With the release of World of Warcraft in North America, Australia, and New Zealand yesterday, we have already seen an incredible level of demand for the game. We launched with 41 servers in the U.S. yesterday, and we are bringing up an additional 34 servers today to accommodate the influx of players. Over 200,000 accounts were created in just a single day! Based on this, we can clearly tell that players are very excited about getting into the game, and as a result, we expect to see high concurrency on the servers for the first days that the game is available. As the rush to get onto the servers evens out and additional hardware is made available, the necessity for waiting queues will decrease.

We have staff working around the clock to ensure we can smooth out this initial rush, and we will be working through Thanksgiving to address the latency issues that players are experiencing.

In regard to waiting queues for joining servers, here are some important tips to keep in mind when deciding which server to play on:

When choosing your server for the first time, the server wizard will suggest a server with low load to improve your game-play experience. However, if you decide to pick your own server to play on, we suggest picking a server where the population is not high during peak hours (peak hours are 6pm through midnight in your local time zone). This will help you avoid server queues.

Also, feel free to play in any time zone. The server wizard automatically chooses a server based on your indicated time zone, but this is only intended as a suggestion for playing with people in your region, not a requirement for better latency. Our datacenters are equally capable of supporting users from any region in North America.

We understand that players want to play with their friends and guild mates, but during these initial days as we bring up more servers to accommodate the load, we ask that you please consider the options discussed above. Please also note that we have determined that the latency issues that have cropped up are unrelated to individual server populations. For the time being, latency while fighting and looting monsters can be expected on all servers, regardless of population. We are continuing to focus on resolving this issue as quickly as possible.

We want to thank everyone for their patience and understanding as we work diligently to iron out all issues resulting from the overwhelming enthusiasm for playing World of Warcraft.