Bad move, Blizzard. Oceanic server goes unfixed until California morning

Last Thursday, on the first day of the World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor game launch, close to 3,300 Oceanic players waited nearly 11 hours to be able to actually play the game.

To be fair, we were in the game – we just weren’t able to access the new expansion’s content because a key quest broke. The server either crashed or was taken down to fix a bug affecting Horde faction players – players were unceremoniously kicked out to a different location – and subsequently any Horde player who tried to enter the game’s new area was told “instance not found” and would be stuck in a neverending loop of World of Warcraft attempting to load.

Standing at the Dark Portal, unable to go in!

In late October 2014, Blizzard Entertainment, developer of the World of Warcraft series of games, announced that it would be shifting servers meant for Oceanic players to Australia, so as to provide a smoother gaming experience for users in the region. A majority of Southeast Asia’s English-speaking players have traditionally played on Oceanic servers.

See: Why Blizzard needs a publisher for Hearthstone in Vietnam

However on Thursday it did look like customer service had not been provided alongside the new servers. Though tickets were submitted and forum posts spammed, Blizzard did not respond until approximately 11pm Singapore time that night, when an employee who appears to be based in the US finally acknowledged that Blizzard knew of the issue. The staff member, known as Jurannok on the forums, has a forum signature that says he works 7am to 4pm PST.

The server took four more hours to be fixed, bringing the total wait time for these Oceanic players to almost 11 hours since the server had gone live. To put things into perspective, 11 hours of proper game time would have allowed players to reach a rough estimate of level 94, out of the cap of 100 levels. Warlords of Draenor characters start off at level 90.

World of Warcraft game service continued to be spotty over the weekend, with media outlets reporting that the North American servers had been hit by DDOS attacks. Blizzard also placed a cap on the number of players on each server, so as to help the latter cope with the attack and the increased number of players who had returned for the expansion. Unfortunately this resulted in long wait-times to enter each server, which in turn brought on a massive wave of player discontent. Other realms also faced various issues, which have been fixed – and are still being fixed – in succession by Blizzard.

Typically, I’d say Blizzard is doing its best. But after getting a first row ticket to watching half an Oceanic realm basically get ignored until someone in California woke up, it’s hard to believe that they really are doing so – not for Oceania.

We’ve reached out to Blizzard for comment and will update if we receive a reply.