Blizzard is making 2 crucial server changes for WoW Season of Discovery

While you’re studying the new Runes and builds for World of Warcraft Season of Discovery, Blizzard Entertainment is making final preparations for its near release on Nov. 30.

According to the Blue Post from Nov. 20 from WoW senior producer Fwoibles, Season of Discovery will release with two drastic server changes—fewer servers from the get-go and controlled faction balance for PvP realms. Firstly, this means there will only be a handful of realms, just like with WoW Classic Hardcore. This is supposed to make the process of selecting your server way easier and not a daunting task where you fear if your server will still be standing a couple months after the release.

“For Season of Discovery, we’re going to repeat this process. We will launch a handful of realms that can support a lot of players, so you can feel confident in your choice of realm… If Season of Discovery proves hugely popular (as we think it might!), we will of course be ready with additional realms if needed,” the Blue Post reads.

On top of that, Blizzard is promising a continuous management of realm sizes at launch to keep all realms evenly populated. There could still be queues, but I’m led to believe this will be nothing compared to queues we had to go through during the WoW Classic release. During that time, many players opted for the “mega realms” populated with streamers and other WoW icons, leaving other realms underpopulated and eventually endeding up dead.

Another huge change that Season of Discovery realms will see is focused on PvP realms. Normally, those servers see faction imbalance further down the road, as fans opt for races that will give them an upper hand in PvP. That’s why you see a ton of Orcs and Undead, but never that many Night Elves. Coming into Season of Discovery, Blizzard will carefully watch over the faction balance on PvP realms, and will limit choosing a certain faction if the server is overflowing with either the Horde or the Alliance. 

All in all, both of these changes seem healthy and necessary for Season of Discovery, especially because fans easily lean into bad habits of following streamers and creating characters on one-sided realms. This should have a positive effect on the long-standing health of Season of Discovery, and I hope this will continue even after its release.