World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard’s vanilla-flavoured spin-off built by the WoW Classic team, has already pulled in far more players than the studio expected.

While the game isn’t set to go live until 4th November and the rush of players to this week’s beta caused disconnects and heavy lag, the team are nonetheless excited by the response to the upcoming launch.

As WoW Classic developer Josh Greenfield shared on Twitter/X: “Man, it was hard to sleep last night, I was so excited. Beta has been… crazy. The craziest numbers I’ve seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost eight years on classic.”

He added: “We’ve got something really special here”.

World of Warcraft senior game producer Tom Ellis also took to Twitter/X detail why the test had struggled to meet demand.

“AHMAGERD, this game is 20 years old, how do you still suck at this!?!” he wrote.

“Heh, fair enough, short answer is, this is our BETA PTR environment stack, it’s not a Production stack by a long, long, long, long, long, long shot. Betas for WoW aren’t usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn’t that powerful. This led to the first problem you saw today,” he wrote.

“Shortly after we went live and when you got through the login queue (which is just http://B.Net protecting itself, rate limiting logins, normal!), you were disconnected. Ah. That’s not quite right. This one took the longest of the issue today to figure out (and even then, was around half an hour I think?),” he added. “Our little BETA environment only uses one REGIONAL realm. Hrm, we should do a panel on WoW infra one day so any of this makes sense. Anyway…

By the end of the day, Blizzard had resolved the issues: “Marked live once again and you all poured in without fuss,” Ellis said.

“Right now things are incredibly smooth for the first few hours of a public beta, Classic teams watching and fixing anything blocking that comes up but we’re otherwise pretty much done for the night, enjoy!”

Blizzard finally officially confirmed World of Warcraft: Forever at last week’s BlizzCon after

fans were obsessing over colours as dataminers pulled hues from Blizzard’s website that were labelled under a curious “wow 2” tag, leading many to speculate that this referred to the rumoured World of Warcraft Camelot, or as it’s better known, “Classic Plus”, much like how Blizzard is now expanding Diablo 2.

Now, following BlizzCon’s opening ceremony, it turns out the rumours were pretty much bang on and World of Warcraft: Forever launches globally on 4th November.