Blizzard explained the queues in World of Warcraft Classic. There are indeed good reasons.
How long are the queues in WoW Classic? Now, shortly after the game’s launch, there are indeed more than 10,000 players in a queue on the particularly heavily populated realms. Some report having to wait 12 hours before they can play.
Blizzard is not planning to open new servers for now
That’s why there are no more servers: You might wonder why Blizzard doesn’t just open more servers. Game Director Ion Hazzikostas has an answer for that. He explains that it wouldn’t be a problem to start significantly more servers. Blizzard has the technical and financial means to do so.
The problem is that the population will eventually stabilize in the coming weeks, and then there would be many realms with extremely few players. In that case, Blizzard would have to merge servers, which would upset the community.
Why isn’t the number of players per server increased? Ion Hazzikostas also has an answer to this. Increasing the number of players would cause performance problems.
Moreover, it would lead to gameplay issues if even more players were to dispute spawn points. He believes one only needs to imagine 2,000 players milling around in the Abbey of Northshire. That is not a particularly nice gaming situation.
Blizzard tries to pack as many players onto a server as is technically and gameplay-wise acceptable.
Layering helps
What technology are the developers using? The so-called layering technology is in use. When you log into a server, you are assigned to one of the layers. This layer contains a specific number of other players with whom you interact as long as you stay logged in.
If you log out of WoW Classic and later log back in, you may be assigned to a different layer and meet different players there.
Each layer also always contains the entire game world and not just individual regions. Furthermore, the population of a layer can basically be compared to that of a server in other MMORPGs. You can therefore meet many fellow players.
How does layering work for parties? You always play with the players on the layer you are grouped with. You can also switch layers by accepting a party invitation.
What advantage does this technology have? Blizzard can easily adjust the number of layers as the population on the servers stabilizes. This way, there are always enough fellow players without too many, and players don’t even notice that a change occurred. Layers are supposed to be turned off during maintenance and not during regular operation.
Queue times are not necessarily a bad thing
That’s why queues have a positive effect: Blizzard does not see the long queues of WoW Classic as a big problem. When a player sees such a queue, he might automatically switch to less populated servers. Thus, the problem essentially balances itself.
For this reason, there were warnings regarding wait times ahead of the launch of World of Warcraft Classic. Blizzard wanted players to think about which server they wanted to be on in the MMORPG from the beginning.
How do you feel about the wait time in WoW Classic? Do you have to wait long? Does it annoy you?
