World of Warcraft Classic players are stuck in hours-long queues

Last week, Blizzard warned players that certain World of Warcraft Classic realms could reach login queues of over 10,000 players. With World of Warcraft Classic’s official North American launch on Monday evening, thousands of players proved Blizzard right.

As Blizzard said in their original warning, the Classic servers hold thousands more players than original Vanilla World of Warcraft servers ever did. Now, nearly every World of Warcraft Classic server has a login queue of several thousand.

Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

A few hours prior to launch, nearly all of Classic’s servers were full — which comes with a warning that players will encounter a lengthy queue. Blizzard has added a few new servers over the past week, ensuring an even spread of players.

Despite the massive interest, Blizzard is apprehensive to add too many new servers before launch.

“Our top priority in planning for WoW Classic’s launch has been ensuring that we are laying the groundwork for strong realm communities that will endure over the months and years to follow, which is why we’re cautiously opening new servers to meet demand,” said Blizzard.

The goal is to spread players out to diminish queues without destroying the sense of community that everyone loved about Vanilla World of Warcraft.

It’s unclear how long these 1,000 player queues will last. But if you intend to play World of Warcraft Classic at all this week, it may be worth logging on a few hours before you actually want to start playing.

We’ll update this story as World of Warcraft Classic queues diminish.