World of Warcraft: Classic was one of the most demanded releases in recent gaming history – maybe in all gaming history. Since the release of The Burning Crusade back in January of 2007, World of Warcraft players had been asking for Blizzard to allow them to play the game in their preferred “vanilla” state.
The day eventually came where that would be granted, but it hasn’t been seamless. Classic has definitely been well-received overall – it’s an incredibly faithful remake of the original and fans are happy to have that back, with all of its perks and its many, many flaws. Either way, it’s certainly still a time sink – I’ll admit with only minimal amounts of shame that I’ve poured more than 300 hours into one of my seven characters, and I’m very much on the casual side compared to thousands of other players.
We've been working on bringing some relief from the queues to the highest-population WoW Classic realms in both the Americas and EU. We'll roll that out in the coming days, after we test it internally. Thank you for your patience. https://t.co/lTwIfXwfeV
— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) April 3, 2020
But some issues are ones that fans really weren’t wanting to put up with. Quest mob drop rates and spawns are forgivable, it’s the “Classic experience,” but the issues on the technical and social end are things that should’ve been fixed by now.
One of those rampant issues, the social one, is the seemingly overwhelming number of bots. Despite Blizzard’s recent no-tolerance approach, they still flood pretty much every server.
This leads directly into the second issue – the queue time to get into the servers is absolutely ridiculous. We’ve placed one fan’s complaint that was issued directly to Blizzard’s devs via Twitter, where they bemoan the atrocious queue times.
Why is the issue still there? Part of this is because there aren’t very many Classic servers. Combining US West’s 15 servers and US East’s 20 servers, there are only 35 for US-based players to roll onto. The entire Oceanic region has 4 (3 PvP and 1 normal), and Latin America and Brazil both only have 1. To be fair, the Latin America and Brazil servers – Loatheb and Sul’thraze, respectively – are both at low population, so that doesn’t quite enter the conversation.
Realms are also restricted by type, which can affect whether the community is focused on player-vs-player combat, role-playing, or are more neutral in their approach. A full server can take a great amount of time to get into.
For a quick example, I just tried to log into the US East PvP server, Faerlina. It’s 11 PM at night on a Friday, so I’m roughly 1,824th in line to log on – an estimated wait of two hours.
Blizzard seems to be testing out some relief, according to the tweet placed above. Hopefully it’ll make it so that people are able to play on their preferred realms without having to make an appointment and then praying they don’t get disconnected at any point.
