World Of Warcraft Dragonflight’s Launch Was A Mess Of Delayed Boats And Other Issues

If there’s one thing that you can count on when a new World of Warcraft expansion comes out, is that it’s likely going to be a very chaotic event and Dragonflight’s launch earlier this week wasn’t any different. As soon as the expansion went live, players immediately rushed in to make their way to the Dragon Isles which caused all sorts of server issues.

Logging in was hard enough due to a laggy authenticator that prevented players from jumping into the game as soon as the servers came online. The world server also got so backed up that some players weren’t able to get in at all. Those that finally managed to get into Azeroth, however, were met with delayed boats and zeppelins and an emergency portal NPC that apparently decided to come in late to work on launch day of all days.

As you’d expect from the WoW community, the issues gave birth to a whole new batch of memes, a “Where’s the Boat?” megathread, a re-christening of the expansion to “World of Warcraft: Unknown Arrival Time”. There’s also a running joke about the wait for the boat being the hardest quest in the expansion.

“Honestly, this is what I stayed up late for,” wrote one Reddit user. “The expansion will be there for years but the shenanigans at launch time are worth staying up until 11pm to experience.”

Of course, the issues haven’t stopped one player from reaching the new max level by the end of the day. Congratulations to Korean player Adelio for being the first player to hit level 70 while everybody else was still waiting for the Dragon Isles boat to arrive.