World of Warcraft Classic: What It Is and How the Server Launch Went

Tens of thousands of players wanted to go back 15 years.

Yesterday, August 27, at 1 a.m., the servers of the classic version of World of Warcraft, which the world first saw back in November 2004, went live. We look at how the server launch went and why tens of thousands of players wanted to return to a game from 15 years ago.

Right after launch, queues of more than 10,000 people wanting to play formed on each PvP server. For many, the wait did not end after a few hours. Even today, August 28, players are complaining about queues, disconnections and lag in the game.

Besides the lack of room on the servers, players also faced other queue problems. Many players gathered in the starting zones and had to queue to kill unique monsters.

Blizzard welcomed players to WoW Classic with the release of a holiday video "Toast!", in which many well-known people gathered in a tavern to recall their past achievements and sing a song.

The video featured Kristian Nairn, who played Hodor in Game of Thrones, voice actor Matthew Mercer, actress and wrestler Ronda Rousey, and the true legend of the game, Leeroy Jenkins (Ben Schulz), who repeated his famous line in the video.

On the night of release, the original World of Warcraft drew more than 1.1 million viewers on the streaming platform Twitch. Even at the time of writing, 40 hours after the servers went live, about 434,000 viewers are watching streams of the original game on Twitch. CS:GO, its closest competitor, currently has 150,000 fewer viewers.

The day after the servers went live, Blizzard representative and game designer Ion Hazzikostas explained the reasons for the large queues and the lack of a solution.

Ion Hazzikostas
game designer, World of Warcraft Classic

From the very start of launch planning, we tried to prioritize the long-term health of the server communities, understanding that even if we underestimated the volume, we could quickly add extra capacity in the first hours. However, if we had launched too many servers, weeks or months later we would have faced a more serious problem. Despite having tools for dealing with empty servers, such as character transfers, this process can create big problems for the player community, which we would like to avoid.

In other words, the company expects a noticeable drop in the number of players after some time. To keep the servers populated for interesting gameplay, it was decided not to increase their number.

Norwegian players reported on Reddit that local internet provider Lyse moved scheduled maintenance to September 10 so as not to interfere with its users enjoying World of Warcraft Classic.

After the release of the classic version of WoW, Activision Blizzard shares rose 6%, reaching a record high since November 2018.