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World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Prepatch is upon us and has come with its fair share of drama.

Queues
With the launch of Prepatch came a familiar foe to World of Warcraft. Queues. Similar to Classic's launch and TBC's Prepatch we are witnessing some of the worst queues the game has had in a long time with WOTLK Classic. Mega servers and fresh servers alike have all suffered the "wrath" of the queue timers. It has become a normality to wait over 2 hours on some servers just to login to the game you pay monthly for. Blizzard's initial fix for this was locking transfers outright to the biggest servers and opening free transfers off of them to select existing servers and one brand new one. This obviously came with a ton of backlash as most experience players knew that transferring off their bigger and more established server would likely lead to a long term death sentence due to population drop off that is inevitable after the game comes out.

A few days after this Blizzard released a statement stating that they "need more folks to move off the mega servers". Then they dropped this nuke of a quote

we cannot increase capacity any more without inviting additional and likely cascading failures to the service. At present, the best and only way to resolve this issue for the impacted realms, is for people to leave the realm via free transfers. There’s no technology solution to this. There is no hardware solution to this. This situation will not improve when Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26th, it will only get worse.

that got everybody up in arms. The suspicious thing with this quote was if you played TBC you knew how bad pre-patch queues were then as well and then the TBC launch itself was fine. It was hard to think of this as anything other than a bluff by Blizzard to get more people off to make it possibly easier and/or cheaper to attain the goal of a smooth launch on all servers. To say there is "no technology solution" to it just felt like a massive exaggeration. Turns out Classic Community Council member Mispeled thought so as well.

Mispelled created a long post on the official WoW forums where he/she states that they work in the industry as a Software Engineer in Online Services and know for a fact that the technology is there and we have had that technology for a decade.

The technology and the hardware both exists in 2022. It is not impossible to have a scalable service within a triple A game that can accommodate far more than the current load of players trying to play the game. How do I know? Because I work in this very industry as a Software Engineer in Online Services. I will not let my profession be disgraced like that with these lies. I know the technology that we have today, the one we had a decade ago and I know exactly what the real problem here is…

Blizzard considers Classic as a side project, a cash cow, and does not provide the necessary amount of resources that the Classic project requires. 2 years of Classic, the issue of queues were there at release of Classic and TBC Classic both, it was obvious to everyone that the same issue would just repeat itself for WotLK, not because it’s an impossible issue to solve, but because of Blizzard’s constant refusal to spend the money to provide a reasonable service to their customers.

Scourge Invasion, kinda
Also something that came out of the blue and not on a reset day was the Scourge Invasion. The infamous WOTLK Prepatch event that has scourge invasions in select zones similar to the Naxxramas vanilla event. Collect unique transmogs, tabards, pets, and more. The most controversial part though was the zombies. The Scourge Invasion basically decimated the capital cities and made functioning in them near impossible as most of the NPC's were dying, players were killing each other as zombies, and it became mayhem. It only took a few days for this to end as the QQ from the player base rose to all time highs at all time speeds. Therefore Blizzard took it out. So it came out early and ended early, very on brand for this prepatch thus far. Lastly you can get a Arcanite Ripper 2h Axe that is 100% drop chance from a temporary boss in Kara. This has an on use effect to rock out as seen in the picture above.

I'll leave you with some memes that WoWHead collected of the queue drama.