WoW Classic’s population label system has changed

World of Warcraft: Classic players are facing long queues to play the game. While they sometimes do that voluntarily to turn in quests, most of the time they’re forced into queues before getting into the game due to how full most servers are.

Blizzard is now making it clearer to players when they’ll have to wait in a queue to play and when servers still have room to join. The company changed the realm population label system and instead of showing their population relative to the most-crowded realm, it now indicates population related to servers’ individual capacities.

So in the previous system, a server that reached full capacity but was still less crowded than a top server could have its population labeled as “Medium,” for instance. Players would still have hour-long queues to join them. In this new system, servers with “Low,” “Medium,” and “High” population counts still have room for players to join, and only those labeled as “Full” will put players in a queue.

This way, players clearly understand when they should expect to wait to get into the game and when they can join immediately. These changes already went into effect last night when Blizzard pushed a small patch live.

This change doesn’t imply that servers’ capacities have either been increased or decreased, though. Blizzard said it doesn’t intend to increase the numbers for existing servers because of problems that could arise down the line. Instead, the company is releasing new realms every day in several regions to try to reduce queue times.

Despite Blizzard’s efforts, players are still facing queues as long as six hours in some North American servers during peak hours. This is forcing big streamers and players who are competing in the Race to World First level 60 to find ways to join the queue before they wake up to play—most of the time using some help from friends.