The World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor has had quite the rocky start. As with most World of Warcraft launches, a huge influx of people returned to the game, causing overcrowding on servers and long queues to log into the game. This time around Blizzard has even had to deal with DDOS attacks.
However, days after the launch, there are still some issues around the World of Warcraft community. One big issue that happened over this weekend involves a moderator of Reddit’s World of Warcraft page. In protest of the long wait that users have endured to play the new expansion, moderator Nightsmoke took the page down, setting it to private so users couldn’t access the webpage.
From this moment forward, r/WoW will be made private until I am able to log into the game.
— Nitesmoke (@nitesmoke) November 16, 2014
This has created a lot of controversy among the community, even obtaining the attention of Senior Community Rep Jonathan Brown.
@nitesmoke I’ve always appreciated what you’ve done, but r/WoW shouldn’t be a hostage. It should always be there for the community.
— Zarhym Deadeye (@CM_Zarhym) November 16, 2014
@nitesmoke This frustration is fair, but maybe ownership of a subreddit should rest with someone who wouldn’t shut it down over frustration.
— Zarhym Deadeye (@CM_Zarhym) November 16, 2014
Now that the website is back up, people are now questioning the reliability of the website and its moderator team. It only took one person to lock out almost 200,000 subscribers from reading the online message board. Users have started to move into creating their own community portals such as the subreddit /realWoW. The extent of the backlash of this event has yet to be truly seen, but hopefully people will take a note and not repeat what happened.
