I would love to see more posts like this in the future. The software nerd in me geeks out and I think it does a lot to explain where the technical challenges arose from for the players who don’t have any insight into software development. Great work getting it fixed and finding the cause!
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Nine expansions. Zero smooth launches. “Things don’t always go as planned.” No. But they do sometimes, especially when you improve upon past experiences.
Being transparent about how you screwed up might appease plebians but you still screwed up and in a very stupid way that wass entirely preventable.
It doesn’t matter how you screwed up because you always screw up.
Shame on you for never getting it right. Ever.
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So this is all the “data miners” faults?
If only there was a way to test all this before pushing this to the live servers, instead of pushing it to live and crossing your fingers…
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Thank you! It’s fascinating to see what goes into a launch like this, and even though you’ve only let us scratch the surface of understanding, it sounds like a nightmare 
Thank you again for all your hard work and letting us in on the details.
This would be great.
Drunk on Dunning-Kruger are we?
YEAH! Go tell those server engineers how to do it right! Clearly you are more qualified and know how to do it correctly. Perhaps you should apply?
It’s not my intention to sound rude but I’m sure it will be taken as such. We all know software development is hard, but your engineers get paid real good money to do it and in truth that read like one giant excuse and less an apology.
Azure Span is still having major issues. Ever since starting the zone a few days ago I’ve seen latency spikes and spell, quest prompt, and vendor selling delays by as much as several seconds up to minutes and I’ve seen quite a few disconnects. At times I go to vendor sell items and click on about twenty things and about 30 seconds later each of the items I clicked start selling one by one. The zone just seems bogged down. 
Very cool, interesting read thanks for explaining how this all really went down.
I really hate to complain on this, due to having to run and write in minimal code on servers running out game tournaments, and having +hit happen so to speak. I’m merely a lay person and think the blizzard team is probs doing a lot of work w/o being as compensated for it entirely. From what little I know, it can be entirely exhausting and peeps in the red for unseen issues.
Having said that, however, I must incline myself in agreement, to letting us the players, Some notification in real time, when it’s happening. I get, the Dev team can’t upfront, because They may not yet have gotten to the bottom of it; but at least within some reasonable time period while the lag, etc, is going on.
For myself, for 2 days or more, I was recalibrating settings, both in-game, on my comp, resolutions on my high end monitor I had just gotten, lag router settings, multiple checks in wow and other sites, and nada. Finally, accepting the problem was on Blizzards end and just waited for it to be fixed. But, nowhere during the problem WAS there notification of what was going on. All the Searches I did on the in-game lag problems from wow, was the old reset game settings, etc many of which were years old.
Thanks for all you do.
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These posts should be a weekly thing at a minimum. It is more important than ever in our increasingly online world that we remember that real people work on these systems constantly.
It was a bad launch, probably the worst since the mop fiasco with the helicopter quest, but if this pushes the team to communicate more openly it will lead to improvements going forward.
The news is in . . . Horde first, … then they start watching Alliance. ::sadpanda
Also, +1 this is a WONDERFUL post Blue, thank you for some inside info 
The increased effort to actually communicate with the players on the actual official WoW site are greatly appreciated.
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I understand that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”. I am sure you did everything you could. My issue was this came a week too late. There was silence when it was happening in real time. I was left sitting on the docks while my “friends” made it and started leveling without me.
This was sort of my last hurrah before I left the game; for me, personally, everything was riding on my first week experience with the expansion. I ended up cancelling my sub before I even made it to the Dragon Isles. The actual content of the game hasn’t been enough to get me to stay. I know the experience of one person doesn’t matter in the long run, but I hope you take it to heart for next time that you need to communicate this a lot sooner than you did.
please fix this HORRIBLE lag in Azure Span…cant even accept or turn in a quest properly…
And I am no near the feast thing, …or the place everyone is farming…this is rediculous
Absolutely love these posts. I certainly understand the downside, as criticism and accusations are brutal (and you’re just the messenger). But I hope the pros outweigh the cons here and we can continue to get these sorts of more in-depth information.
Wrong, the lag and instability is still happening. The cobalt area is a big issue for this due to everyone rep grinding on their alts in the area 24/7 because rep/renown isn’t account wide so they are forced to, if they want to get the bis ring. Also the PvP quest Wild Arcana in the cobalt area isn’t helping either when people are farming each other all day long.
Fix azure span please.
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Perhaps you didn’t read the report but they made it very clear this was a human-error and they didn’t do proper testing in advance. Crawl up their holes all you want, doesn’t mean this wasn’t pathetic yet again, chump.
This right now, is exactly what im imagining…
Servers crashing, posting on forums…
Blue? Crickets…