World of Warcraft: Forever kicks off with a bang with Blizzard’s smoothest launch in memory

World of Warcraft: Forever was released last night. Those who stayed awake were prepared for the usual of major WoW releases: long queues, disconnections, and server lag. However, aside from a few minor hiccups here and there, things went smoothly.

Eurogamer can report first-hand that for European players who stayed awake, say, between 11 p.m. and 3:50 a.m. last night, login queues were short and constantly moving. Those who were very Wanting to access when the servers came online was met with non-clickable server selection boxes, but backing out and joining the short queue resolved that quickly.

Once you got in, there was very little server lag other than a lost spell or two, nor constant random disconnects that would leave you out in the cold (I didn’t get disconnected once – a record). As far as WoW launches go, an incredibly smooth first day.

This has been acknowledged by World of Warcraft developers, such as executive producer Holly Longdale who wrote on X: “At the risk of spoiling things, so far so good, which is crazy in itself. The team has been preparing a lot since the beta madness.

Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, Senior Game Designer on World of Warcraft Forever, fixed some minor issues that arose. These include a zone population issue: Simply put, megaservers split players into different shards, and some of them seemed a bit empty of players. There was also an oddity with the various large ships and zeppelins scattered around the map, which were destroyed. Temporary portals have been added to provide a workaround.

“Thank you everyone for making this launch great and smooth,” Greenfield wrote. “I’m going to go home and ‘go to sleep’ now. Yes, I’m sleeping. I absolutely will not play WoW Forever before 3 a.m. No.”

The reaction to this silky smooth launch stunned some players. “I can’t believe how smoothly this launch went,” is the title of the post from Reddit user Arizhela, currently at the top of the WoW Forever leaderboard. They continue: “I fully expected not to be able to play today, but I logged in with no queues or lags.”

Another post, created early this morning, is titled: “Never take a day off for launch, they said” in which a WoW player regrets not taking time off this week, expecting problems. “You were refined, son,” user SnooWalruses3948 replied, while SirePuns shared his shock: “The advice was sound, but this time the developers hired a witch, I tell you. The code must have been witchcraft, the hardware must have been blessed by a witch too.”

It’s unclear how well World of Warcraft: Forever’s launch went, given the unsocial, job-unfriendly release time in the middle of the night for us Europeans, but it follows a record beta period in which many returned to the MMO. Impressions of this beta version have been largely positive, with the magic of the old MMO seeming to be rediscovered.