There's something rather magical about a World of Warcraft launch night, even when it doesn't work – and Dragonflight's issues are World Server crashes, and the complete inability for players to take the boat or zeppelin to the new lands of the Dragon Isles. Veteran World of Warcraft players still remember the infamous boat trip to Northrend during Wrath of the Lich King's launch, and the parallels with the Rugged Dragonscale are hard to ignore.While some Twitch streamers like Asmongold and Annie Fuchsia were lucky enough to make it past the great Dragonflight barrier, many others such as Lirik are struggling to get through. Despite hosting a Dragonflight launch test the week prior, the servers have been pushed to the brink and are having difficulty ferrying the players into the new zone. The Horde zeppelin crashes and burns, and the Alliance boat sinks, leaving players of both factions stranded either in their capital cities or on the character selection menu, reading the dreaded message: "World Server is down."Given the chaotic launch of Overwatch 2, it wasn't unreasonable to expect a similar struggle with Dragonflight. World of Warcraft expansions have always traditionally had very infamous release nights, and their success has never been measured by the first few hours of launch, but rather by how fast Blizzard Entertainment could fix the immediate technical issues. The good news for the vast majority of players is that both Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands enjoyed a relatively smooth launch after the initial hurdles. The bad news is that it still doesn't eliminate the possibility of Dragonflight's launch resembling Warlords of Draenor.
In Warlords of Draenor, players were bottlenecked after the initial Dark Portal prologue through attempting to hopelessly set up their Garrison. Dragonflight has a similar bottleneck in the means of transportation to the Dragon Isles, and it's quite possible that the server struggles to transfer all those players from one outdoor instance into the other – namely from the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor, and onto the Dragon Isles.
Understandably, frustrations are high in the community as some players point fingers at Blizzard Entertainment, the World of Warcraft servers, or even N'zoth himself. Even if players manage to make their way to the Dragon Isles safely, they can still fall prey to a random disconnect as the World Server struggles to reestablish itself again. Moreover, it seems that the launch of Dragonflight is causing a major bug – with many players reporting that the user interface settings on their characters would get mysteriously deleted after logging back in.
While Blizzard Entertainment officially reaching out on Twitter does put the mind at ease, there can be no estimate on when these issues might be fixed. Until then, World of Warcraft players can but keep calm, attempt to log on, or even watch one of the many Dragonflight streams on Twitch and earn the rare Feldrake doing so.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is available now on PC.