'World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth' Now Available for Preorder; Servers Struggle Due to Demand
"World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth," one of the most anticipated expansions of the venerable massively multiplayer online game by Blizzard, is now available for pre-order. The demand is such that "World of Warcraft" servers buckled under the load.
Blizzard has announced that they are pushing pre-purchase orders for "World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth" starting Tuesday, Jan. 30, even though an exact launch date has not yet been revealed. It turned out to be a good move on their part, since even just the rush of pre-order customers seemed to have taken down their servers, as Polygon noted.
"Players may encounter problems while attempting to make purchases. We are working with our third party payment processor to resolve the issue as soon as possible and apologize for the inconvenience," Blizzard announced in their Battle.net client message, asking players to tune in to their @BlizzardCS account on Twitter for more updates.
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"World of Warcraft" servers have since returned online, even though some players report that their existing characters are still not showing up. Blizzard has also taken to social media to notify users that the fix will be coming, but at a time that the "World of Warcraft" team has not determined yet.
"[#Warcraft] Update: The WOW team continues to work towards alleviating the blank character selection screen and character login issues. We do not have an ETA to share at this time. Thank you for your patience during this," Blizzard noted in their Twitter post on Wednesday, Jan. 31.
A subsequent post from Blizzard also announced that they are putting their "World of Warcraft" servers into maintenance mode on the same day,
"World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth" has been made available for pre-orders starting at $50. Like the earlier expansions, Blizzard is also offering a digital deluxe edition, this time costing $70, which adds a few digital bonus perks.
