Ascension releasing DoomHammer – a no-risk classless realm

The population of Ascension continues to skyrocket. Players are not only joining the classless experience,
they’re staying. More accounts have been created on Ascension this week than any week prior, and with
the launch of our new no-risk realm, Cenarius, we have seen queue times drop approximately 0
minutes–players just keep coming. We’re working tirelessly to manage this influx, and we’d like to
give you an update regarding our plans to manage this population growth.

At the time of writing, there are over 1000 people in queue across all realms, despite exponential
increases to individual server player caps over the past two weeks. To mitigate extraneous queue times,
we will be opening a third No-Risk realm, Doomhammer, to allow players additional options when playing
on Ascension. As always, we leaving all the cards on the table and are open to merging some or all of these
no-risk realms if the population on any one drops too low.

This is only one small part of our bigger plans to manage the growth of Ascension. As most of you know,
we’re actively modifying our software to boost our playercap. Additionally, we’ll be conducting a bit of
maintenance next week to migrate all realms to a new infrastructure; this move is intended to help us better
manage the population growth. We’ll let you know when we have a time for that sorted out, so keep an eye
open here, and on social media.

We are still absolutely working to expand the player capacity of each individual realm. At this time,
almost all of the work to be done is coding–not hardware–based. The last thing we want to do is let a flood
of people in only for the server to lag terribly. Our goal is to have as many players per realm as we possibly
can while still offering the quality, lag-free experience that you deserve. Keep an eye open for updates
regarding the player capacity of our realms!

Thank you, honestly, for your patience, Heroes. We know you’re aching to play without queue times, and
we’re working hard to get you there. We hope you enjoy our newest realm, Doomhammer, which
launches at 4:00pm on Sunday, January 14th, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).