Earthen Allied Race Was Delayed A Few Hours Due To Bugs, And That's A Common Issue In My World Of Warcraft The War Within Journey So Far

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately. Yes, I paid to get into the MMORPG's The War Within early access. Let's set aside the issues with the pricing and early access of the expansion for now and just look at my experience and today's delay, though.

First, there is a lot of "good" in The War Within so far. Of course, there's always a bit of a "honeymoon" phase for a new expansion, but I am particularly fond of a lot of the Warband additions to WoW. They are hands down my favorite expansion feature.

Being able to level alts up to 25% faster (based on the number of level-capped characters you have) is awesome. Sharing a Warband bank, achievements, currencies, and reputations is awesome, and I love the dungeons so far. Passing Warband-bound gear to alts is fantastic.

I'm very interested to see if the raiding gets me. The WoW expansions I play the longest are the ones I do the most raiding and that usually comes down to me enjoying the environment of the raid and the story.

For someone that has never been an "alt" player, I've rolled or re-played 3 new/previously abandoned characters already and I'll be doing a 4th tonight. I'm loving these new systems.

On the negative side, the bugs, man, the bugs. This may be one of the buggiest World of Warcraft expansions I've ever played. I'm not just talking about early access, either. While parts of the expansion's campaign were time-gated and couldn't be completed until launch, I couldn't complete it until days after launch anyway due to one quest bug or another. I wasn't alone.

(UPDATE: MMOBomber Lia pointed out how bad the bugs in Cata were and actually still are and they're right. I must have mentally blocked Cata launch or was just being overly dramatic here since I couldn't finish the main story. Let's say it's in my top 3 buggiest launches then to be safe. Thanks , Lia!)

The final portion of the campaign, and the portion that unlocks the Earthen Allied Race, was supposed to drop today...and it did...briefly.

Apparently, that content has issues and the patch was pulled down by the team so they would be "able to investigate and address a priority issue." Yeah, that's all they said. Judging by many of the replies to the announcement post, though, I'm going to guess there were quests that weren't working. The patch was re-enabled just a few hours later, but that's no guarantee it will stay enabled.

Not sure why the team is being a bit cryptic on this one, though.

I expect some bugs so I'm a little more generous with my feelings on these issues than many, but damn, having main quests still bugged a week after launch is kind of laughable and makes you wonder if the laid off QA workers were really a team that Blizzard could afford to reduce.

I'll be back with more opinions on the expansion as Season 1 launches on the 10th and Mythics come to town.