WoW Classic Sunday and Layering Progress

For whatever reason Sunday has become my day to catch up on WoW Classic news and updates, so I might as well keep rolling with it.

Classic is as classic does

First up, Blizzard put up some information about their progress with layering, listing out a number of servers that has successfully been reduced to a single layer.  As of the post on Thursday there were 13 American and 6 European servers that had been locked into a single layer.  They also said that it had been several weeks since any realm had needed to run more than three layers in order to accommodate the server population.

You will soon see an indicator in the realm selection screen as to whether or not specific realms are still running multiple layers or not, and free transfers off of especially crowded servers will remain open until they get all realms down to running a single layer.

That plan still seems to be to get ALL realms down to a single layer before going to phase 2 of the WoW Classic plan, which might involve some of the more crowded servers getting queues again if people won’t transfer off.

We’ll see if we get a timeline of sorts for the phases next month at BlizzCon.  In the meantime WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas was interviewed about phases over at PC Gamer.

On lighter news, Blizzard has continued with its city tour series, this time putting up a post about Darnassus, home of the night elves, and Thunder Bluff, home of the Tauren.  I guess the theme was “cities where druids start.”

There is also another entry in the video series with some of the WoW team, this time featuring Tom Chilton.

Tom Chilton’s name might be recognizable as one of the auction house NPCs in Stormwind has his name.

Tom Chilton also might be remembered for spilling the beans on WoW subscriber numbers after the company had officially stopped talking about them, which Blizzard then denied, as well as being the one to say Warlords of Draenor garrisons would essentially be the WoW version of housing back at BlizzCon 2013.

I actually have a few Tom Chilton quotes, like that one about expansions building barriers. or when he said WoD was further along than people might expect (BlizzCon 2013 again) which got everybody assuming there would be a February release or something crazy like that.  But he did help make WoW, so you have to give him that.

And, finally, Fandom Entertainment has jumped on the bandwagon with an Honest Game Trailers look at WoW Classic.

All the negatives won’t keep me away.