Yesterday, Blizzard released the prepatch for their World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion set to release later this year. It’s been a bit of a rough road, but after an extended maintenance, the patch finally hit the live servers.
Unfortunately, the rough road hasn’t gotten any clearer, and a fully day later the servers are only slightly better. It took hours for the traffic to die down enough for most of the NA servers to be functional, with servers constantly crashing.
Now, things are a bit better. The game is certainly playable again, but many servers are still experiencing rolling restarts and frequent disconnections.
More than anything, the prepatch has greatly increased traffic to the servers, with thousands of players that were inactive during the content drought returning. With so many players logging on, the servers are under a heavy bit of strain.
But population aside, there’s plenty of other issues as well. Many things were broken or otherwise scuffed with the release of the prepatch, so much so that Blizzard has released a compiled list of the most common known issues.
Blizzard support is compiling a list of common known issues in the #Shadowlands pre-patch 9.0.1! #Warcrafthttps://t.co/ihETnFEaMO pic.twitter.com/NbLcZxUoAy
— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) October 14, 2020
Some classes are having specific troubles. Warriors, for example, are losing the Avatar spell, which can sometimes be fixed by logging out and back in. Druids are losing their class mount, which reappears after barber trips in some cases.
One of the most common issues players are having is a “character not found” error, which can sometimes be fixed by switching realms and back again. If not, players can only wait for the servers to lose a bit of the load.
Allied races are randomly locking for some players that should have them accessible. Other players are being told their graphics card is out of date, which sometimes is related to needing a driver update or a card just not being up to snuff for the upcoming expansion.
Some players are able to log on, but not able to interact with anything. This is most commonly due to out of date addons, as the massive patch broke a large number of addons that will hopefully be fixed soon.
There are plenty of other issues going on – missing bag slots, quest givers missing, the Mechagnome unlocking questline being busted, and the Operation: Mechagon dungeon being unclearable. In some cases, players are just flat out missing eyeballs and other textures.
As time moves on, Blizzard will hopefully have all of these problems fixed. Until then, all players can do is hope that the company is able to fix them relatively soon.
