Twitch streamer Zack “Asmongold” was having the time of his life with the release of World of Warcraft Classic last night. He had more than 200,000 concurrent viewers on his channel while he was streaming it, which was about a fifth of the game’s total viewership on Twitch.
But Asmongold got disconnected from his server midway through his gameplay. On release day, this is worse than getting crushed by a raid boss.
When he tried to log back in, he was the last of a 20,083-player queue that could take up to five and a half hours to be cleared. For the biggest WoW Classic Twitch streamer on release day, that meant more than just waiting a bit to play a game.
Asmongold got desperate. His friends were also kicked from the server for no apparent reason and there was nothing they could do except wait. He stayed live on Twitch while waiting and left a message saying he went to bed because Blizzard disconnected him. He said he’d come back when all of the 20,083 players in front of him were in.
Asmongold waited about four hours to hop back into WoW Classic, which wasn’t too bad considering other wait times players reported, which ranged from six to 10 hours.
The biggest problem with WoW realms is that each one is a unique server unrelated to the others. Players who have characters in a realm won’t have them on another server since they’re restricted to the realm where they were created. The best you can do is buy a character transfer to move it to another realm, but that takes at least a day to complete.
That’s why Asmongold couldn’t simply join a server that didn’t have a queue. He wouldn’t be able to play with the character he had been building for the past eight hours and his fellow WoW streamers wouldn’t be with him. So, Asmongold preferred to trade a few hours of streaming for a spot back in the realm he was initially in.
Asmongold is still live on Twitch, but he’s in the server now.
