World of Warcraft Classic is full. Everyone is craving a hit of that intoxicating nostalgia, but there's hardly even room for a single diminutive gnome. When you're stuck in a queue, you've got a lot of time to express your frustration about being stuck in said queue, and a lot of people have been doing exactly that.
In response to a player asking why Blizzard didn't have more servers in place to avoid these long queues, game director Ion Hazzikostas explained the developer's approach and why it can be better to have too few realms than too many.
"[F]rom the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritise the long-term health of our realm communities, recognising that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours," wrote Hazzikostas. "But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible."
Blizzard picked the number of realms so that each would have a healthy population even if player numbers were around the developer's most conservative estimates. Since launch, less than a day ago, 20 new realms have been summoned into existence. New ones won't get added until they're filled, however.
Even in-game, queues persist. If you manage to log in, the hordes of fresh players all doing the same quests means you'll be competing over heavily contested spawns. Some players have tried to manage the chaos by forming orderly queues, politely taking their turn. Here's one courtesy of artemsaetg on Reddit:
And here's a stumpy conga line, spotted by llzerdklng:
It's not just the Alliance, either. The Horde is also very polite. Here are a bunch of orcs and trolls lining up while they kill cultists, snapped by Palls1234:
All these queues might be a pain in the arse, but even they aren't immune to nostalgia, and I kinda want to play Classic even more seeing all these people respecting each others quests and making sure everyone gets a shot. It's lovely. The reality, of course, is a lot more boring, so I think I'll just enjoy it vicariously.
