Don’t Panic at World of Warcraft Classic’s Launch Day Queue

One of the worst things for something like World of Warcraft: Classic is more servers. If we learned ANYTHING from the days of vanilla, it’s that more servers are not the answer. They’re just not. What happens is the population spreads heavily onto the servers available immediately at launch and then, as new servers come on, people just simply make alts to play the game waiting on the popular servers to cool down to join their friends already there.

Since WoW: Classic won’t have cross realm (which didn’t come out until way past vanilla) or phasing or anything like that, there is a real need to keep each servers population high. Right now, there is a major tourist season happening. WoW players are logging in and people are resubscribing at the idea of playing something that by all intentions, most won’t stick with.

Which could just be diresome down the line. Players who commit to leveling to 60 and playing the game and doing the activities need a healthy population to do it. Raids take 40 players and most of them need for Molten Core fire resist gear and the dungeon set. Then for Blackwing Lair you’ll need 40 players with tier 1 gear and fire resist. For AQ40 you’ll need 40 players in tier 2 gear and with nature resist gear farmed up.

So take into consideration how hard it is to pull together 40 players who have gear for a healthy endgame raiding. Then consider the battlegrounds and everything else. Without pulling from other servers, if a server is “dead” then playing it becomes miserable for everyone and then they transfer off.

Don’t forget the Alliance / Horde imbalance that can come as well. Servers often stack heavy in one direction or another and forcing everyone onto a few servers helps even the population out a bit. It wasn’t until Blood Elves came to give Horde a “non-monster” race to play that the Horde had a considerable amount of players and we can almost assume the same will occur to WoW: Classic.

So as you sit and wait in queue, just load up Netflix or do something else. It’s a workday today anyway, so just go to bed early for work and play tomorrow. Don’t fret over the queue and remember the grind takes a long time. There is no rush to max level to be the first of anything. The faster you rush the less you enjoy a game, the less you enjoy it then why are you even playing, right?

So if you don’t have an idea what to do while waiting in the queue, try the following:

• Watch Netflix / Hulu / Streaming Service of Choice
• Read guides to vanilla WoW to learn or bring back memories of how the game is played, we have tons and so does the rest of the Internet
• Watch old WoW machinima on YouTube
• Play regular WoW
• Play any other video game right now but WoW while in the queue
• Have a nice dinner

So sit back and relax and be patient. If you absolutely can’t deal with massive queues – well it’s time to figure out how to play at 3AM EST until the server hype cools down or move to a less populated server – if there is one.