After years of waiting, World of Warcraft Classic is now live. This new/old version of Blizzard’s perennial MMORPG is permanently locked to version 1.12 of the game, which dates back to August 22 of 2006. Our friends over at sister-site Wowhead have been covering its momentous launch, and reading about today’s festivities will undoubtedly be faster than trying to play yourself — queue times for most North American servers rest firmly in the “hours” category.
As of 4:05 p.m. Pacific, Stalagg had the longest queue of all North American WoW Classic servers, with an estimated wait time of 646 minutes (10.7 hours), with 25,257 players waiting in queue. Whitemane comes in second with an estimated 501 minute (8.35 hour) wait, with 22,822 people in line. Of the 20 available North American WoW Classic servers, half of them estimate a wait time of at least an hour; meanwhile, players on Arugal (one of two available Oceanic servers) must wait 603 minutes, or 10.5 hours for their chance to experience all of the bugs that aren’t bugs.
While some NA servers do currently offer wait times that can be measured in fewer than 60 minutes, changing servers isn’t an acceptable option for many players. Blizzard opened up WoW Cassic username reservations two weeks ago, and character names in WoW Classic are server specific. This means that if someone wants to play the character they’ve already made, on the server that (presumably) all of their friends also made characters on, they’ll just have to sit and wait. And if they don’t have friends waiting, choosing a low population server means severely limiting your options for finding a party, joining a guild, or making any meaning post-story progress.
Unfortunately, there’s no one weird trick (“Blizzard HATES this!”) for getting a better spot in a server queue. Whatever you do though, don’t leave the queue and rejoin it. This will remove you from your current spot and place you all the way back at the end of the line, resetting your wait time. But! Feel free to keep Wowhead’s Twitter open for the absolute latest on the situation — those gumshoes won’t rest until server wait times are downgraded from “hilarious” to “inconvenient.”
If you weren’t around for it at the time, World of Warcraft version 1.12 — aka Vanilla WoW — was an extremely different game than its modern descendant. For one thing, the world of Azeroth is quite literally a different place, since version 1.12 dates back to well before Blizzard redesigned the map at the launch of WoW‘s 2009 expansion, Cataclysm. And unlike modern day World of Warcraft, there is no difficulty scaling, no Heirloom items, no profession ranks or associated discounts/buffs, no Horde Paladins, no Alliance Shaman, no active damage mitigation for tanks, and no armor type bonus for healers.
There are also no Blood Elves, Goblins, Draenei, or Pandarin, no Allied Race variations, no Death Knights, no Demon Hunters, and no Monks. If you want to do a dungeon, someone in your party has to own the the key to that dungeon, which is obtained from a special quest chain. Hunters can’t even fire their ranged weapon as a basic attack if the target is within 15 feet, just like the good ol’ days. You wanted this! Have fun everybody!!
