Blizzard is warning for queues on several WoW Classic realms in excess over 10.000 players upon the launch of the vanilla server option for World of Warcraft later this month.
Last week, we already covered that Blizzard is expecting severe queues due to extremely high demand after Blizzard kicked off name reservations on the upcoming Classic realms. The WoW Classic team is now warning fans that various realms will be massively overpopulated and urges players to move to other realms. According to Blizzard, they already raised the player cap on Classic’s servers.
Based on name reservations so far, the Shazzrah realm is looking to be massively overpopulated. If all existing players on this server remain there, login queues in excess of 10,000 players are a certainty, and possibly much higher than that.
We recently opened up the Gehennas realm, and we urge players on Shazzrah to consider moving there. There are a lot of players currently on Shazzrah and we want Gehennas to fill up before we open any new PvP realms. This is so that player population is spread as evenly as possible before launch, in order to provide the best play experience.
While we are able to fit several times more players on a single realm in 2019 than was the case in 2006, we are not going to raise that cap any further, even though we have the technical capacity to do so. 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.
Please also note that our realm population estimates of Low, Medium, High, and Full are based on this increased capacity – a Medium realm today already has more characters on it than even the most crowded realms did back in 2006.
Our top priority in planning for WoW Classic’s launch has been ensuring that we are laying the groundwork for strong realm communities that will endure over the months and years to follow, which is why we’re cautiously opening new servers to meet demand.
The same issue has presented itself on the European Shazzrah realm and Blizzard urges fans to move to the Gehennas realm to prevent extreme queues.
World of Warcraft Classic launches globally on August 26/27.
