MMO launch night is usually a specific kind of misery. You take the evening off, you queue up, and then you spend two hours staring at a number that goes down by one every forty seconds while your guild chat fills with people complaining about the same thing. That’s the ritual. We’ve all done it enough times to know the drill going in. Even though Blizzard launches have improved over the years, I was expecting pure mayhem for the big WoW: Forever launch with a disaster waiting in the wings for us that were dying to play.
WoW: Forever didn’t do that. The starting zones were absolutely packed, exactly as you’d expect for a launch this anticipated, and yet the whole thing just worked. No queues worth mentioning, no rubber-banding, no mobs vanishing and reappearing six feet away while twelve people tried to tag the same boar. It was almost eerie. I kept waiting for the moment it would buckle, the way these things always do about ninety minutes in when everyone hits the same quest hub at once, and it never came. The quiet was the strange part. Launch night chatter is normally half excitement and half people reporting disconnects, and this time it was just excitement. Since then we’ve had a handful of short maintenance windows and some layering snafus, which is about as routine as it gets, and nothing beyond that.
Credit where it’s due. Blizzard’s infrastructure team clearly did a lot of work nobody will ever see, and that’s exactly the point. This is just a fantastic launch and kudos to all the teams behind the scenes. So, after all that, we’ll see you in Azeroth!
