Just out of curiosity, when first trying to connect to the game to reserve names, was everyone automatically connected to the server Atiesh first before being able to select a different server?
Is there anyone here who was initially logged into a different server?
I got auto logged into that one once. Created 2 characters before realizing I was on the wrong server. Deleted them and finally got into the one I wanted.
It sent me directly to Atiesh no choice. I had to log back in a few minutes later to delete those characters so I could move to Grobbulus. Minor inconvenience, but I expected the Asmongold to hit the fan.
If every single person attempting to log on today was automatically funneled into a single server, that would explain a lot about why many things about the servers broke today.
Is there a reason people don’t want to be on Atiesh?
Same. I might just play there.
I don’t think people have anything against Atiesh specifically, but most people knew what servers they wanted to play on beforehand, which may have not been Atiesh 
No, it’s just not the one my guildmates and I picked ahead of time. 
I selected Bloodsail and got Bloodsail
Same thing, OP. I clicked Herod the instant the servers went from “offline” to “locked” and was told my position in queue was ~700-something and <1 min wait time. After being stuck at that position for ~5 min I was booted back to the login screen, and after close to 40 min of being stuck on “logging into game server” I was placed on Atiesh. Took me another ~7 min to log into Herod which I had selected originally.
Well I wanted a pvp server.
This happened to me twice. Got DC’d picking Herod and then after like 10 minutes I was on Myzrael and then I got DC’d again and ended up on Atiesh before finally getting into Herod.
Ah, well grats on getting Bloodsail first try! I’m wondering though, did you attempt to connect to Bloodsail when the servers were Locked immediately at launch, or a little bit afterwards when they would have been Online?
Interesting that you were put on Myzrael. Do you think you accidentally selected it, or do you think it was an automatic selection like Atiesh?
Yep. Locked doesn’t mean they’re not online, it means you can’t create a character on it. So when it was Locked you could log in and keep trying to create your character until they unlocked it.
Ah, alright! So from what I am seeing in this forum, it seems that if you were able to connect to a server from the login screen, you were fine. But if for any reason connecting to a server was disrupted, Atiesh was selected as the default server to connect to.
Which would explain why so many people were having connection problems, as well as bloated queue times for the initial login.
Not just Atiesh. Pagle got a lot of redirects too. Notably Staysafe who specifically tried to log into Faerlina.
Its a Blizzard technique. If you fail to be able to connect to a server because of load, and you have no characters on that server, it will redirect you to a Low server, because if you have no characters, you must not be tied to that server.
Well that makes sense.
I never saw the realm list but the time I was initially just spam clicking Herod, so I’m pretty sure it was a redirect.
Well that matches the info that Eloraell just gave. Although I’m still curious as to why the majority of people were being redirect to the same one or two servers. Perhaps if, say, a large number of people on Atiesh left to join a different server, that would mean that Atiesh would momentarily be considered Low pop, and therefore receive a lot of redirects. Same with Pagle and Myzrael i imagine.
I didn’t even try to log in until an hour after it started, expecting that things would be borked, and it seems like from the posts I’ve been seeing, that was a common experience for many folks.
But when I did log in around 4 PDT, I just got the realm selection screen, from which I could pick the realms I wanted. I didn’t get auto logged into any server, like it appears happened to others. Maybe that was a temporary situation due to the load issues they were having.
/moo 
I hope you got to reserve the names you wanted!
And yeah, it was definitely due to the immediate load of everyone trying to connect to servers.
Although I’m still wondering why Bloodsail Buccaneers and Grobbulus (the two RP servers) were disconnecting most of the people attempting to join shortly after the servers were online.