World of Warcraft took the world by surprise. It had a decent amount of hype leading up to it, the Internet was excited but, to most, it appeared to be just those really into Blizzard games. MMOs were not super popular back then. EverQuest had, at that time, layers of stigma attached to it poisoning the public’s perception of MMO gaming and your choices was EQ, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, or one of the varied eastern free-to-play beta experiences.
At launch, things took a turn for the bizarre. Blizzard’s forecasts for the game were dead wrong, the swell of players flooding servers was too much for them to handle. Stores were selling out of the game fast and online vendors were taking orders left and right. When they flipped the servers on, the little light flicked from “on” to “burning on fire please help” as server queues reached the 1000s. The servers were crashing harder than burning ship trying to walk into Mordor.
If you got past the queues, you were greeted with latency issues, including the infamous “kneel and loot stuff for half an hour” and the even more infamous “disconnect because Internet was really sketchy back then compared to now” and be greeted by the 1,000 person queue. Blizzard issued game time credits for lost playtime and the rocky ride lasted over a month. Afterward, the servers were plagued with dilapidated hardware that wasn’t optimized to run the game and the entire issue wasn’t “perfected” until all the servers were upgraded.
That wasn’t the first time Blizzard underestimated their fanbase. WarCraft III suffered from about a month of launch hiccups too, with their Battle.net service having intermediate availability as box copies of the game, which at the time were not available online, were selling out faster than they expected in certain markets.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow/editorial/remembering-the-launch-of-wow
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