World of Warcraft: Forever’s launch hit some minor hiccups immediately upon release, but overall is going surprisingly well, much to the surprise of players who anticipated the worst.
As soon as the countdown timer clicked to zero at 3 PM PT, players began to encounter short login queues. Sitting through the queue would bring up the game’s list of possible rulesets, but they were grayed out an unavailable. It took around 30 minutes of players requeuing and waiting with bated breath to see if the servers would come online or if they were out of luck, but lo and behold, eventually everything started working as intended.
In all previous versions of WoW, players picked a server to call home and create their character on, then logged in to that server to play. Servers generally ranged from anywhere between 3,000 to 10,000 or more players, with server sizes increasing in recent years as Blizzard experimented with larger, but fewer, servers. In the past, that approach to WoW Classic launches have seen their fair share of issues, from hours-long queues to login issues.
For Forever, Blizzard opted for a different, “realmless” approach. Instead of individual servers, players would instead pick their desired “ruleset,” like player vs. environment, roleplaying, or player vs. player. All players on the same ruleset are then placed on essentially one giant mass of interconnected servers.
So far, that seems to have been a good call. Aside from the first 30 minutes, launch has been smooth, with minimal lag and few issues. Starting zones are crowded, but it’s not impossible to make progress on quests. Some players on Reddit are calling it “possibly the best Blizzard launch ever,” with another saying they’ve “never seen a smoother launch.”
In other Forever news, Blizzard gave all classes a big damage boost ahead of launch, is teasing what looks to be a new legendary weapon players will be able to acquire, and even hinted at new class and race combos that could be coming to the game in the near future.
