Want to know the real reason the launch is so bad?
Blizzard pays for value servers, bottom of the barrel stuff. It’s all about cutting costs to show the shareholders as much profit as possible, and the servers, which directly correlate to the quality of the game, is one of the things they did away with.
WoW servers are run on Hewlitt-Packard blade systems (hence the term server blades) which are a cheap and corner cutting method of hosting servers.
In fact over the years Blizzard went from using the top of the line model for all the expansions up until Mists. Then when the new line came out they switched to using the cheapest possible model sold by Hewlitt Packard, which is rated currently 2.1 stars.
In Classic WoW they went a step further and used a new budget model Hewlitt-Packard came out with, again to save money.
Then they invent their own in-house technologies such as sharding and layering to deal with the fact they have screwed themselves by buying cheap servers. It’s a real duct-tape and bubblegum operation.
If you ever wondered answers to questions such as, “Why are private servers so much smoother than the actual game?” You now have your answer. The owners of those private servers didn’t skimp out on Hardware the way Blizzard does.
With the amount of money we pay to play this game we should demand better.
