Blizzard Urges World of Warcraft Classic Players to Switch Realms

World of Warcraft fans have just over a week to get ready for the release of World of Warcraft [...]

World of Warcraft fans have just over a week to get ready for the release of World of Warcraft Classic, and ahead of that date, Blizzard is urging some players to consider swapping over to a different server. While the classic version of the game releases on August 27th, players have been able to reserve names in certain realms ahead of schedule to make sure everything's in order for the launch. At least one of those realms is already "massively overpopulated," according to Blizzard, and some excessive queue times could result from that.

A post on the Blizzard forums warned World of Warcraft Classic players of the potential queue times. "Login queues in excess of 10,000 players are a certainty," Blizzard said, and the queue times could possibly be "much higher than that."

To remedy this problem, Blizzard is suggesting that some World of Warcraft Classic players scoot over to the Stalagg realm which was opened up not long ago.

"We recently opened up the Stalagg realm, and we urge players on Herod to consider moving there," Blizzard said. "There are a lot of players currently on Herod and we want Stalagg to fill up before we open any new PvP realms. This is so that player population is spread as evenly as possible before launch, in order to provide the best play experience."

Blizzard announced not long ago that the realm cap for number of players had been increased to allow for more people to reside in each realm, and even with that increased cap, the Herod realm is still overpopulated. There are no plans to raise this cap again though, so players still in that world might want to consider moving over if they're thinking of holding out for Blizzard to relent.

"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," Blizzard said. "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."

World of Warcraft Classic will open its doors to players on August 27th.

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