WoW Forever: Blizzard calls launch night "so far so goodish"

Blizzard's first verdict on the WoW Forever launch is a careful one. Executive producer Holly Longdale wrote on X on 5 November: "At the risk of jinxing things, so far so goodish which is crazy by itself."

She said the team had prepared a lot since the wildness of the beta, and that the launch was "crazier than the insanity we imagined". What helped, in her words, was that the team had built plans and contingencies.

Senior game designer Josh Greenfield called it a "long day but great day" and went through what had gone wrong. A service that manages transports had issues, which is why boats and zeppelins were replaced by temporary portals overnight. He also addressed the areas that feel too empty.

For European players who stayed up, login queues were reported as short and constantly moving, with very little server lag. Those who tried to get in the moment servers opened ran into server selection boxes that could not be clicked. Backing out and rejoining the queue fixed it.

It is still hard to say how well the launch really went. It opened in the dead of night for Europe, so this first picture comes from a quieter hour.