Blizzard Promised WoW Forever Busier Cities. Players Called Its Layers Empty and Overcrowded on the Same Day, the Balance a Riot MMO Has to Strike.

What Happened

World of Warcraft: Forever drew complaints about empty capital cities and overcrowded starting areas on November 5, the day after it launched.

The complaints

• Launch setup. Blizzard, the studio behind WoW, launched World of Warcraft: Forever, a separate branch of the game, on November 4 with no realm list, splitting busy areas into layers, parallel copies of a zone.
• Too empty. A US forum post reads: “Layering in the open world feels fine but the cities like Org, UC, feel empty.” Org and UC are the capital cities Orgrimmar and Undercity.
• Better in beta. The same post says: “It was perfect in the beta, loads of players running around org was great.”
• Too crowded. An EU forum thread from the same day, “Stop Overcrowding the layers”, says “There is nothing ‘classic’ about overcrowding layers”.
• Stuck at login. A reply in that thread says they could not move or tag monsters at first login. No staff reply appears on that page.
• Ironforge screenshot. A November 5 post on X captioned this screenshot as the empty Ironforge Auction House. It shows one moment on one layer.

Blizzard's reply

• The thread. Hours after launch, players on Blizzard's forums were asking “Why do I see maybe 8 people inside the main city?”
• The admission. Blizzard senior game designer Aggrend replied in post 27 at 06:35 UTC on November 5: “we are aware of some issues with certain areas not feeling as populated as they should.”
• No specifics. The reply names no zones, rulesets or numbers.

Whether the change is live

• Which tomorrow. The outlet Timesaver reads “tomorrow” as Thursday, November 5, Pacific time.
• No live notice. Timesaver said Blizzard hadn't posted that the change was live as of 09:20 UTC on November 5. We found no later confirmation.
• Hotfix list. Blizzard's November 5 hotfix list covers spawn timing and bugs, such as “Fixed an issue where Pelluk would sometimes not spawn”, and has no entry on layering or population.
• Not proof either way. A server tuning change may not appear in a hotfix list.
• No published figures. Blizzard has published no launch player count, population cap or layer size.

How Forever splits players

• The stated question. Blizzard's Rulesets video asks at 0:27: “How do we let as many people play together as possible?”
• The stated goal. At 1:04: “The goal here isn't to build up one giant server. It's to let like-minded players link up in game more easily.”
• Split by ruleset. Players pick PvE, PvP or RP instead of a realm, and the video says at 2:36 that the outdoor world, auction houses and guilds are all separated by that choice.
• A second reversal. Blizzard said a roleplay-PvP ruleset would split players, then added one for launch.
• Layers stay. Clay Stone, associate production director of WoW Forever, said on October 23 that “there will always be some amount of layering that occurs within our high-capacity infrastructure”, per Kami Labs.
• Seen in beta. Beta players were already saying that leaving a party or crossing a zone line dropped them into another copy of the world.

Riot's team at the launch

• Competitive research. Fabrice Condominas, executive producer on the Riot MMO, tagged @AggrendWoW on November 5: “One MMO team just launched. Another MMO team is now ‘doing competitive research’ with suspicious dedication.”
• Flawless launch. Orlando Salvatore, senior engineering manager on the Riot MMO, tagged Aggrend the same day: “Flawless launch” and “MMOs still have a place in this world, and you showed people why.”
• Rolling Horde. Before launch, Salvatore was recruiting Horde players for a PvP guild.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Riot has said nothing about servers, layers or population for its own game.

• Both ends at once. A population setting has to serve a crowded starting zone and a capital city at the same time, and Forever's first night drew complaints about both.
• Beta didn't settle it. Forever had a month-long beta and still launched into this argument. Riot has announced no beta.
• Reply speed. Blizzard answered on its own forum within hours of launch. Players will expect that from any big MMO launch.

Our read. Condominas joked about “doing competitive research”, and Condominas and Salvatore both tagged the designer now answering these complaints, so Riot's team is playing this launch. Players notice this in cities first, so a Riot MMO's hubs would need to feel full on an ordinary night as well as on launch night. None of this says what Riot has chosen.

Your Take

What to Watch

Reported from Blizzard forums and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.