Blizzard is estimating severe World of Warcraft Classic queues up to several hours or more on the most popular servers once the game releases next week.

　　The WoW Classic Development team answered various questions during a Reddit AMA, and as expected, many questions were asked about the expected extreme queues on Classic’s servers. When asked about adding new servers when needed, Blizzard replied that contingency plans are in place to quickly open new realms but the team wants to match demand to avoid creating low-population realms. In addition, the development team also confirmed that they are considering opening up character transfers later on.

　　“Based on the name reservations we’ve seen, the queue time on some realms will be extremely long”, executive producer AltriusWoW writes. “We’ve opened up additional realms and we’re encouraging people to set up their characters on lower population realms for a better experience. This is a good time to coordinate with your friends/guilds to switch if they’ve reserved names on a full realm. We are considering integrating character transfer services later on, when players have higher level characters.”

　　Going more into detail on character transfers, the executive producer replied, “We’re considering integrating a character transfer service once players have reached higher levels. This was available in the original WoW. We’ll look at the rules we imposed at that time and also discuss the implications of players moving to a new realm. We believe realm identity is an important aspect of Classic so any guidelines around transfers should support this belief.”

　　Blizzard already said that queues could be extreme on the most popular servers, and from the looks of it, queues up to several hours or more are being estimated.

　　“On the most popular servers, such as Herod and Shazzrah, we are currently estimating lengthy queue times - up to several hours or more in certain instances”, senior game producer Chromschi said. “That is why we strongly encourage players to use the name reservation period to transfer their characters and their guilds to lower pop realms.”

　　Like Blizzard, we can only encourage players to set up characters on the lower-populated realms in order to prevent severe queues for everyone.

　　World of Warcraft Classic launches globally on August 26/27.