Everyone wants to play World of Warcraft Classic today on the game’s release day. Expectations are high, but so are the expected queue times, according to Blizzard.
Blizzard let players create characters on the new servers ahead of time, which allowed the company to estimate how full these servers will be upon release and how this will affect players’ ability to actually join a server once servers are live. The news isn’t great, though, and anyone who has a character on a server whose population is marked as “Medium” or higher can expect to be placed in a queue.
On Aug. 17, Blizzard had already written, in bold, that PvP realms such as Herod were “massively overpopulated” and login queues could exceed 10,000 players in this realm if all players stayed there and tried to log in on release day. On that day, Blizzard released the Stalagg realm as an alternative and said it wouldn’t expand the capacity of Herod, even though it could.
“Raising realm caps would simply forestall the problem, letting more players in at launch but creating an unsustainable situation down the line, with severe queues when we turn off layering permanently before Phase 2 of our content unlock plan,” Blizzard said.
Players who intend to join PvP servers Faerlina and Whitemane should also expect “extremely long queue times that take several hours to get through,” according to a Blizzard statement on Aug. 22. The company suggested that players move to Blaumeux and Skeram to avoid long queue times.
Blizzard said multiple times that the current capacity of all WoW Classic realms is much higher than it used to be in 2006. A realm with Medium population today has more players in it than a Full realm at that time. But there are many realms set as High or Full population for the 2019 release of the game.
If you’re trying to play WoW Classic today, either consider joining a server with a lower population count or get ready for many hours of waiting until you’re let in.
Published: Aug 26, 2019 11:32 am