In anticipation of the launch of the “classic” version of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, Blizzard is doing all they can to ensure all goes smoothly and hopefully queue-free. Blizzard is aiming to keep the “vanilla,” pre-expansion, nostalgic feeling alive for new and retuning players, but do want to exclude the “realm is full” messages that veterans will remember from the game’s earlier days. Community Manager “Kaivax” posted an update on server availability this week on the official World of Warcraft: Classic forums.
Blizzard opened up servers last week in order to let players reserve names for their characters in advance of World of Warcraft: Classic‘s launch on August 27th, and the unexpectedly large number of people registering names gave an early clue that the interest in the nostalgia servers was high enough to necessitate more servers. Blizzard marked many of their initially planned servers as “full” and announced more servers scheduled to open the Monday before the game officially goes live for play.
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.
Players who did reserve names on the full servers are being encouraged to switch to the next set of servers to help combat overpopulation. Blizzard cautions that the most populated servers, the realms Faerlina, Herod, Mankrik, Pagle, Thalnos and Whitemane, might see queues that go on for hours. Ah, how very nostalgic. The new North American realms will be available for name registration on Monday, August 26th at 10 AM PDT:
- Incendius, PvP, EDT
- Westfall, Normal, EDT
- Bigglesworth, PvP, PDT
- Old Blanchy, Normal, PDT
New realms are also being added for EU region players on Monday. The four additional PvP realms are Flamelash, Gandling, Mograine, and Razorgore. Blizzard will also add “Normal” realm Nethergarde Keep.
World of Warcraft: Classic will be available for play to World of Warcraft subscribers on Tuesday, August 27th. Check out mxdwn’s hands-on impressions of the game from Blizzcon 2018.