Brokentoy

Like many of the over 8 million World of Warcraft subscribers I preordered my copy of The Burning Crusade to get it on launch day. When I went to check my shipping status I was greeted with this slap in the face:

“Due to system maintenance our order status system is temporarily unavailable. Please do not call our customer service center as they share the same system and do not have additional information. We apologize for the inconvenience; please check back later.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade orders are shipping today, on schedule, out of our Louisville, Kentucky distribution center. If you placed an order before 2:00pm (cst) on Monday January 15, 2007, and have NOT received an email from us requesting additional payment processing information, your Burning Crusade order should ship today at the shipping service level you requested.”

Having “system maintenance” on the launch of the year’s most anticipated video game is a such cop out. This bad PR excuse is as believable a publicist’s claim that Britney Spears “fell asleep” on New Years. I’d be more satisfied if the page just said that EB doesn’t want to waste precious server cycles on bandwidth on their own customers. I’d still be insulted, but at least they would be honest.