To nobody’s surprise, World of Warcraft’s Classic realms have been experiencing gigantic queue/wait times for all servers since it’s official North American launch this Monday.
Might as well go to sleep while the queue ticks down. #WoWClassic #worldofwarcraft pic.twitter.com/Xo4gI0P9B1
— theMysticBeard (@theMysticBeard) August 26, 2019
As expected, as well as what Blizzard had warned us about the week prior, players have been entering Classic Realms with user queues in the thousands. Average wait times are ranging between a few hours to several hours. There’s no particular backlash or controversy, considering players knew ahead of time that queue times would be long. Blizzard noted that these servers are designed to hold thousands more players than vanilla World of Warcraft servers could, which could also be the reason why there’s such a severe delay.
At this time, all realms that have a Full or High population tag are expected to experience extended queues. We urge players on realms marked Full or High to plan to play on one of these new realms to avoid the longest queues, and to help spread the player population as evenly as possible and provide the best play experience for everyone.”
Blizzard did add a few additional servers last week, which makes the queue times a little better than they could be. They also made another big change with the removal of the three-character limitation for each Classic user, extending the character limit to up to 10 per Classic Realm. This means now players can create characters “for a total of 50 characters across all Classic realms per WoW account.”
Despite the long wait times and additional servers, Blizzard is holding off on constructing new servers for players due to immediate interest possibly out-weighing long term interest. Logistically speaking, it makes sense, but it’s hard to tell how the player base is going to trend downward considering the sheer number of folks jumping in for the original World of Warcraft experience.
Just a few examples from friends entering Realms (trying to, anyway).
Players should heed the probable wait times they’ll inevitably experience when they try to hop into their server of choice. Almost every server (save for some Normal Realms they’ve deployed) since the initial NA release has had a population status of “Full.”
Might be best to just chill until you’ll be able to play, four hours from when you log in. That’s an exaggeration, of course… Well, maybe not.