Like many of my fellow adventurers, I was very excited to enter the World of Warcraft last week to try all of the great and new things added to the game before the release of Wrath of the Lich King.  However, just like everyone else, my excitement crashed as quickly as the servers night after night.

Let me pre-empt my disappointment a little by saying that I was one of the few people that forgot to turn on their background downloader and ended up having to download the entire 1.2 gigs of patch in one night.  After 3 long hours, I log into WoW to find many wonderful things:  achievements, new talents, easy raid mobs, oh my!  Obviously, there are many new features that make WoW seem like a whole new game. 

I found myself fishing for the first time in 3 years to unlock achievements for my guild and the entire world around me to see!  I have fished up Old Ironjaw for the disbelievers that think he just doesn’t exist (and yes, it took me 4 hours and 370 fish).  But, despite all of the great new fishing achievements, the server restarts and shut downs over the past week have really put a damper on what could have been the most exciting WoW patch yet.

Here we are, 1 week since the patch release and instances are still shutting down sporadically and server lag is still a problem.  It is hard to enjoy my classic raid of BWL if the server crashes while we fight Chromaggus because I know the pug will not be able to start back up that same night to finish the achievement.  It is hard to get a group together for the Headless Horseman when the Scarlet Monastery’s server has gone offline.  It is hard to get excited about Wrath when the state of the game is so spotty due to this patch.

I have played the Wrath beta.  I know that there are a lot of great things coming.  Despite Wrath’s possible greatness (and it is great from what I’ve played), the game won’t be any fun if we can’t see all the cool new parts of the game.  The stability of the servers after patches needs a major boost if Blizzard expects people to stick with WoW going into the next expansion.   Arthas invading our servers is great…so long as the game still works.