Last week, Blizzard has opened the floodgates for World of Warcraft Classic. Starting from August 13th, players with an active game subscription were able to reserve their character names on their desired servers. However, over the weekend, Blizzard has issued a statement regarding the server population. According to the developers, a couple of realms are overpopulated even before the official launch of World of Warcraft Classic.
The statement reads:
“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.”
Shazzrah is the European realm, while on NA side it seems like Herod is the one booming in popularity. Since the release of the server list, Blizzard was under fire by the community of having too few PvP dedicated realms (PvP realms was the most popular server option back in Classic days). However, Blizzard is opening up some new realms to accommodate all the players. The post continues:
“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 the 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.”
However, if you’re among the players who’ve already reserved their character’s name and made plans with fellow mates to play on a specific server, you might not want to move to another realm. In this case, we suggest going away for the launch weekend in order to avoid massive queue times. On Monday, log-in queues should be way shorter. On the other hand, you still have a week to change your plans and inform your buddies to swap servers.
