I have never been a World of Warcraft fan, but I know many people that are, and they were all looking forward to new places to explore, but little did they know, they were just adding to the problem.
WoW players will be familiar with the fiasco surrounding opening the gates of Ahn’Qiraj, a realm that was added in latest patch.
While servers filled with gamers that gathered on the place of event, some 27 crashed, leaving thousands of gamers stuck in their own realms.
Today, all of the servers in question are downed until tomorrow. Luckily, this time the crash was a major meltdown – a datacenter is on a move – so Blizzard gave from two to four days of free game time.
That was fun. Choosing Moonglade for a part of the event was perhaps unwise… every single druid on the server can teleport there for free… and when the event was announced, they did. And the non-druids either flew in or switched to druid alts. Since the zone has no mobs except the ones summoned for this event, even the low levels got to come watch.
Except there were so many people there, that for the most part all anyone saw was a green dragon hovering in midair and a bunch of ghosts hovering and probably 800 people standing still. Then the dragon was on the ground being attacked by everyone who could attack him, throwing out hundreds of shadowbolt spells that took 1/4 to 1/3 of the health off a max level character and pretty much instantly killed people with less. Spells took 60 seconds to start casting, and after being cast, another 60 before they hit the target… I have no idea at all how on earth we all managed to keep the guy tanking the dragon up, or how he kept the dragon on him, but he did, all the way down to 30%… and then the server crashed. It was funny watching the server go down and knowing you’d been in the middle of it, but it sucked for everyone, because they only needed 10% more on the dragon for the event to finish and the dragon to become friendly again.
They redid it yesterday afternoon before peak playtime and it didn’t crash.
The rest of the events like this are in higher level areas that everyone has to travel to reach, so they shouldn’t be nearly as bad.