Before I throw up some of the shots I took from last Friday’s warrior protest on the Warcraft Argent Dawn server, let me summarize.

I made a dwarf character on Thursday, just in case a queue stood between me and anarchy the next day. I logged into Argent Dawn approximately 15 – 20 minutes before the scheduled time with no queue in evidence. So I don’t know if they raised the server cap that night or the queue was inoperative or there were less people playing than normally — I understand AD regularly has queues.

Anyhow, I saw one server announcement when I first logged in that The Powers That Be would prefer if we went away … the server was forcibly reset at one point (with an accompanying Server Will Reset in XX Minutes countdown) … I, personally, was booted out of the game, (whether from server load or a /kick — who knows), three times and one more time with a rollback … at the Ironforge bridge, the protest’s targeted gathering area, a GM ordered protesters off the server, in General channel once and in /say once. Threats could have been issued more than those times — that’s all I saw after arriving and when I wasn’t offline for whatever reason.

Beyond the obvious show of solidarity among warriors, I took away the impression that these server loads are iffy. There were 200? 300? protesting gnomes and various hangers-on and the server was coughing up black stuff. PvE raids shouldn’t be that large (at that point it’s not a raid, it’s zergage), but PvP wars can easily grow to that size.

And let’s not even think about the delicious possibilities of intentionally crashing servers to ice your guild competition OUT of desirable loot areas. Because that would be wrong. In theory.

Continue reading →