The Post
A senior engineering manager on the Riot MMO posted four photos of an empty five-mile walk and blamed the WoW Forever beta.
How big is a hit MMO's blast radius? Big enough to empty a town, according to one of the engineers building Riot's own. On September 20, Orlando Salvatore, a senior engineering manager on the Riot MMO, posted four photos of empty sidewalks, a bare crossroads and scrub hills with the caption: "I'll just assume the reason I saw almost no one on my nearly 5 mile walk is because everyone is just playing WoW Forever beta. An MMOs blast radius is big", and a wink.
He joined Riot in October 2024 from Blizzard, where he had been a lead software engineer on WoW Classic.
WoW Forever is the new version of World of Warcraft that Blizzard revealed at BlizzCon, built on the original 2004 game and expanded rather than replaced. Its beta opened on September 17 and runs to October 21. The game launches on November 4.
By 11:35 UTC on September 21 the post had 5,637 views, 140 likes, 10 replies and 2 reposts. It's a joke, and it confirms nothing about Riot's game. It is also the second time in three days he has used the beta as material. On September 19 he replied to a fan proposing a guild for the Riot MMO with "What does The Riot MMO mean? Is that a reference to something?"
The Beta
Blizzard's own WoW Classic developer calls the beta the craziest numbers he has seen at Blizzard. Blizzard has published no count.
The developers running the beta are making the same claim in earnest. On September 18, Josh Greenfield, a WoW Classic developer at Blizzard, posted that it had been hard to sleep from excitement and that the beta had produced "the craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost 8 years on classic". By September 21 that post had 198,778 views, 7,362 likes and 480 replies.
Man, it was hard to sleep last night, I was so excited. Beta has been... crazy. 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.
— Josh Greenfield, WoW Classic developer at Blizzard, September 18 2026, the post
Blizzard has published no concurrency or player count, so "craziest numbers" is one developer's description, not a figure. GamesRadar reported the quote the same day alongside Blizzard's account of why the beta servers kept breaking.
This shape of demand has caught Blizzard out before. By Greenfield's own account at BlizzCon, the number of hardcore players online at once went from about 200 to 1,500 over one holiday break while players were still running the mode themselves with an add-on, and that is what got it built.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Our read, labelled speculative: a Riot MMO engineer measuring a hit by the empty street, a beta week that previews his job, and the one fact Riot has confirmed about its own game.
Our read, and it's speculative. Salvatore's joke is a claim about what a hit MMO does: it takes people off the street for a week. He is the engineer Riot hired away from Blizzard's classic team, and the beta he's pointing at is the biggest thing its own developer says he has seen. Riot has no number to put beside it. It reset its MMO in 2024 and has shown nothing playable since.
Forever's first week is also a preview of his job: the class of server problem Blizzard spent the week explaining is the one Salvatore's team meets on Riot's first public day, whenever it comes.
Two Forever jokes in three days is a posture, not a leak: the team is in the conversation and giving nothing away. The cost is visible this week. The people who will play Riot's game, and some of the people building it, are inside a competitor's beta, and its design is the baseline they'll carry over. We've already sorted the nine decisions Blizzard put on stage into the six Riot should copy and the three it should leave in Azeroth.
| Side by side | WoW Forever, this week | The Riot MMO |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Azeroth | Runeterra, the one confirmed fact |
| Beta | Open since September 17, runs to October 21 | Not revealed |
| Launch | November 4 | Not revealed |
| Demand | "The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years", per Greenfield; no count published | Not revealed |
| Week-one servers | Kept breaking, by Blizzard's own account | Not revealed |
The one fact Riot has confirmed about its game is the setting: Runeterra. Whatever the game's blast radius turns out to be, that world is what has to do the pulling, and the fiction already has a picture of a world calling people out of their homes at once: The Call, the cinematic Riot opened its 2022 season with, in which the Freljord's warbands, Shurima's defenders and Targon's sun-warrior answer one summons together, with Ornn at the forge making the weapons.
That map is the world Riot draws on, not a launch plan. Which regions the game opens with, how much of the map it covers, its size, its era, its platform and its business model are all unrevealed. The Freljord, Shurima and Targon crests are here because The Call's warbands ride out of them, not because any of them is a starting zone.
Your Take
Will the Riot MMO's launch week empty a street the way WoW Forever's beta did for its own engineer?
What to Watch
Two dated beats, then three more RuneGrove reads on the game Salvatore blamed.
The WoW Forever beta closes
Whether Blizzard publishes a player count before then decides if "craziest numbers" ever becomes a figure.
World of Warcraft: Forever launches
Launch week is the real blast-radius test, and the server problems of beta week one are the ones Riot's engineers will study.
Reported from Orlando Salvatore (@KirbyAu) and Josh Greenfield (@AggrendWoW) on X, read through fxtwitter, with GamesRadar's report and Blizzard's beta post for the dates. Counts are as of September 21. The walk post is a joke and confirms nothing about the game; the MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
