New Classic Oceanic Realm, Medium pop realm queue’s, Zeppelin/Boat issues, Classic forum changes.

We have opened a new realm in the Oceanic region:

Felstriker – PvP – AEST

The other two PvP options in the Oceanic region are currently experiencing significant login queues, so we’re bringing an additional realm online to handle demand. We recommend that players looking for a smoother experience strongly consider moving to this new realm, which should be drawing upon a population base that is easily sufficient to support an additional healthy Oceanic PvP realm community.

Thank you for your patience!

Why does Herod still have a 900 person, 8 minute queue when it’s showing Medium population?

The way realm population display currently works once the servers are live is that High, Medium, and Low are determined dynamically, in terms relative to the most crowded realms. So a realm with pretty rough queues (say 4k-5k) might end up showing as Medium because you aren’t Faerlina, Herod, etc.
This is how it’s worked for a long time, but the unprecedented size of the queues on the handful of outlier realms is skewing the algorithm. The team’s first priority is stability and getting new servers online as needed, but beyond that, we’ll look into changing this logic to be more intuitive (i.e. showing “Full” when a server has a queue, for starters). I know, this is technically not #nochanges, but then again neither are 20k people waiting to log into the same realm…

You MUST have known there would be long queues. Why the hesitation to have servers in place to handle extra players? (not characters)

I understand the frustration: Anticipating and planning around jumping back into this world we’ve all missed, only to be stuck in a long queue, is not the experience we want anyone to have.

But from the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritize the long-term health of our realm communities, recognizing that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours. But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible.

Thus, we took the path of launching with few enough realms to still thrive in the event that our most conservative estimates ended up proving accurate, while having enough servers ready to activate at a moment’s notice if needed. And clearly they were, and are, needed.
We’ve released over 20 new realms worldwide so far since launch, and we’ll be up around the clock continuing to do so until everyone who wants to experience Classic is able to. But even still, as we bring new realms online in a given region, we wait for them to fill before opening new ones, because we want to make sure that each and every realm has a healthy population in the long term.

There is a known issue that’s causing zeppelins and boats to be unavailable on certain servers (mainly the ones brought online after initial launch), which is obviously a major concern if you’re looking to switch starting areas to meet up with friends, or are getting to higher levels and have quests sending you across the sea. The upcoming regionwide restarts (4.5 hours from this post for NA/OCE) will fix this going forward.

With the release of WoW Classic mere hours away, I wanted to provide a few updates on what will happen with the Classic sections on the forums:

• • Individual Classic Realm forums will be opened prior to launch.
  • Starting from 27th August, all WoW Classic sections will require an active subscription or game time to post in.
  • The current Classic Discussion section will also be archived tomorrow and a new one created so we start from a clean slate.

For now, we will not be adding Class or Profession sections for Classic. We encourage you to use the existing sections and prefix your thread title with [Classic]. We will monitor these sections over the coming weeks.

Not long to go now!