layout: post title: Massive traffic on Wow, still fun created: 1101428103 categories:

• Game
• Personal

So I picked up <acronym title="World of Warcraft">WoW</acronym> on Tuesday. I played a few hours that night, when things were really busy. Not suprising, given the response:

We launched with 41 servers in the U.S. yesterday, and we are bringing up an additional 34 servers today to accommodate the influx of players. Over 200,000 accounts were created in just a single day! World of Warcraft Community Site: WoW - Day One

By shifting around to different servers, I was able to experiment a bit with different characters. Because of the traffic and upgrade issues, you should probably try and create characters on a couple of different servers. That way if your server is down or under heavy load, you'll still have a backup character to play.

There are some unrelated-to-load issues with latency when fighting or getting "loot" at times, but I predict there are going to be a lot of people playing this game and really enjoying it. We'll see if Blizzard manages to make this type of game more accessible to a wider range of people.

What am I playing, and on what servers? Here's the current list:

• Rumba, Tauren Hunter, on Cenarius server (Pacific)
• Cudgel, Human Rogue, on Argent Dawn role-playing server (Eastern)
• Retarxis, Gnome Warlock, on Silvermoon (Pacific)

I'm playing characters that you can either solo easily with, or that are good additions to any team. There is enough "stuff" to do (fishing!) that even just picking it up and playing for an hour or so is fun.

Note: the front page of the community site is very "blog-like", but the individual items don't have permalinks that I can see, so I can't link to the individual items. To be fair, Blizzard does run a huge number of forums, but they also don't have easy ways to keep track. Hey Blizzard -- permalinks and RSS are a good thing!