WoW Classic: Players Experience Long Queues Both In Game and Out, Blizzard Explains
World of Warcraft: Classic finally went live earlier this week. It only took years of petitions and begging from both fans and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern to make it a reality.
With the game going live, it appears Blizzard might have underestimated the demand for the new game as queue times to log in have become a new internet meme. Players were experiencing crazy wait times to log into the servers. One screen shot indicates they had a 608 minute wait time to get into the game.
Wowhead reported wait times were 245 minutes on August 26th for the North American servers.
NA #WoWClassic Queue Times
– Average Queue 10,607 players / 245 minute queue.
– The newest PvP servers have a queue.
– Stalagg and Whitemane have over 1,000 minute estimated queues (just under 17 hours). https://t.co/9R1lIwmmjc pic.twitter.com/k3paRdmS8I— Wowhead (@Wowhead) August 27, 2019
EU servers fared slightly better with wait times at 221 minutes on August 28th.
EU #WoWClassic Queue Update 7:00 PM CEST:
– Average Queue 7,020 Players / 221 estimated minutes.
– Only 6 servers do not have a queue.
– Existing queue times on servers continue to increase.https://t.co/2YIuEtZfJe pic.twitter.com/jej5EfdLCk— Wowhead (@Wowhead) August 28, 2019
The unprecedented demanded for the World of Warcraft: Classic caused Blizzard to act swiftly. TechRadar reports Blizzard is adding more servers in order to shorten queue times. Before launch, they had added four new servers in hopes of mitigating the lengthy queue times. They added two PvP servers and two normal servers.
Game director Ion Hazzikostas addressed the long player queues to get into the game on Blizzard’s official forum:
“I understand the frustration: Anticipating and planning around jumping back into this world we’ve all missed, only to be stuck in a long queue, is not the experience we want anyone to have. But from the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritize the long-term health of our realm communities, recognizing that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours.”
He explained they didn’t want to have too many servers at launch because it could leave a number of them underpopulated in the long-term.
“But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible.”
He continued:
“Thus, we took the path of launching with few enough realms to still thrive in the event that our most conservative estimates ended up proving accurate, while having enough servers ready to activate at a moment’s notice if needed. And clearly they were, and are, needed.”
He even indicated they had launched over 20 new realms worldwide since launch.
“We’ve released over 20 new realms worldwide so far since launch, and we’ll be up around the clock continuing to do so until everyone who wants to experience Classic is able to. But even still, as we bring new realms online in a given region, we wait for them to fill before opening new ones, because we want to make sure that each and every realm has a healthy population in the long term.”
But not only are players sitting in queues to get into the game, they are also forming them when it comes to boss kills. I don’t know about you, but it looks like easy pickings if they are on a PvP server. Maybe a raid into enemy territory should be planned?
All these people waiting patiently in the queue to kill the boss in #WowClassic – this is the politest thing I’ve ever seen in gaming, ever 😂 pic.twitter.com/03CouuSJjz
— Melui (@Farore13) August 26, 2019
When the community comes together in organisation in #WoWClassic and forms a formal queue for a rare creature kill
THIS IS GLORIOUS XD pic.twitter.com/fdWtzakob9
— UnicornHair (@UnicornHairz) August 26, 2019
What do you think of WoW: Classic? Are you going to give it a try? If you have already, what are your thoughts? Let me know!
More About:Video Games
Read This Next
