As fully expected I spent most of my game time wandering the starting areas of Azeroth as WoW Forever entered its first weekend.
WoW Forever
There was, as with WoW Classic, very much a comfortable feeling being back in the vanilla vision of the world. Perhaps one of the more confusing things to explain to somebody not at all invested in the game is how it is fun to go out and… well… run through a bunch of quests I am sure I have done dozens of times before.
If you go back to my post about the Account Played addon that tallies up your play time, I have a lot of time invested in both retail WoW and WoW Classic.
There is a comfort to it… as noted… but also a feeling I sometimes refer to as the “Lone Lands effect,” after the zone in Lord of the Rings Online. I enjoy playing through that zone, in part because it is interesting, but also because I have obtained something of a mastery of the landscape. I know how to get places, where mobs are. It is maybe the one zone in Middle-earth where I feel like the adventurer the game sets you up to be.
There is a bit of that in running through these quest lines once more. But there are also new additions, so it isn’t all just making myself feel good via repeating a previously accomplished task. And, in a game where a lot of other people are playing, there is always some variability in your experience. No two runs are identical, as familiar as they may feel.
Or so I say.
Blizzard as well seemed to be having a good weekend. They were on social media on Friday announcing that WoW Forever had been their “biggest launch ever.” (Blue Sky link)
Nov 6, 2026 – 18:34 Pacific Time post
In case that graphic falls by the wayside at some future date, the post says:
Congratulations everyone, you made HISTORY!
WoW: Forever has achieved:
The biggest launch in WoW history by peak concurrent players
This is all because of you, the players. From all of us, THANK YOU!
That is all over a banner that says “Thank you for the Biggest Launch Ever!”
It has been a while since Blizz had a superlative that grand about a WoW launch.
Otherwise, Notes from the weekend.
- Character Splitting
At one point I was hitting level 8 with a character and then turning around to roll up a new one. Alt-itis for the… win?
Once I had four characters in play I settled down a bit… or at least focused on getting those four to at least level 10. For my hunter, my first character in play (because I always have to have a hunter as my solo time character), level 10 is important because it is when you finally get a pet.
Really, at times it seems a bit crazy that you have to play through to level 10 before you get the defining aspect of your class… but whatever. So Tistann, my hunter, was the first to level 10 and got out and did the pet quests.
Learning to tame a boar
The hunter class is as it always was in vanilla, an awkward yet fun mix of skills, maintenance, and inventory management because you have one fewer bags than everybody else.
My pally was next, and my shaman and warrior are close.
That was made possible by… spending a lot of time playing. If ManicTime is to believed… and it is… I spent about 7 hours playing on Saturday. For me in my 30s or 40s… pretty normal. For me in my 60s… well, I need to get up and take a break more often. Still, I could have probably played more.
At some point I’ll pick some favorites to play. But for now I am spreading out a bit.
- Auction House
I did not use the auction house at all during beta because… well… why bother? I spent all my time out in the field just playing. So I was a bit surprised to find that Blizz had swapped over to what I think of as more of the Guild Wars 2 style auction house. It isn’t fully there, as you still have to go to the auctioneer NPC, but you cannot see individual auctions, just the price points.
Auctions for linen bags
This has a number of benefits, the primary one being able to see the state of the market at a glance. I am not sure I need an addon like Auctioneer for my simple AH needs.
Selling is likewise simple and quick.
Auction house selling linen cloth
That shows you the sellers out there and, by default, pre-prices you at the lowest price point which, if everybody simply took, would lead to more universal happiness I am sure as the auction house works on a “first in, first out” system for items of the same price. But people are anxious and want to sell first, so the desire to undercut overtakes people.
I have tended to find the big group and just stick my items there, avoiding the first couple of under cutters… and have been rewarded. Now, we’re in a time of high demand, so things may change, but I have yet to do that and have my items not sell… and they usually sell before I can close the AH window.
Of course, I went to the AH to sell because I was out of silver for skills at level 10. But to sell you have to put down a deposit, and I didn’t even have a coin for a deposit.
So I sole enough light leather to the vendor to get the cash for a deposit, then listed a couple of stacks of light leather, which sold immediately. You still have to wait the hour to get your cash in the mail.
Cash for light leather
But once the mail came in I had enough cash to go buy back my light leather from the vendor to then list it at the AH. Light leather, right now, is pretty easy to pick up out in the world. Just wander through the wendigo cave and you’ll fill up on it.
- Guild Formed
Part of the need for cash was to get a guild formed. On Saturday when we had five of us near Ironforge I sent my now slightly cash flush hunter over to the visitor’s center to pick up a guild charter for 10 silver. We didn’t even have to pool our coppers, I just grabbed it.
But to buy it you have to give the guild a name. I believe you can change it later, but for the moment I needed something. We had discussed a few options, but our old WoW Classic guild name, Crag Boar Rebellion still resonated, so we went with that… even staving off the desire to make it “xXCrag Boar RebellionXx” or “Dark /><\ Boars” or some such.
Charter in hand I did the same thing I did back in 2019, which was to stand outside the bank in Ironforge and ask people in chat to sign our charter while just randomly sending signature requests to anybody walking by who wasn’t in a guild.
Busking for signatures…
This actually worked… and pretty quickly. People seemed to be in a good mood about it. I was worried because I had already heard enough tales of Asmogoof the Unwashed and his completely toxic Olympus guild spamming invites to people to the point of everybody learning how to turn off guild invites… which also blocks guild charter signature invites.
[To purge the taint of Olympus from your experience there are addons like OlympusMute]
I know this because Ula had already turned that option on thanks to Olympus spam and I wanted to get all five of us on the charter first before I started rando-invite quest.
So a number of people no doubt did not see my spam request. But enough did that we had a all the signatures and a guild formed within ten minutes. I think WoW Forever must have just put everybody in a good mood.
The guild tag on Steam Cleaner
Then, once the guild was formed… and I ran immediately to the guild registrar when we got that last signature… a couple of people quit the guild and we kicked two more… but one person asked to stay and we let them. Can’t hurt I guess. The first tab for a guild bank costs 100 gold, so we aren’t going to have to worry about that for quite a while.
Then there was getting everybody invited which always means getting somebody who was promoted to officer online when another character shows up.
And invitation from Skronk
Anyway, op success on the guild creation front. Since I turn off all global channels, guild chat, party chat, and proximity “say” is all I see now.
- Crowds and Stability
As noted, Blizz is tooting its own horn about the opening success for WoW Forever. And it sure felt like it was very popular on the ground. The layering, which seemed a bit wonky opening night, seemed to get better. Things like named mobs for quests were respawning so quickly opening night that it was hard not to end up killing the same mob a few times if there was nobody else waiting because you couldn’t get out of the aggro radius before it popped back up.
There were a lot of people in each layer, and sometimes it felt like you wouldn’t be able to get a quest done as all the mobs were being devoured. But I found that, with a bit of patience, it tended to work out. Like crowds anywhere, they tend to show up in waves so if you hung around for a bit one wave would depart and you could get wrapped up as the next wave arrived.
I had a bit more trouble with quest turn ins… or at least one quest turn in. The Operation Recombobulation quest, when you turn it in, sends the quest giver into a 30 seconds routine during which nobody else can get or turn in the quest. People were piling up trying to turn that in and we were past the good cheer on that front as impatient people raced to turn in the quests whenever the NPC became available. It was maddening at times.
Then there was the usual races to kill this mob or that where tempers could flare. I was on both sides of the coin on that one throughout the weekend. In this time it is probably best to forgive people their trespass.
Also, there was a fair share of smaller problems. The AH seemed to take a few tries to buy something at times… I suspect a race condition in matching up purchases with orders that leaves you getting the order you were assigned being snapped up before it gets processes.
The client also seemed to get slower and slower to launch as the weekend progressed, such that by Sunday afternoon it took a couple of minutes from pressing the PLAY button for the client to actually appear.
Layering, as noted, seemed to stay stable for me, but over on Reddit somebody posted a video of layering breaking and dumping everybody into one layer that gave a taste of how many people are actually playing the game.
- Atmosphere
I am enjoying the feel of WoW Forever so far. People like to talk about the campfires as a nice touch to the game, and I am certainly in favor of that.
Campfire, turned purple by the current Twitch drop
But I have to admit I am constantly taking screenshots of just the way things look in game with the new lighting scheme.
I saw a complaint at one point about the fact that because WoW operates on a real world day/night cycle, where your server time controls the time of day you experience, that a lot of people were going to end up playing at night and… that seemed like it might suck with the new lighting scheme Blizz introduced.
Dark places are much darker. The tunnels in Stormwind are pretty dark even in broad daylight. I feel like Blizz might want to look into a torch slot or something to let people shine a bit of light on the world when they need it. There are some torches you can equip in weapon slots, if you can find them, but it feels like Blizz might commit a bit harder to giving players some light at night.
That said, my experience so far, at least in Dun Morogh, has me feeling pretty good about the the night. The dark isn’t the inky blackness of early EverQuest before we all figured out where the gamma slider was in the settings. It is just dark enough to make light stand out. And the storms and the fog that comes and goes from the place… if you don’t like the weather in Dun Morogh right now, just wait five minutes and it will be something different.
Running to Kharanos at night
It gives the whole area a sense of atmosphere. It is quite possible, in a driving snowstorm, to get completely disoriented and end up going the wrong direction. You’re never going to get fully lost… open the map already… but it tickles the sensation of being lost in the world which makes everything feel more alive.
Overall, a good first weekend for me. Looking forward to more.
