World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard's vanilla-flavoured spin-off, exceeded expectations during its beta testing this week with record-breaking player numbers. The unexpected surge in players caused server disconnections and lag, though Blizzard resolved the issues by the end of the day. The strong response has excited the development team, with Classic lead developer Josh Greenfield describing the numbers as the "craziest" he has seen in his 17 years at Blizzard.

Senior game producer Tom Ellis explained that the beta environment uses a less powerful server stack than production and operates with only a single regional realm, which proved insufficient for the volume of players attempting to connect. The technical issues were attributed to the beta's limited infrastructure, which Blizzard does not typically scale for large player surges. World of Warcraft: Forever, officially confirmed at BlizzCon 2026, is scheduled to launch globally on 4th November.