The all new WoW Dragonflight Azure Span zone is one of Warcraft’s most beautiful to date – if you can play through it. Given its popularity visitors to the MMORPG‘s winter wonderland are being hit with horrendous lag spikes, rendering the icy peaks of the Dragon Isles effectively unplayable.
The first zone I encountered during my WoW Dragonflight alpha preview was, indeed, the Azure Span. Equal parts terrific and treacherous, the home of the blue dragonflight is a sight to behold – if you’re not stuttering all over the place, of course.
Given that it’s one of the largest zones in the game thus far, there’s an awful lot to do. In turn this has made the frosted heights a bustling hub of activity, but the servers are simply unable to keep up with the demand.
“You really need to do something about the lag in Azure Span,” bemoans one fan on the game’s official forums. “It’s quite bad that one of your new expansion zones is completely unplayable due to lag.”
“It’ll be acceptable after [Blizzard’s] maintenance on Tuesday, but within a day back to awful. That’s what happened last week,” comments another, while a third response reads “yeah the lag there is so bad! Please lower the amount of people that can play in the Span before opening another instance of it.”
“A $58.51 billion dollar company can’t fix the lag in the Azure Span,” reads a second thread. “After 15 years of profits, WoW still uses outdated and unoptimized source code which is now starting to show its age with this new expansion.”
As someone who plays on Turalyon (EUW), a server renowned for newer players, I too have experienced some nasty stuttering in the Azure Spans. While it thankfully comes and goes, I can imagine that playing through it on higher population servers would be a real struggle. Perhaps Tuesday’s maintenance will solve the problem for good, but in the meantime it may be worth exploring the other realms of the Dragon Isles and levelling through those instead.
If you’re looking to blast through the campaign on a lower population server and hopefully avoid the lag, you can check out our WoW Dragonflight tier list to help you pick the best character for the job. We also have a WoW Dragonflight leveling guide to help you take to the skies in style.