WoW Forever: beta player cap raised again, queue issue fixed

The population cap on the WoW: Forever beta has been raised again, Blizzard executive Holly Longdale wrote on X on the evening of 27 September. In WoW, the population cap is the largest number of players a game world lets in at the same time; once it is reached, anyone else who tries to log in has to wait in a queue. Longdale did not say how far the cap was raised, what it is now or which parts of the beta it covers; she added only that the wild ride continues. Her word "again" means this is not the first increase during the beta, but she did not say when the earlier one happened.

The increase came after a weekend of login queues on the beta. On 26 September, a Saturday, a player opened a thread titled "Realm is full" on Blizzard's North American forums, and others joined in to complain about long waits; one wrote that he had been number 764 in the queue. Some guessed at the reason, from a deliberate limit on beta servers to a backlog on the login server, but these were players' guesses. On 27 September another player reported being put in the login queue after a disconnect, when he expected to go straight back into the game, and said that once he got in, Westfall had no non-player characters in it.

Blizzard community manager Kaivax replied to that report in the same thread less than half an hour later. He wrote that Blizzard had looked into it, found an issue that was causing the queue to fill and had just fixed it, and he thanked players for testing. He did not describe the issue, did not say whether queues are now gone for everyone and did not mention the empty Westfall. Neither his post nor Longdale's names a region, and Blizzard has not said whether the higher cap and the fix also cover players who connect to the beta from Europe.

Testers in Europe also had lag and disconnections in the first days of the beta, which Blizzard tackled on 21 September by changing how connections from the EU region are routed. The beta is not open to everyone: players get in by invitation or with a pre-purchased bundle that includes access. It runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.