People Really, Really Like the new Classic Servers for World of Warcraft

For the longest time, World of Warcraft fans have wanted vanilla servers. At first, it was a frequently-requested feature (that would get a good natured laugh and a quick refusal from Blizzard), and it was later discovered that there was a secret fan-run server that catered to that crowd, although Blizzard did eventually have to shut it down after silently tolerating it for a couple of months. People were utterly convinced they wanted a vanilla server, Blizzard was absolutely convinced they didn’t, and it seemed there was nothing the two sides could say to convince each other of that simple truth.

Well, eventually, Blizzard caved, and recently they launched their very own, official vanilla World of Warcraft servers.

And the queue times to get in, reported by PC Gamer, is friggin’ enormous. The reporter, Steven Messner, was apparently in a cue of about 8,500 players, and that was on the low end. People were saying they were waiting for upwards of 70 or even 100 minutes to play, and the people who did log in were not in a hurry to leave. When you also consider that right now, well over a million people are watching Vanilla WoW on Twitch, and Blizzard has been forced to open up new servers for Vanilla WoW just to accommodate all the people trying to play it… I think it’s pretty clear the fans knew what they wanted.

That said, how much of this is just release-day hype and how much of it has staying power is a genuine mystery. On one hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to find people stick around – after all, vanilla WoW lived a long time before it got its first expansion – but on the other hand, once people get their fill on nostalgia, maybe they’ll be eager to get back to the far more modern gameplay offered by the most recent expansion.

Time will tell.