World of Warcraft: Forever Servers Buckle Under Player Rush on Beta's First Day

World of Warcraft: Forever is a new branch of Blizzard's iconic MMO, "frozen" in the classic vanilla version of the game (patch 1.12.1), but expanded with new content: quests, dungeons, and class abilities that never existed before. The project became available for beta testing just yesterday, and on its very first night, the game's servers couldn't handle the massive load.

The beta went live on September 17 at around 12:19 pm PT, right after the developers' live Q&A stream wrapped up. Players had been warned to expect a queue when logging in through Battle.net, but reality turned out worse than expected: the enormous interest in the project led to mass disconnects and an inability to get into realms right after launch.

Blizzard later stated that the team was already investigating the connection issues with realms and hoped to resolve them soon. Alongside that, WoW Classic Associate Production Director Clayton Stone acknowledged on social media that the number of players wanting to try the beta was simply incredible, effectively admitting that the company had expected far less interest.

On the Blizzard forums, players are also voicing frustration that this kind of problem keeps happening. With every new release, the situation doesn't change — "new project, same old issues."

My entire Blizzard launcher can't load any content of any game - "Oops! Something went wrong." GG Blizz, same problems, different decade.

It's worth noting that reports of issues have now almost died down, so anyone who wants to try the beta can log in without trouble. The first day's technical difficulties haven't affected the testing timeline: the beta will still run through October 21, and the full release of World of Warcraft: Forever is scheduled for November 4.