Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26. Often hailed as World of Warcraft's most beloved expansion, Wrath continues the story of the Prince of Lordaeron, Arthas Menethil, which s
Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26. Often hailed as World of Warcraft’s most beloved expansion, Wrath continues the story of the Prince of Lordaeron, Arthas Menethil, which started back in the days of Warcraft 3. We’ll get to (re)explore the vast continent of Northrend and ultimately confront the Lich King himself at the Frozen Throne, at the top of the legendary Icecrown Citadel.
Ahead of Wrath Classic’s release next week, I had the chance to sit down and chat with two of Blizzard’s lead software engineers, Brian Birmingham and Ana Resendez. To kick things off, we started with the elephant in the room—the Wrath Classic server queues.The price of popularity
Spending hours sitting in a queue to log in to your favourite game isn’t a new experience for most MMO players. It’s something that’s plagued every remotely successful game in recent years, and World of Warcraft has its own history of server troubles with new expansion releases or big updates. Wrath Classic’s pre-patch has been no exception.
There are other server capacity problems that we can’t solve with layers.Brian Birmingham
«One of the things that we have been doing over most of the history of World Warcraft is leaning on letting players play what they want, where they want, and trying to increase server capacity to allow that,» says Brian Birmingham. «Classic philosophy originally was to try to get everybody back down to one layer after launch. We eventually abandoned that effort, especially with a big surge of players when the pandemic hit.»
The launch of WoW Classic allowed Blizzard to add layers to servers to help alleviate the strain—something that is used successfully in modern WoW. Essentially, layering means that players would be spread over different server instances, even if they were stood at the same exact spot in the same zone. But this also leads to problems with areas potentially feeling empty when in reality, they’re not. But as Birmingham goes on to explain, not all server problems can be solved with layering.
«We’re at that point where we have to change our strategy a little bit, too many people are clustering onto too few realms, and causing those realms to be over capacity in a variety of ways. So while layers can help the problem of too many people in one tight space—we can make multiple copies of that—there are other server capacity problems that we can’t solve with layers. There are things like the auction house, for example, which is not layered. But that’s just one example. There are all kinds of bottlenecks behind the bottlenecks.»
(Image credit: Blizzard)
The large servers that are locked right now are likely to stay locked for the foreseeable future, but it’s not all doom and gloom if you’re planning on playing. «So at this point, we have a lot of really healthy realms,» continues Birmingham. «Some of them are really too popular, and we have stopped transfers and character creations on those. But then the rest of [the servers] have really healthy and vibrant communities. And so if you’re allowed to make a new character there, you’re gonna have a good permanent home. That’s what we want to be able to guarantee.»
As for the future, the World of Warcraft team encompasses both Classic and modern WoW and server technology is something that both groups discuss. «I’m really happy to see all the technological advancements,» says Ana Resendez. «It’s a conversation we have all the time with our partner teams in the modern game. And that helps us continue exploring different solutions for the future. But I just want to really reiterate that it’s something that we are constantly looking at and we monitor the health of the servers closely.»
The introduction of the fresh start servers for Wrath Classic was mainly due to the team’s expectations for the number of players jumping in for the popular Wrath expansion, especially those playing Classic for the first time. It’s also partly what prompted the XP buff, Joyous Journeys, which sadly ends on September 26.
«We were [always] planning to have it stop at launch. We knew as we were introducing it that the longer we left it, the more people would come to count on it forever,» says Birmingham. «We do really like what we’ve seen from it—it has invigorated the community to make new characters, level them up together, and go explore old dungeons. And so maybe it’ll come back at some point in the future, but we don’t have any specific plans for that yet.»
(Image credit: Blizzard)Dungeon (finder) decisions
Earlier this year, Blizzard announced that the Random Dungeon Finder tool wouldn’t be added to Wrath Classic and this has been a point of contention for some. The original Wrath expansion added the tool during one of the later patches, allowing players to form five-person groups with the click of a button and be thrown into a dungeon with randoms. This is something that modern WoW still makes use of, but many feel that the tool was the start of the decline of the social aspect of the game, when the feeling of community the early game fostered began to fade.
