Only one week has remained and we’ll finally be able to go back to the vanilla WoW, when World of Warcraft Classic opens its doors. Thousands of players have overcrowded the PVP servers both in the US and in Europe, leading Blizzard to add one more in each region and urging us to consider joining the new realms.
Another method to avoid overcrowding and server crashes is the layering system used by Blizzard, which will be turned off by phase 2. Let’s check out the official announcement on the Battle.net forum posted by community manager Kaivax:
“Based on name reservations so far, the Herod realm is looking to be massively overpopulated. If all existing players on this server remain there, login queues in excess of 10,000 players are a certainty, and possibly much higher than that.”
He mentions players on Herod to move to the new US PvP realm – Stalagg, so that the population is evenly spread. The same announcement was made for the European players that received Gehenas as the third PvP realm.
Layering Will Be Turned Off Before Phase 2 of Content
“While we are able to fit several times more players on a single realm in 2019 than was the case in 2006, we are not going to raise that cap any further, even though we have the technical capacity to do so. Raising realm caps would simply forestall the problem, letting more players in at launch but creating an unsustainable situation down the line, with severe queues when we turn off layering permanently before Phase 2 of our content unlock plan.
Please also note that our realm population estimates of Low, Medium, High, and Full are based on this increased capacity – a Medium realm today already has more characters on it than even the most crowded realms did back in 2006.”
According to a WoW Classic discord post, if you want to play together with a group of friends, you can create a group before WoW classic is launched. You must start the battle net launcher, select your region (EU/US etc) and head to the ‘Social’ tab. Then click on ‘Groups’ in the left panel, and choose ‘create’ or ‘join’ group. It’s the easiest way to be invited in a group or guild if you already know the link to the group you want to join, because they don’t even need to know your character name and you can play with your friends through the layering in the beginning.
We’re all excited to learn more from the WoW classic dev team since they have announced that they’re doing an AMA on the Classic WoW subreddit. Check it out tomorrow – Tuesday, August 20! We’ll be back with more Classic WoW news until next week.
Are you ready for WoW Classic ‘cause I can’t wait any longer!
Sonia Theo has a long experience in writing, and now she is our associate journalist covering tech, gaming and mobile news. She has a BA in English and German and a BA in Arts and Design. Sonia likes writing about the latest updates in current and future games, guides and reviews. Her favorite past times is gaming, crafting and cooking. Sonia is always ready to help players with tips when they’re in a tough boss fight.