World of Warcraft: Forever beta launches with hour-long queues as players swarm servers

World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard's reimagined version of WoW Classic, launched its beta today but encountered immediate server strain as players flooded in faster than the infrastructure could handle.

The beta servers went live following a Blizzard Q&A session. Early login queues started around nine minutes, but players who made it through reported being disconnected and sent back to the end of the queue for another, longer wait. The issue spread across the player base, with streamers and regular players alike experiencing repeated disconnects.

Blizzard acknowledged the problems on X: "We're working through some final issues, and we expect the doors to open soon."

Senior game producer Tom Ellis responded to the chaos with a note of surprise: "Yeah, ok that's a bit excessive for a beta. Calm down now... give us a minute, this environment is taking a beating and we're scaling various services up."

Associate production director Clayton Stone expressed astonishment at the turnout: "Wow, the number of people hammering at the door of the Beta is... insane. Thanks for showing up, everyone! We're scaling up and up and up (and up). You will all be in soon."

The server congestion reflects the game's architectural shift. WoW: Forever removes the traditional realm system, instead allowing players to choose between normal, PvP, or Roleplay rulesets and join a single shared server. This unified approach aims to preserve the social experience of the original 2004 MMO but appears to have concentrated player traffic more intensely than expected.

Players waiting for access have begun exploring datamined content, including new class talent trees and reworked armor sets. The beta runs until October 21, with the full launch scheduled for November 4.