After a rough start for the World of Warcraft: Forever beta due to very high demand, many players expected to see long queues, disconnects, and worse when the game launched in full on Wednesday. But no such problems materialized in what must be one of Blizzard’s smoothest game launches yet.
However, as detailed in multiple Reddit threads, the good experience for most players came at the expense of one group: Horde players choosing the player-versus-player (PvP) ruleset, many of whom struggled to create characters at all. There was also the strange side effect of the game appearing deserted for some players, when it should have been at its busiest. Both of these are partly attributable to Forever‘s server structure, which differs from all previous versions of WoW.
Forever does away with the discrete servers used by WoW for the past 22 years. Instead, players choose a region and a ruleset — Normal, PvP, or Roleplay — and from then on can play with anyone who made the same choices. The game dynamically manages the world population using “layers” that will always include friends, and usually other players you’ve seen or grouped with before.
As players flooded in on Wednesday, many more were choosing Horde over Alliance on the PvP ruleset, leading Blizzard to throttle numbers to avoid a massive faction imbalance and unfair gameplay. Unlike previous versions of WoW, these players couldn’t then hop to an emptier server, or one with a more even faction distribution. They just had to wait for more Alliance players to join the PvP ruleset and balance things out.
As for players logging in and finding a quiet, empty world, it seems Blizzard may have been overzealous in the number of layers applied during launch to ensure the game world wasn’t so busy it became unplayable. “We are aware some zones feel more empty than they should,” WoW: Forever designer Josh Greenfield posted on X. “Tomorrow we’ll be tweaking some numbers to make things feel more lively. Sit tight!”
Greenfield also admitted that boat and zeppelin transports between WoW: Forever‘s two continents had broken, and been temporarily replaced with portals.
Otherwise, Forever enjoyed an extremely smooth first day. Looks like those stress tests paid off.
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