If I remember the Wings of Liberty launch it was pretty stable for the most part. I think that the launch of the first Starcraft 2 game would have more traffic than its expansion so I don't think there will be many issues if any.

Indeed- I was playing day 1 just fine.

I didn't remember that so i didn't include it in the choices. I guess that probably was a "Some small connectivity issues but mostly playable" situation. I don't even remember if i bought the game day 1.

@pr1mus: That was my choice. "Perfect" is a strong word- WoW's been going strong for eight years now and players still get dropped occasionally.

Hasn't the beta for HOTS been lackluster? I don't play Starcraft 2 but my understanding is that the big MOBAs have eroded away people who would play it. I wonder how much traffic they are anticipating.

@yapapanda: Brad mentioned in the last Unprofessional Friday that people seemed to be getting more enthusiastic about it in the last couple days. I don't know myself since i didn't play it.

My guess is that it will be fine.

I don't think the turnout will be as large as WoL and if memory serves that one went pretty decently.

All they have to do is have enough servers for the all time peak number of players that played WoL, add a couple more servers for good measure and it should be fine. If they wind up having extra capacity then they just have to close the extra servers. If they do that it should go off without a hitch.

Seeing as it's just an expansion and not a giant game, they should be fine. Especially because there aren't going to be any changes to battle.net itself.

Judging by how the beta has improved and really gained traction while staying pretty stable, I'd say there's a good chance the launch will be fine. There will probably be some hiccups, but nothing major. Certainly nothing anywhere near D3 or SimCity.

I'm sure there will be some small issues since it is a launch day, but it should be alright. Wings of Liberty didn't have too many problems, and I doubt there will be as many people hitting HotS day one since its an expansion and not an entirely new Starcraft with completely new servers.

my guess i'll hear the occasional "BLING!" of the achievement service dc'ing off and on, but i imagine the game will be just fine.

Should be fine with maybe some server restarts. They've had this platform up and running for a long while now so I don't expect any major problems.

There may be a few hitches but considering it's using an established engine/game/whatever as a basis instead of starting from scratch I don't see any big problems. Now if you wanna make a poll about whether the game is balanced or not, hoo boy that's probably gonna be a different story.

@yapapanda said:

MOBA's are attracting some big numbers yeah but I think there's a lot of people pretty stoked for the beta. Blizzard is holding a bunch of launch parties world wide with a bunch of matches going on, should be pretty interesting. I don't think the numbers are what they were at it's peak though. We'll see if HOTS changes that.

I doubt it will be bad at all, don't think there will be as many people playing HOTS than diablo 3 had on launch for sure.

Patchy for the first few days, then mostly mild with a light chance of rain when the first big patch rolls around

I would say it'll have some problems but nothing too serious because its an expansion and not the brand new game in a series. I could be wrong though, we shall see.

I'd hope it's all good considering they've gone through both the Wings of Liberty and Diablo III launches, but there will no doubt be some issues during launch.

It will probably be more or less just fine. I doubt it will be as big as WoL and if memory serves correctly, then there wasn't too many issues with that launch.

EDIT: Wait! I missed my 2000th post?! God dammit! Now I need 999 more posts before I can celebrate again!

Nah not really. Kind of like saying FPS have been taking away numbers from Starcraft. They're completely different games. Also numbers for Starcraft aren't really going down, they've been increasing since HOTS is coming up to release. Just because LoL has been more successful in viewer count doesn't mean SC isn't anymore.

And no one was really excited for the beta at first, but when they balanced it out a bit better, had some tournaments and spells got changed around, I think the majority of the community are pretty excited for it.

I'd imagine them letting people pre-load the game will improve stability early on. There might be some login server instability once the midnight maintenance ends and the servers go up again but beyond that I doubt there will be that much trouble.

I think it will draw fair numbers, but a lot of people I know have dropped out of Starcraft 2 for MOBAs due to difficulty and SC2 primarily being a 1v1 game as opposed to a team game. I think the servers will be pretty good.

The thing is people don't even have to "pre-load" the game. If you have wings and its updated then you don't have to re-download anything, so it has the potential to stop any sort of issues that could happen.

It will be just fine. The infrastructure is already built and has been used for almost 3 years. They probably added more servers than what they have had for the last year since there will be an influx of players.

I am quite excited. I had a blast playing the beta and played probably 300-400 games of it, which is a lot for me since I usually average 100 games per season. Though going back to Wings of Liberty for the last week has been tough. It feels so crappy in comparison though immortal/sentry still works so I can still have an unfairly high PvZ winrate while having fun.

Can play HOTS now on SEA if you switch regions.

Blizzard has shown last year - with Diablo 3, that they still cant manage or forecast demand for a major launch.

However, they have also shown they know how to do an expansion pack. Mists of Pandaria? Near flawless execution.

So with that I predict a few glitches, maybe a server restart or two, but by tomorrow evening, all cylinders will be firing and we will be playing starcraft just like we always do.

I remember Wings of Liberty going well so I imagine HOTS holding up really well.

Blizzard will do the bare minimum. Just like EA did. It's not worth the extra expense to put on servers for a launch just to have all that extra traffic vanish within a week. This is the capitalist society that we live in.

EA continued to do the bare minimum even under all this pressure from press and consumers to provide extra servers. If they really wanted to fix it then it would take 1 phone call to Amazon and about a day to install the software. Instead we see this trickle roll out of servers and feature slashing. Its shameful, but inevitable and we brought it upon ourselves by not standing up to Blizzard when they did it.

Now everybody and their uncles brother is gonna want a slice of the always online DRM pie and we're all fucked.

Wings of Liberty's launch was pretty much fine.

Most of the complaints around that launch revolved around the quality of Battle.net 2.0 rather than the actual stability of the game. :P

I don't remember much trouble with SC II launch, so I'm going with that.

It's been perfect so far as expected

so it's basically the equivalent of an unlock key??? the DLC has been on the disc all this time?????? >:(

@ripelivejam: The data has been there since the last major patch a couple weeks back.

was my lame attempt at a joke, forgive me. :( i did assume they updated it on a recent patch. has to make you wonder if that somehow makes it easier to crack pirating-wise....

@iragequit: Yes it's essentially an unlock key