WoW Forever Beat Queues, but Players Feel Alone. Blizzard Ran 70,480 CPU Cores and Split Zones Into Layers, a Trade the Riot MMO Will Have to Weigh.

What Happened

MeinMMO recorded a 5-minute maximum queue at World of Warcraft: Forever's November 4 launch, and within hours layering was the biggest topic on Blizzard's forums.

Launch night

• No realm list. Blizzard, the studio behind World of Warcraft, launched Forever, a separate branch built on the original Azeroth, at 3 p.m. Pacific on November 4 without realms.
• Zones split. Busy zones are divided into layers, which are parallel copies of an area.
• Short queues. The live ticker at MeinMMO, a German gaming site, recorded a "maximum wait of 5 minutes."
• Kotaku's login. Kotaku's Rebekah Valentine logged in about three hours after release, stayed nearly three hours and wrote, "I was online in five minutes, and didn't disconnect once."
• Best launch talk. Valentine added, "I saw several comments that this was the best WoW launch ever, and I think I agree."
• Late start. Blizzard Watch, a Blizzard news site, reported servers came up "a tiny bit later than scheduled, and with a login queue," with "intermittent lag."
• Smaller faults. MeinMMO logged party invite errors that restarting the game fixed, plus reports of subscription and game-time purchase problems.
• Layer display bug. Kotaku said a bug at Bael'dun Digsite let players see other players but not the NPCs on their layers.

The hardware

• Launch hardware. On launch evening the @Warcraft account listed 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory and 70,480 CPU cores.
• No population data. Blizzard has published no launch-day player count, population cap or layer size.

How Forever sorts players

• Blizzard's question. Blizzard's Rulesets video says the team's biggest question for the new screen was "How do we let as many people play together as possible?" (0:27).
• Pick a ruleset. Players choose PvE, PvP or RP in place of a realm, with Hardcore due after launch.
• Stated goal. The video says, "The goal here isn't to build up one giant server" (1:04).
• Split economies. Auction house access and guilds are locked to a ruleset, and "those economies never mix" (2:51).
• Player grouping. Blizzard groups players by preferred language, PvP balance and Familiar Faces, a factor lead software engineer Ana Resendez revealed at BlizzCon.
• Layering stays. Clay Stone, associate production director of Forever, said on October 23 that "there will always be some amount of layering that occurs within our high-capacity infrastructure."
• Promised fixes. Stone's statement promised fixes for players split on boats and zeppelins and for large groups entering capital cities.
• Launch versus later. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield told Blizzard's podcast, per MeinMMO, that launch could look quite different from a month later, citing Durotar and Orgrimmar.

The empty-city complaints

• Beta warnings. Beta players reported layering separating friends, and an October 23 forum thread said "all layers are almost empty" and "It makes the game feel dead."
• Top forum topic. Timesaver's log of Blizzard's forums had layering as the biggest topic between 02:50 and 06:06 UTC on November 5.
• Players split. In that log, some players said a relog found a busier layer, and others said low numbers were normal late at night.
• Stormwind thread. A November 5 EU forum post said Stormwind felt empty and asked Blizzard to "turn the layering back to how it was in beta."
• No staff reply. The log found no Blizzard staff response on layering up to 06:10 UTC, and the EU thread's first page showed none.

Mark Kern and Kotaku disagree

• Kern's screenshot. Mark Kern, a team lead on the original game, posted a shot captioned as the empty Ironforge Auction House and wrote, "BRING BACK THE CROWDS."
• Original design. Kern wrote, "In OG WoW we deliberately wanted to show the players as you flew in."
• Unconfirmed tuning. Kern also wrote, "I'm told they are tuning the layers now." Blizzard has not confirmed that.
• Kotaku disagrees. Kotaku said layering was "mostly working great" and credited it with reducing crowding.

A Riot MMO manager reacts

• Salvatore's praise. Orlando Salvatore, a senior engineering manager on the Riot MMO and former Blizzard engineer, wrote, "Flawless launch, tons of familiar faces, and undoubtedly a return of a juggernaut."
• Already invested. Salvatore had already been recruiting for a Horde guild and joked that Forever emptied the town.
• Rendering hire. Salvatore's August 3 post seeks a principal rendering engineer for the MMO, covering "keeping performance in check at MMO scale." That is rendering work, not server work.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Blizzard chose capacity first, and Riot has said nothing about servers, sharding or population for its own game.

• Queues versus crowds. Forever cut queues with layers, and the complaints moved to empty cities.
• Public hardware numbers. Blizzard's post gives a public reference point for what a large MMO launch runs on.
• Beta settled nothing. Empty-layer complaints appeared in the month-long beta and again at launch, after Blizzard promised layering fixes.
• Cities show it. Cities are where players see each other's gear and mounts. A Riot MMO would need its hubs to feel full on an ordinary night too.

Our read. Short queues were the right call for launch night. The cost shows in the cities: Forever's video says players on one ruleset can trade across their whole region, but a player standing in Ironforge sees only one layer of that population.

We would take a longer launch queue for a city that feels full on an ordinary night. Forever's population a month from now tells Riot more than launch night does, if Blizzard ever publishes it.

Your Take

What to Watch

Blizzard's first three Forever raids open December 9.

Reported from Blizzard's posts on X and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.