The good news is that the WoW Classic release date is just a week away and will include a lot of happy Blizzard customers.
Fans have been hyped about the Vanilla Mode since it was first announced during Blizzcon.
Name Registration is already open for those who want to be first to explore the old ways of World of Warcraft.
But fans are also being warned of server Realms facing severe overcrowding issues.
A recent message from Blizzard explains: “We have contingency plans in place to bring up additional realms quickly if needed.
“We may also integrate character transfers (this ultimately became a service in original WoW.)
“As you can imagine, it’s difficult for us to gauge how many people will come to play Classic and stay on to experience max-level content.
“Ultimately, we want to see realms with healthy stable populations so we’ll try to match demand without inadvertently creating low population realms in the process.”
This follows an earlier statement regarding the issues facing some of the Realms in WoW Classic.
“Based on name reservations so far, the Herod realm is looking to be massively overpopulated,” the Blizzard statement adds. “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 Stalagg realm, and we urge players on Herod to consider moving there. There are a lot of players currently on Herod and we want Stalagg 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.”
Trying to combat this issue, Blizzard has opened two new PvP realms this week, including:
- Blaumeux – PvP – Pacific Time Zone
- Skeram – PvP – Eastern Time Zone
And Blizzard is urging players on PvP realms to consider moving to one of these realms. Doing so will help spread the player population as evenly as possible before launch and provide the best play experience for everyone.
We should hear more from Blizzard on these ongoing issues before the big launch; however, there’s no guarantee it will be good news. If these numbers haven’t changed and player numbers remain all over the place, we could see a very rough launch for WoW Classic.
“On the most popular servers, such as Herod and Shazzrah, we are currently estimating lengthy queue times – up to several hours or more in certain instances,” Blizzard confirms.
“That is why we strongly encourage players to use the name reservation period to transfer their characters and their guilds to lower pop realms.”
This could lead to free Realm transfers in the future to help alleviate server issues after launch.
“We wanted to hold true to our main objective of ensuring healthy realm communities in a post-Launch world.”
“Therefore, we felt that the best approach here was to start off with fewer realms in order to gauge player interest during the name reservation period. As we have seen players congregate on certain types of realms, we have opened up new realms with communication to that effect.
“While we acknowledge that queues will be part of the launch experience, we encourage players to keep an eye on the forums and message boards over the next days/weeks for communications around realms with lower populations and therefore more manageable queue times.”
