net forums at the time. "We're continuing to maintain a lowered realm population cap to help with the stability, which is resulting in increased queue times."
The longer queues have led some gamers to virtual hostage-taking. In protest over having to wait so long, one moderator of the WoW subreddit, nicknamed Nitesmoke, shut down the subreddit over the weekend until he gained access to Draenor. The subreddit is now back up, however, with the other moderators apologizing for Nitesmoke's action and telling the WoW community on subreddit that he is no longer a moderator.
"Nitesmoke made a mistake. It was a big one. I'm going to simply ask that you stop trying to get back at him. It's over; he's not on the moderation team here," writes Aphoenix, another moderator. "Nobody here is on board with how he handled the situation. We will not handle the situation in the same way. Nitesmoke has apologized (to me, and through me, to you), and I apologize as well."
As of the latest update, Blizzard has rolled out fixes for the DDoS attacks and says most realms in the Americas and the Oceanic regions are largely stable, although other areas with huge populations are still plagued with long queues.
"To address the queues for these realms, we are currently working on expanding the instancing tech we deployed earlier which allowed for additional copies of Draenor," writes Nethaera, community manager at Battle.net. "We are currently testing these improvements with the goal of deploying this tech more widely."
Blizzard did not say who was responsible for the attacks, but a member of DerpTrolling, a group of hackers who launch attacks at big game publishers' servers to protest what they perceive as greed at the expense of gamers, claims he was responsible.
So Blizzard finally confirmed our attack and now they are working on fixing their servers
— DERP (@GabenTheLord) November 14, 2014
The rocky launch of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is what many believe to be a positive problem, one that could prove to be profitable in the long run. Analysts believe if Blizzard handles the huge demand properly, its new title could become one of its best-sellers.
"When a new piece of content comes onto the market, you have to anticipate what kind of demand there will be and at what time of the day people will be using it," says Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games at IHS. "It's not an exact science. If you haven't got the assumptions right, you don't get the best result."
World of Warcraft, which defined the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) industry at its launch, continues to be one of the top-selling franchises for Blizzard, with more than 7.4 million subscribers worldwide as of last month, down from its peak of 12 million but up from the 6.8 million gamers it had in August.
