Overall, things went about as well as one could hope. I personally ran into very few issues.
WoW Forever
Things were a little shaky in the opening minutes.
At the appointed time, 15:00 US Pacific Time, the servers were not up yet. Potshot, Ula, Bung, and I were all on together trying to log in. Then there was a bit of time when you could log in, get in the queue, then end up at a screen that indicated that the different server rule sets were all offline.
That wasn’t so helpful.
But the queue wasn’t that deep. I never saw it personally with more than 1,500 people in it, with a five minute estimate.
The login queue
That was minuscule compared to some of the queues people saw during the 2019 WoW Classic launch… and frankly during some of the vanilla era when Blizz was having to divide servers to make the queues manageable.
While this was going on I checked the official WoW Twitch channel and it was showing a graphic that said, “Launching Soon.”
Launching Soon
I took that as a sign that maybe things were not quite ready yet.
After a few minutes of that I saw the channel was showing what looked like some sort of representation of new players in the starter zones, both Horde and Alliance.
Something on WoW Twitch
About then Potshot reported that he had gotten through to the character select screen. The rest of us got back in the queue and were soon into the game.
It was, of course, crowded… but, again, nothing close to the classic launch.
Out in the dwarf/gnome starter zone
This was due to the layering no doubt. Of course, layering comes with its own issues. We grouped up and found ourselves all in different layers with no obvious way to get to the same location. Eventually I logged out and back in and ended up in the same layer as Potshot. Later Ula ended up in our layer as well. So somehow it worked out, and this was on day one under probably the worst possible set of layering circumstances. Still, I would feel better if there was some way to manage layers.
And just because the zone population wasn’t huge didn’t mean that the area wasn’t being torn up. I rolled out for the first quest and found a wolf apocalypse in progress.
So many wolf corpses
I was immediately motivated to get enough copper to get the skinning skill, something now available almost immediately in the starter area. But first I had to get something to sell or complete a quest.
I swapped over to controller mode as it will auto target for you, so I could just point myself somewhat in the direction of a mob and hit the X button and it would shoot my gun at the target. No need to click or tab target.
Rolling troggs in controller mode
Players started to spread out fairly quickly. I don’t know if that was more layers in action or just the natural progression into the game… or maybe both.
We ended up together and going through the back half of the quests in the Coldridge Valley and found that, while there were some groups also working through things like the troll cave, there were not enough to cause much of a log jam.
I stopped to take a screenshot of an item you need to collect for one of the quests.
The red container you need for Felix outside the troll cave
I just walked up and was able to grab it. The problem is that only one person can grab it at a time and it takes a few seconds to reload. That ended up with a queue of people waiting to pick it up back at the WoW Classic launch.
The line for the same objective back in August 2019
We made it out of Coldridge Valley and on to Kharanos. There were groups all over, but not so many as you might imagine.
One thing I mentioned in yesterday’s pre-launch post was that Blizz had cranked up the spawn rates for the kick-off. This led to some greater than usual comedy in the wendigo caves. Already a location known for trapping the unwary with respawns, with the launch day respawn rate it became a bit of a murder palace. I got in over my head and died a couple of times in there, then Ula and I went in and got trapped by a wave of respawns and died again. There were corpses and skeletons visible all along the path.
In the wendigo cave between respawns… a couple of fresh dead before me
Overall, as I noted at the top, things seemed to go as smoothly as one might expect.
We’ll see how things build up as the weekend approaches, but I guess if you took the end of the week off to get stuck in, the game doesn’t look to be letting you down.
Addendum: Potshot came upon this article about how to deal with layering.