World of Warcraft Forever players return to 2004 – beta queues stretch on for an hour

Blizzard has opened beta testing for World of Warcraft: Forever, a modernized take on classic WoW, but most people hoping to get in have only managed to see the login screen so far.

The servers went live right after a live Q&A stream, and queue times started climbing almost immediately.

Early logins were relatively painless, with about a nine-minute wait. The real issue comes after that – players frequently get disconnected once they clear the queue and get sent straight back to the end of the line, where the wait tends to be even longer the second time around.

Regular players and streamers alike are reporting the same problems, though some in the community have managed to get through. There's no trick to speeding things up – you just have to wait and hope the client doesn't drop you at the login screen.

Blizzard acknowledged the issues on X:

Thank you to everyone waiting to get into the WoW: Forever Beta. We're working through some final issues, and we expect the doors to open soon. Thank you for your patience!

One likely reason for the overload lies in the game architecture itself. World of Warcraft: Forever is the first version of the MMO to drop the traditional division into separate game worlds and realms.

Instead of picking a specific realm, players choose a ruleset – normal, PvP, or roleplay – and then land on a shared server with everyone else. Blizzard has said the goal behind this choice was to preserve the social side of the original game, where communities formed around a shared space.

The downside of this approach showed up on day one – instead of dozens of separate queues spread across different realms, there's a single massive line that the entire test population is trying to squeeze through at once. It's reminiscent of the original game launch back in 2004, when hour-long queues were just part of the experience.

While server access remains a gamble, dataminers are already digging through the client files. Wowhead and other sites have published full talent trees for every class along with reworked armor sets, so there's plenty to look at even without logging in.

There's no rush to get everything done – the beta will run until October 21, after which Blizzard will take a break to fix bugs. The level cap for the beta is set at 30.

The World of Warcraft: Forever launch is set for November 4, and server load will likely climb even higher as the weekend approaches.