Blizzard's Biggest Player Surge in 17 Years – WoW: Forever Beta

The latest addition to the World of Warcraft series saw a mind-blowing launch of its beta. "The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost 8 years on Classic," said WoW Classic developer Josh Greenfield.

Blizzard announced World of Warcraft: Forever during the opening ceremony of BlizzCon 2026, just a week before the beta was launched. The new title in the WoW series is built around the players' beloved original setting from 2004 with new storylines, quests, and locations to explore.

Once the beta version went live, however, the users started experiencing disconnects once they finally got through the login queue. As the WoW senior game producer Tom Ellis explained, it took the team about half an hour to find out why this kept happening. The CPU and memory on WoW's and Battle.net's side were doing fine, with no signs of overload present. Turned out it was the BGS metering system that was protecting Battle.net's services from collapsing under an overload this massive. 

"We all recognized we need more logging and notifications when this system is kicking in, but this is the first time anyone's seen it kick in when there wasn't an obvious CPU issue to go along with it. 20 years, always something new," said Ellis on Twitter.

Aside from that, the users pointed out that they experienced severe lag when looting and accepting quests. Ellis stated that the PTR database that beta uses responded to queries slowly. This happened, in essence, because there was plenty of new data along with unfamiliar behaviors for old data, and database engineers had to perform a lot of manual checking. Once the checks for the ever-changing data were complete, database performance went up.

"That's why we have betas like this. We found more problems in six hours yesterday and fixed them than we would have found in six months of internal testing," commented Greenfield on Twitter.