World of Warcraft Classic launches next week, and some servers are already “massively overcrowded” thanks to the droves of players who’ve signed up for early name registration. As the WoW Classic release date approaches, Blizzard has detailed some contingency plans to deal with those population issues, and one of them has already been put into place.
On August 26 at 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 18:00 BST, four new WoW Classic realms will open up. Incendius and Bigglesworth will be there for PvP players, and Old Blanchy and Westfall will serve up normal flavours. At the same time, Blizzard will lift the three character limit on registration, so you’ll be able to create the final maximum of ten characters per Classic realm, or 50 Classic characters per account.
In an AMA earlier this week, Blizzard said that it has “contingency plans in place to bring up additional realms quickly if needed.” Clearly, that contingency has quickly become a necessary step. Blizzard made a more recent announcement on the overcrowding problems which asked players to avoid “and realm marked as full” – in particular, Herod, Faerlina, and Whitemane.
Queue time on the most heavily affected servers could be substantial – “up to several hours or more in certain instances. That is why we strongly encourage players to use the name reservation period to transfer their characters and their guilds to lower pop realms.”
Blizzard says it may eventually implement free character transfers for WoW Classic – after all, that “ultimately became a service in original WoW” – but on launch day, bear in mind that certain WoW Classic servers could have you waiting a very, very long time to get in.