PTR is working at least.
I suppose this is to be expected when they fire 70% of their QA team and closes EU offices. I'm so glad I didnt pre-order.
I've not even purchased Dragonflight, so no loss my end.
Pretty much every single MMO game that launches (or launches an expansion) goes through these issues. It's pretty rare that things go smoothly. Blizzard have even posted in the past that there is no perfect solution for it.
Do I think it's fun that people can't play the game they've purchased? Of course not. However one has to be realistic.
Edit: Forgot a word.
I am stuck in the new zone can't get inside and lots of lag.
It was all going so smooth.
Nope. It's not working in the US either. Right now if you're not on the Dragon Isles, Zerith Mortis, Draenor, or Pandaria, you're screwed. Try to go to Dalaran on the Broken Isles, Ashram, or Orgimarr and it's "Transfer Aborted: instance not found."
Towliee is not able to get in either.
Well they are puzzingly bad at anticipating bottlenecks in their infrastructure for having done this for so long. Also in the last few xpacks they used to have an instanced scenario at the beginning to throttle the influx of players in the new continents, and they didn't do it this time around. Perhaps it's just lost institutional knowledge, like the online engineer that kept pestering them to do it this way is no longer there and designers went back to do what game designers do: not think about the technical challenges created by their design.
Zep/boats are especially bad because they do the exact opposite of instanced scenarios: they make sure that players are going to zone into the new continent simultaneously by entire boatloads, pun intended.
Now I'm in. Started at the graveyard of the Wild Coast.
This is the cloud era, not your hardware servers. A company such as blizz coupled with AWS has the capability to increase and decrease its resources on a timeline of seconds. Hell, all of this is automatable based on traffic patterns.
In conclusion, yes Blizz isnt filled up with idiots but accomplished and well-trained guys, however, this practice of not anticipating high traffic on launch days and hiding behind the guise of "nothing is perfect", while raking in people's money is quite unethical.
That's quite interesting actually (the point about zep/boats and instanced scenarios). There are obviously dozens of things you need to keep track of when designing things like this.
Wrath classic launch was with zeps and boats and if I remember correctly (and if I don't someone will correct me hopefully) the zeppelin's didn't turn up for a while and they had to create portal NPC's.
Worst launch since WoD.
lmfao what do you think the 'cloud is'? It's all on "hardware servers". I work for Blizzard's hardware vendor, I have helped run firmware updates on their hardware. 'The cloud' is not some ephemeral magic place where you don't have to worry about hardware lol. WoW runs on a cluster of 14th Gen Dell Blades running ESXi 7.0u3.
What is happening isn't a hardware problem. It's not a matter of needing to allocate more hardware in anticipation of high traffic. This is a software issue.