It isn't the world's best kept secret that Blizzard's recently released fifth expansion for World of Warcraft isn't doing so well launch-wise, with a number of high profile server issues plaguing the game's launch since late Wednesday night. Today, Blizzard has apologised to its playerbase and offered up game time as compensation for said issues.

As I detailed in my first entry of the continuing review diary for Warlords of Draenor, the fifth expansion hasn't received the best welcoming launch it could have had. High server queues, server crashes and a fair chunk of broken quests due to phasing issues all plagued Draenor's launch, with it only getting marginally better on Saturday before repeating thanks to the weekend crowd. Blizzard's Executive Producer J. Allen Brack explains the issues:

"I know how much everyone was looking forward to this expansion, and once you were able to get in and start having fun, all the comments I've seen indicate that this is one of our best yet," Brack wrote in a message posted on the World of Warcraft forums. "But the quality of the content does not excuse the subpar launch experience we delivered, and I apologize for that."

Blizzard is expanding its use of new instancing technology that helped improve server queues over the past weekend, which Brack said will roughly double the pre-launch capacity of each game realm, enough to greatly reduce queues or even eliminate them altogether. It's also extending every subscription in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe that was active as of November 14 by five days to make up for the aggravation players experienced during the first few days of release.

"The support voiced by many of you as we worked through the challenges was immensely appreciated," Brack wrote. "We're extremely grateful to be part of such a passionate community. We love World of Warcraft, and we're very proud of this expansion, so stumbling out of the gates like this was very disappointing for all of us."

Technical issues aside, Warlords of Draenor is actually an exceptionally awesome expansion for the MMO that is hitting its tenth anniversary, which you can read more about in our review-in-progress. I haven't actually played WoW for a good three years, so coming back into the world through what I can only describe as the most content-polished expansion is a choice I was happy to make, and encourage any other veterans to definitely try out.