Continuing towards the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion, Blizzard has been hard at work on making sure that the alpha stays running. Unfortunately, it seems that they’ve encountered issues that make it so that keeping it running needed to be adjusted.
The issue is a simple one, really – the Shadowlands Alpha realms will be down until tomorrow, June 25th. They went down earlier today, so they’re only down for a single day, perhaps not even a full 24 hours.
“We encountered some last-minute technical issues with the latest alpha build,” Blizzard explained in an announcement earlier today. “We’re expecting to release the new build and bring realms up tomorrow (June 25th). Thanks for being patient while we work through these problems.”
With such a minor amount of downtime and direct transparency on the part of Blizzard, it seems like this would be a pretty cut and dry issue. In fact, everyone seems to fully expect it to be quite simple.
Of course, that doesn’t stop every small occurrence from being seen as something more. When you have a mass of fans as bored as the current WoW playerbase is due to the content drought between expansions, everything becomes a bit of a conspiracy.
Such is the case for the alpha build being taken down, which many have used to fuel theories of whether or not we can expect to see a beta for the Shadowlands expansion anytime soon. Some have theorized that the technical issues on hand are with bringing the alpha to the next level.
Frankly, there’s no reason to believe this would be the case, as Blizzard seems to have exercised a great amount of transparency during this pre-expansion phase. Fans have generally been incredibly pleased to see the developers return to transparency.
Additionally, the purpose of a beta is to receive beta testing (obviously). Blizzard has no reason to be secretive over releasing a beta, as they would need as many players as can fit in the servers to come help with testing.
We also haven’t been given any sort of a release date for Shadowlands yet, and while the expectation is that we should see it before the end of 2020, such a thing can’t be confirmed. Especially given how insane 2020 has been and the countless delays we’ve already seen, fans should likely temper their expectations.
Either way, alpha testers shouldn’t be too worried about this downtime, as barring further complication, the servers should be back up by tomorrow.
