WoW Forever's second day: empty cities, portals for ships and characters reported on the wrong ruleset

After a launch night that held up better than many expected, Thursday 5 November 2026 brought the first real adjustments to WoW Forever. Blizzard answered on layering and on lost transports, and fixed a problem for invited players. Other problems are only reported by players: we mark them as such. The bugs Blizzard has listed are in our article on the Known Issues. This article reflects what was public at 23:15 UTC on 5 November.

A world that feels too empty

The most common complaint of the day was not about queues, but about seeing too few people. Thread after thread on the forums described near-empty capitals, on both the US and EU sides. MassivelyOP called the aggressive layering the biggest issue of the night, and its writer counted 84 copies of Stormwind: that is one writer's observation, not an official figure. Mein-MMO also noted that some players miss the crowds of past Classic launches. Not everyone agrees: one EU thread asks for fewer people per layer.

At 06:35 UTC (07:35 CET) Aggrend answered on the forum: Blizzard knows some areas do not feel as populated as they should and planned to tweak some numbers the next day to make them livelier. No post confirms that the change is live yet. After the maintenance one thread claims phasing got worse, with players attacking enemies you cannot see, but it is a small thread and nothing confirms it.

Portals instead of ships and zeppelins

At 06:39 UTC (07:39 CET) Aggrend also confirmed that boats and zeppelins can get lost in the Maelstrom for long stretches. As a temporary fix, Blizzard placed portals near most docks and inside the zeppelin towers to move between continents. A proper fix was due in the morning, and the portals will go once it has been verified. No post has confirmed that step yet, so if a transport does not arrive, look for the portal.

A short maintenance

According to players the servers went down at about 15:00 UTC (16:00 CET) and were back within about 45 minutes. Blizzard wrote nothing on the forums about it: players say the notice was only in the Battle.net app. No patch notes followed, and it is reasonable to think this was when the layering and transport changes went in, but that is our guess.

Characters on another ruleset

This is the point to watch. After the maintenance, some players report that characters created during name reservation are now on Roleplay-PvP instead of Roleplaying, or on PvP instead of Normal. The threads are few but tell the same story. Blizzard has not replied, so we do not know how many players are affected or whether the characters will be moved back. If it happens to you, check the other rulesets and open a ticket with Blizzard support. Others report losing a few minutes of progress because they were disconnected by the maintenance.

Invite-a-Friend fixed

At 02:43 UTC (03:43 CET) Kaivax announced a hotfix for players who joined with an Invite-a-Friend code: they were wrongly restricted in some chat channels and could not level past 10, join guilds, form parties or trade. If you were affected, log out and back in.

Other complaints

Warlocks are asking for a hotfix: pets now get 2 health per point of Stamina, a change from the notes of 2 November, and many say they die too easily. On PvP the Horde is still reported as full. Blizzard has not answered either complaint on the forum.

The numbers

The only official figures are about the hardware: @Warcraft says the game runs on 3,924 virtual machines, with 251,136 GB of memory and 70,480 CPU cores. Blizzard has not published a player count, and we have not found a reliable peak for Twitch viewers. The press agrees on the launch: "buttery smooth" for PC Gamer, fine for PCGamesN, and Holly Longdale, the game's executive producer, called it "goodish" according to MassivelyOP.