World of Warcraft: Current Year

Silence_sl

shitlord
2,459
4
Khadgar has cast Mirror Image and some of you have probably already noticed a few additional versions of his NPC around Azeroth. He's there to help you get to Draenor once the expansion goes live!

We've had some time to evaluate the overwhelmingly positive response to Warlords of Draenor as it went live for European players, and realized getting you through the Dark Portal in an efficient manner is important. When the switch from Mists of Pandaria to Warlords takes place at 12:00 a.m. PST, you will automatically receive a quest titled "The Dark Portal" that will direct you to visit Khadgar in the Blasted Lands. However, now that we have four more Khadgars added to the world, you can go to one them as well!

Here are Khadgar's locations:

Stormwind - next to the Hero's Call Board in the Trade District
Orgrimmar - next to the Warchief's Command Board in the Valley of Strength
Shrine of Seven Stars (Alliance) - in front of the main entrance
Shrine of Two Moons (Horde) - in front of the main entrance

Note: if you happen to not receive the initial quest that leads you to Draenor, have no fear! Just find your closest Khadgar and he'll lead the way.
 
282
0
This launch is horseshit. At least our server has been lagged to fuck and the quests are fucking retarded where you have couple hundred people trying to spam click some shit that only one at a time can get.
 

BoozeCube

The Wokest
<Prior Amod>
51,085
299,137
Yeah I was wondering the game thing. I mean it's been a while since I last played WoW but every launch since the history of launches with them has been swamped with people wanting to play. Either you man up and power through and get a lead on people so you are a zone or two ahead or wait a week for shit to clear up.
 

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
29,948
29,763
They did put 4 new different Khadgar's out there that is pretty damn good thinking on the fly and a quicker response than they have ever done.
 

Vinyard_sl

shitlord
3,322
16
I'm waiting in Dalaran atm. Not gonna be in shrine/sw f that. I'm hoping they open up free transfers off my server because I'm on oe of the most populated alliance ones
 

axeman_sl

shitlord
592
0
What you 'muricans can expect:

I'm on a "high" pop realm, but not one of the really overcrowded ones. Like well outside the top 10, probably more like the 15-20th most populated or something thereabouts.

Two hours before launch, the server started crashing every couple of minutes. While they claim to have some sort of sharding of the Blasted Lands zone, there were still hundreds if not thousands of players standing on top of the NPC. It took 10+ minutes for it to load and another 10 minutes to respond to clicking the quest acceptance thing. With the server crashing every few minutes and the world server being down half the time, it was an hour and a half beyond midnight before I could even get Khadgar to appear and give me the quest.

The phased introduction was fine, but as soon as I entered Shadowmoon Valley, it wasutterlyunplayable for the next 2-3 hours. We're talking delays of up to a minute on all actions and events. It was virtually impossible to kill anything as combat was so delayed that you had no idea what was going on and mobs wouldn't load in until long after arrival/respawn. Fortunately I'm a balance druid so I can just cast Starfall and it'll take care of shit, but most other classes were completely incapable of killing anything. While it doesn't show on the latency thingy, I'd say we had about 30-50,000 latency. Sometimes it took several minutes to loot a corpse.

Once the lag settled somewhat around 3-4AM, it became technically playable, though still quite rough--the latency meter didn't indicate any lag, but it felt like ~500ms. However, they must have fucked something up with the quests. Things aren't respawning faster than their standard timers, so you have hundreds of people camping the same half dozen mobs that take two minutes to respawn. It takes at least 10-15 minutes to do any kill quest. Clickable objects are only slightly better, and the fact that their spawns are static means each spawn has a crowd of 30+ people standing directly on top of it. As of 6AM, having barely left the computer since release, I was still level 91 despite going as fast as it was possible under these circumstances. Instances give almost no exp, so while they're lag-free, they're pretty pointless to do as the drops are also worthless to anyone who has SoO LFR gear or better.

All in all, a rather disastrous launch given the game is 10 years old and the last three expansions had a much smoother day 1. I don't know what it is that makes Blizzard stick with completely broken shit like shared quest interactibles, mob tagging and such weak phasing/sharding. Whatever technology they use to distribute players onto different instances of a zone, it still puts thousands in the same one and renders it largely unplayable.

Is there some logistical reason why they can't have all mobs behave like rares, i.e. everyone who deals damage gets quest credit and loot? Is there some reason they can't make clickable shit on the ground phased to the individual instead of shared so that only one player can use them every 20 seconds or whatever? I don't get it. The solutions are so obvious and it's frankly pathetic for these problems to be in a 2014 release by the very biggest MMORPG company in the industry. And didn't previous expansions have mobs respawn faster if more people were around?
 

Drakurii

Golden Baron of the Realm
14,670
46,901
So pulling the Ironmarch Scorchers at the portal down and having them burn those to death that are /afk is the best way to pass time
 

Sinzar

Trakanon Raider
3,149
269
Can you just run to the next zone and begin questing there, or do you have to level up before being able to take the quests?
 

Kuro

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
8,885
23,239
Each zone requires that you be at its minimum level to access the quests. It's pretty hard-funneled.

Expansion launch is one of the few times I'm happy that my server is a backwater.
 

Burren

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
4,340
5,843
LUL to the idiots that thought they could jump on right at midnight and have a flawless time. Everyone wants to do that; no fucking shit it's going to be crowded. Why the hell would you expect anything else and get mad? Go to fucking bed and start tomorrow, the game will still be there.
 

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
11,473
5,204
LUL to the idiots that thought they could jump on right at midnight and have a flawless time. Everyone wants to do that; no fucking shit it's going to be crowded. Why the hell would you expect anything else and get mad? Go to fucking bed and start tomorrow, the game will still be there.
MoP was fine for the most part, and tomorrow will be much worse than 3AM EST.

That said, I don't know how I ever let myself get talked into playing on one of the top 5 population servers in the US.
 

orcmauler

Golden Squire
171
24
Well, guess i'm glad that we are getting pounded by the polar vortex. I won't be picking up my CE until Friday at the earliest so hopefully I'll only have my continual comcast issues to deal with.
 

Bain

Bronze Knight of the Realm
399
2
I am running a macro at the moment to keep me logged in on Kil'jaeden. Hundreds of people flying and probably more sitting on the ground around Khadgar. It's unreal - if i move a little bit it renders another fifty mounts in the air.