Probably, one of the most eagerly anticipated expansions, Warlords of Draenor, to come down the pipeline erupted to a pretty abysmal launch this past week. Since launch, the game has been plagued of numerous bugs, outages, horrendous lag, server capacity issues and DDoS assaults that has the World of Warcraft community up in arms. For myself the experience has been somewhat frustrating but not from queue issues. I want to talk about my feelings thus far from what I’ve seen.
I have toons on both the Horde and Alliance side. My Horde toons are all on the Australian server Saurfang while my Alliance toons reside over at Kilrogg. Day one of the release, I had been logged out but for those who were logged in, you could “stay” logged as long as your game was kept up-to-date (and by that nature, the patching had already been long complete). The way you are introduced to Draenor, the “new” continent to explore, you receive a quest to be transferred to the starting zone. The starting quest itself is pretty easy but there was a bug that prevented you from hitting your garrison.
I decided to log out and go back in just case that might fix the issue. Instead, I found myself ported back into the Shrine in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and had to circle back. The guy for transporting people back into Draenor no longer functioned. Instead, I had to return to the Blasted Lands and try the Dark Portal. There on my server you had numerous people flying around and a few trying to enter by foot. For myself, it kept bouncing me repeatedly in and out. Eventually, it simply DC’d my game. When I got back in, I found myself dead and went through the same thing a few more times.
Pretty much at that stage, I gave up on my horde toon and decided to go Alliance as I heard US servers did not have the bug and that the Alliance side was having more success. I managed to get through but found a few more bizarre bugs that eventually just crashed my game (one was a flight bug that let me go through walls and hills). Eventually, I found myself having more success on that side than the Horde and started to level my Alliance paladin. Eventually, I hit level 93 and logged off to take a nap.
Then the deadly Queue Boss arrived.
With the servers at maximum capacity and getting DDoS, Blizzard temporarily had put a cap on all servers to allow certain instanced areas more breathing room and allow people to play in a few areas. On the other hand, it also prevented a great deal of people from playing at all. I no longer could get into my Alliance server and that forced me to switch back to Saurfang.
In many ways that angered me because I had put a fair amount of effort into leveling my Alliance paladin to 93. Now, I pretty much was starting nearly from scratch (although in truth I am planning to do this for my other level 90 toons). However, the issues with garrisons seemed to have settled and I could get into mine (my alliance toon had a similar issue where I would get teleported backward as I tried approaching my garrison).
Pretty much I hit leveling my paladin pretty hard and last night I got to level 100. My route was simple: do every single quest in every zone in a linear fashion. In that manner, I could get a good feeling of the entire storyline and potentially find any gear upgrades along the way. The first two zones move at a decent pace. However, I started getting flashbacks to MoP as more useless quests started to pour in. None of the quests are particularly difficult but the style gets tedious fast. Some of the worst quests involved just finding enough mobs to kill where you need to get a drop. With everyone rushing to level 100, you end up having a ton of kill stealing as well as very fast spawn rates with clusters of mobs around you that get aggroed easily. Some mobs with bad drop rates though might take forever to spawn and with the rush you can easily miss something.
One of the new questing features is the bonus objective quests. These are seen on the map where you can hit an area and you instantly get a few things to do. Most of the time these quests end up being the standard kill-gather quests. However, I did find a few having some technical issues mostly in how the quest themselves are tied into the location. So for instance, there’s one bonus objective side quest where you can enter some caves for the same mobs. However, the minute you cross a location, the quest despawns. In those zones, the number of mobs aren’t great so being able to find any can be really tough especially with the mad rush.
Another thing that drove me a little crazy was the placement of quests. You still have quest hubs but often times you’ll receive several quests that spread your journey out. I get that the idea here is to allow enough freedom to do quests in a non-linear manner. However, I still think you have to be a completionist in order to get enough experience for leveling. With my path, I ended up at level 100 probably around 15-25% complete into Nagrand. I’m not sure if I ended up skipping quests that I would have enough experience to hit 100. Mobs right now provide very low experience and I don’t think dungeon grinding at this phase is an efficient method for leveling (unless someone tells me otherwise). Overall, it’s still mostly a very rigid experience in terms of funneling.
Right around the fourth area, I started to feel that the mobs finally were growing more difficult. On the other hand, my paladin started at around ilvl 561 with the legendary cape (no BoA weapon) and I didn’t start replacing gear until that point. But things started to become a lot harder to kill. By the time I got to Nagrand, I finally started seeing some major issues with some mobs becoming really annoying. Fortunately, I hit level 100 and I could just focus on my garrisons. I still have a huge number of quests to complete there but I pretty much felt burnt out by that point.
With regards to Nagrand itself, it honestly is BC Nagrand. There’s a lot of similar quests and you pretty much feel that there was almost zero sense of creativity placed here as a lot of stuff I’ve seen so far feels like slightly improved recycled content. The other areas did not remind me of BC by comparison but Nagrand feels like a really awkward nostalgic sex trip with your ex-girlfriend after you discovered she was sleeping with an AIDS infected homeless person just to share some heroin needles.
I haven’t tried the dungeons yet but I am limited to just Skyreach on normal mode since my gear level is too low. To be honest, I really do not want to go through another gear grind. All you’re going to do is grind a single dungeon to get to ilvl 600, then grind normals to get to 615 and grind the same thing at a slightly higher difficulty so you can raid. Having already done the mind numbing gearing game in the other expansions, I’m really not thrilled to start from scratch all over.
The other thing is that once you hit 100 you’re pretty much left on your own. You get maybe on little quest to do Proving Grounds so that you can get a starter ilvl 610 weapon and prepare yourself for random heroics. Outside of that there really isn’t anything to indicate what you’re supposed to do. You no longer have daily quest like in MoP where you get a currency to eventually buy epics. If you’re lower than ilvl 600, there’s nothing beyond finishing Nagrand, some very long crafting scenarios and grinding Skyreach that really point you towards heroics.
I suppose the real feature here that is the end game ends up becoming your garrison. Truthfully, this is a very fun feature but without a guide, you’re pretty much playing a more visual version of a Facebook/web game. Most of the garrison is just building resources and sending your followers on timed missions. After that, you’re just waiting around for something to happen. The garrison part works out well while you’re questing because it’s a nice pause between quests. However, if you run out of things to do at 100, you’re pretty much at the mercy of an IRL clock.
In general, I’m probably dissatisfied mostly at the technical level of things. I think most people are; most people will probably blame the lengthy queue as the thing that turned them off. And part of that issue is beyond Blizzard’s direct reach as the DDoS attacks are just malicious.
But from a server capacity point of view, I think even without the DDoS attacks, things weren’t handled well. By comparison MoP had a pretty good launch. I felt there were far less technical issues with MoP than with WoD and I really enjoyed the game much better. I feel bad for all the streamers and long time hard core WoW fanatics about their experience. Yet I feel that most people are disappointed not so much with the queue part specifically but with the fact that Blizzard still has capacity and technical issues, considering that the game has been out for a long time and the company should have foreseen problems that they’ve already encountered in the past.
For myself, the technical issues go beyond just server capacity but the in game problems such as poor spawn rates, mobs that spawn too fast, NPCs or quests that get blocked by dickhead players and the over proliferation of quests as the only feasible means of leveling. These are not new issues and they are ones that come up during game launches. Of course, some of these things will disappear over time once the first major wave of people hit level 100. But I think the questing mechanisms themselves and the overdependence on it to level help contribute to the overall server instability since player density ends up bottlenecking the game for others.
At any rate, I’m probably going to slow my pace down until I can figure out how to progress in the game. It’s still a bit of a grind but I just dislike spending excessive amounts of time waiting. And that’s not just for the server queue but the item grind, etc.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.