Gamers who are attempting to play online multiplayer through Blizzard’s Battle.net have to wait a little longer than usual as current queue times are estimated to be over a month. These ludicrous wait times come after two massive updates were issued for the popular titles World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Blizzard’s Battle.net is an online gaming and digital distribution site similar to Steam where players can purchase games and engage one another socially. The major difference from Steam, however, is that Battle.net mainly focuses on supporting Blizzard games with a few notable exceptions such as some of the more recent Call of Duty titles. Though it has been around since the ’90s, Battle.net has grown and changed over the years and now one of its main functions is to serve as a matchmaking hub for all multiplayer games on the site.
A report from GameSpot shows that Battle.net is currently experiencing abnormally long wait times in queues for some of its most popular games. Some players have posted screen shots on their Twitter accounts to show just how outrageous some of these estimated wait times are, with one of the longest being 45 days. It would seem, however, that as of now many players are taking the situation in good humor because of its ridiculousness. Blizzard has yet to address what is causing the extreme wait times.
There is some speculation that a contributing factor could be the recent releases of the two major updates for World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The World of Warcraft update is a pre-patch in preparation for the upcoming Shadowlands expansion, which comes out on October 27. Meanwhile the Modern Warfare update will allow PC players to uninstall certain game modes to reduce file size. This was due to players complaining that Modern Warfare took up too much internal storage and prevented them from playing the game.
While the massive wait times are somewhat amusing, it is undoubtedly a strange phenomenon. If it is true that these recent updates are to blame, whether it be technical issues or simply a massive surge in site traffic, it is surprising that Blizzard did not have better preparation in place, especially for two of the most popular titles in gaming. However the likely scenario, which is also far less dramatic, is that Blizzard’s Battle.net is simply going through some sort of intense maintenance and will likely be running as usual soon enough. The month long wait for players that started today will probably end, at the latest, before the week is out.
