Following WoW’s ‘no realms currently available’ error as a result of maintenance gone wrong, avid fans of Blizzard’s iconic MMORPG have asked for some sort of compensation from the devs to make up for hours of lost time.
Following an hour-long bout of WoW Dragonflight maintenance on November 9 from 7am PST / 10am EST / 3pm GMT / 4pm CEST, Blizzard noticed that players were having issues diving back into the wonderous world of Azeroth.
A tweet from the Blizzard customer service account for the Americas stated “we’re currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts.” This was followed by the servers returning for a brief period, then dropping once more. Finally, the issue was reported as solved on November 10 at 12:20am GMT, but some players are still struggling to log back in.
Despite a fix finally coming through, this is just another bout of server issues that have cropped up as a result of maintenance. As players fork out cash to keep up subscriptions (or renew them ahead of Dragonflight), the constant downtime has lead to demands for some form of meaningful compensation.
“Can we get a free month of game time for all the outages we’ve had for the last few months?” asks one fan on Blizzard’s WoW forums. “Every other week there’s an eight hour patch day followed by a week of the servers going down, the API failing to load, the game itself being unplayable, millions of players being affected by ‘updates’ that aren’t ready for the live game being pushed for us to bug test while you say ‘we’re in beta!’. This is embarrassing to experience given how much money the quarterly earnings have reported.”
One response to the thread reads, “meanwhile our sub is timed to the literal minute. I’ve always held the stance that if they gave us time even once a year for when downtime went longer than anticipated that’d be fine and it would be just a little bit of a good faith gesture? It’s not like I’d expect a week, just maybe even two days or so?”
A final reply states, “I always get refunded for lost services. If you are paying for a service and you can’t access that service you are entitled to a refund. If they disagree, then contact your credit card to do a charge back.”
Debate continues to swirl around the notion of compensation for outages like this one. Rival MMORPG Tower of Fantasy has been quick to compensate players for any server takedowns (although some argue that the rewards aren’t enough), and Disney game Dreamlight Valley has also offered free loot in response to ongoing glitches and bugs. Whether or not Blizzard chooses to follow in the footsteps of Hotta and Gameloft remains to be seen, but the constant downtime is clearly irritating fans.
If you’re lucky enough to be able to dive back into Azeroth post-maintenance, be sure to check out our list of the best WoW addons to prepare for Dragonflight. If you’re more WoW Classic inclined, then we have a WoW WotLK Death Knight guide to make sure you’re prepared for Northrend – when the servers come back, because apparently they’re down, too.
