Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Forever went fully live on Wednesday, and players didn’t get the long queues and disconnects many had been bracing for. The launch may rank among the smoothest Blizzard has had.
Players had reason to worry: the beta started badly under heavy demand. Launch day went better. Horde players who chose the player-versus-player ruleset had a worse time, though. Multiple Reddit threads report that many of them couldn’t create a character at all.
Forever has no servers to switch to
The Horde PvP bottleneck comes from how Forever is built. WoW has used separate servers for the past 22 years, and Forever drops them. Players choose a region and a ruleset (Normal, PvP or Roleplay), and after that they can play with anyone who made the same picks.
Population is handled through “layers.” Your friends are always on your layer, and it usually also holds players you’ve met or grouped with before.
The system holds up until one faction floods a ruleset. On Wednesday, Horde picks on PvP far outnumbered Alliance picks, so Blizzard capped the numbers to avoid a lopsided faction balance and unfair matchups.
Older versions of WoW let a stuck player move to a quieter server or one with a better faction split. Forever has no such option. Horde players who were blocked had to wait for enough Alliance players to join the PvP ruleset to even things out.
Too many layers left some zones empty
The same structure caused a second, stranger problem. Some players logged in at the launch’s busiest point and found the world nearly empty.
Blizzard seems to have opened too many layers at launch, in an effort to stop the world from getting so packed it couldn’t be played. Josh Greenfield, a designer on WoW: Forever, responded on X.
“We are aware some zones feel more empty than they should,” Greenfield said. “Tomorrow we’ll be tweaking some numbers to make things feel more lively. Sit tight!”
Greenfield also said the boats and zeppelins that move players between Forever’s two continents had broken. For now, portals PORTALS $0.001403 ▼ -47.3% are filling in for them.
Outside those issues, day one ran with little trouble, a sign the stress tests worked. Horde PvP players who spent launch day stuck at character creation are still waiting for more Alliance players to sign up.