The beta for World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard's upcoming vanilla-flavored iteration developed by the WoW Classic team, has attracted significantly more players than anticipated, according to a statement from a lead developer.
Josh Greenfield, a WoW Classic developer at Blizzard, shared on Twitter that the beta numbers have been the "craziest" he has witnessed in his 17 years with the company and nearly eight years working on Classic titles. "Man, it was hard to sleep last night, I was so excited. Beta has been... crazy," Greenfield wrote. "The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost 8 years on classic. We've got something really special here."
Despite the excitement, the surge in players during the beta test this week led to issues such as disconnects and significant lag. Senior game producer Tom Ellis addressed the technical challenges, explaining that the beta utilized a "BETA PTR environment stack" rather than a robust production environment. "Betas for WoW aren't usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn't that powerful," Ellis stated. He elaborated that a particular issue causing players to be disconnected after clearing the login queue was traced back to the beta environment using only one regional realm.
By the end of the day, Blizzard had resolved the performance issues. "Marked live once again and you all poured in without fuss," Ellis reported. "Right now things are incredibly smooth for the first few hours of a public beta, Classic teams watching and fixing anything blocking that comes up but we're otherwise pretty much done for the night, enjoy!"
World of Warcraft: Forever was officially confirmed at BlizzCon last week, following weeks of fan speculation fueled by datamined color palettes from Blizzard's website labeled under a "wow 2" tag. These findings led to widespread rumors of a project known as "Classic Plus." The game is scheduled for a global launch on November 4.