A Brief Report from WoW Classic 20th Anniversary Edition

As I stated in a previous post, I am not at all planning to play the WoW Classic 20th Anniversary Edition that just launched.

That said, my curiosity was piqued by the plan to roll out just three servers per region for this event.  So I just had to try and log in when the servers went live.

When 14:00 local came around, I took a bit of a break from work and brought up the WoW launcher and… discovered that the 20th anniversary edition was a “classic era” server and not a “classic” server.  I do wonder if that divide will come back to haunt them if they plan to make this into a progression server.  But maybe it will stop at Outland or Northrend and stay strictly in what I think of as the legitimate “classic” era.

Anyway, that meant I had to download the classic era client, which up until now hosted only the season servers and the forever vanilla servers.  Fortunately, that was quick… just 2.6GB, a small number these days… and I was soon able to log in.  When I went to change realms, I saw the new Anniversary option.

I was then presented with the four servers… because we get the Oceania servers on our list… three out of four of which were already full at 14:05 local time.  People were not wasting any time getting in.  I picked the “Normal” server… PvE is now normal I guess… and was rewarded with a new warning.

Yes, I had selected a full server… but it wasn’t like I had a lot of options.  Anyway, I confirmed my choice and then I sat for a while on the alert that I was logging in to game server.

That went on long enough… more than five minutes but no more than ten minutes judging from time stamps on screen shots… that I went back to my work computer and carried on a bit, expecting to eventually look over and find myself in a thousand deep queue.

But no.  When I did look over, I was in the character creation screen.  No queue, I was just in.

I quickly rolled up a human warrior… I don’t know, why not… and logged into the game only to find myself in a sea of my fellow players.

That was a lot of people… but I will say, the server seemed to be holding.  My system is probably above average for WoW players, but still things seemed to be pretty smooth.

So the server seemed to be up to the task, but the quest infrastructure… not so much.  The starter area was not designed to push that many people through it at once.  The very first quest, which requires you to kill wolves… wolves that are generally so plentiful that it would seem laughable to worry about player competition… found those wolves being spawn camped by groups trying to get in their kills.

At that point tagging a wolf on your own was a pretty high effort proposition, especially for a melee class.  Quick draw casters are our bane.

So I logged out, satisfied that I had seen the launch.

About 90 minutes later I hit a break in my work and decided to log back in to see how things were going.  I ran over to the spot where I had started, just to show how much things had thinned out.

By that point the mass of players had either filtered out into Elwyn Forest proper or had logged off, having claimed their name and being content to wait until things had cooled down.

I was at that point able to hunt wolves pretty effectively.

People were still slaying them all over, but their spawn population was high enough that it was no longer quite the bottle neck it had been before.

The local kobolds, however, those were a bit tougher.  Still, if you spread out to one of the camps on the periphery  you could find one now and then.  And there is a natural effect of spreading people out that way, so they next tier of kobolds was a bit easier than the first, and the third maybe a bit easier than the second.

The game itself, or my little corner of it, seemed to be running fine, though I did see a server broadcast announcing that they were bringing more hardware online to support the launch.

I carried on for a bit.  I will admit that the early game still has some charm, that it is easy and fun to just hack away at mobs and get a level now and then.  I also seemed to be getting a prodigious amount of gear upgrades from drops.  It wasn’t long before I had chain pants, a chain shirt, a cloak, bracers, and an upgraded shield and boots.

That is just the sort of drip of upgrades that gets people hooked.

I made it through wolves and kobolds and even the Defias, which is your first encounter with aggro mobs as well as quests with less than a 100% drop rate.

I got through all the starter quest save for the named mob because, even though things had cooled down quite a bit, there was still a line.

From there it was off to Goldshire and the first inn and inn keeper.

I did pretty well I think, came out a bit geared up, level 5, and able to rest in the inn to build up that essential blue bar… should I ever return.

Things ran smoothly.  I went in and out of the server over the first 6 hours after launch and never saw a queue, save for a 1 second queue for the login server itself, which popped before I could even think about taking a screen shot.  Aside from that lag getting to the server for the first time… which was during the initial rush so might be excused from being perfect… things seemed to work.

It does feel like maybe Blizz has this down.

A little over five years ago I wrote a post about three problems MMORPGs were never going to solve, and one of them was opening night queues.  Maybe Blizz has this solved now.  I mean, they threw a bunch of hardware at it… which is still the brute force solution… but they didn’t have to spin up 30 more servers most of which would later feel empty.

So op success I guess. Congratulations Blizzard.