• The Season of Discovery update launched on Thursday for World of Warcraft Classic players, and it’s been a hit at attracting new and old fans of the series.
• Some players are reporting massive wait times before logging in and most available servers are already full.
• Season of Discovery essentially twists the way people play Classic, bringing unique changes to classes, rewards, bosses, dungeons and raids.

The latest update for World of Warcraft Classic, Season of Discovery, went live on Thursday and immediately attracted thousands of players as Blizzard finds new ways to twist their classic experience and attract the curiosity of new and old gamers alike.

According to WoWhead, three of the five online servers in North America are already full one day after launch. For WoW, a full server means around 5 000 players are online at a single instant. If servers are constantly full it means as soon as people log off, new people log in. All three of the available Season of Discovery realms in Europe are full, with Taiwanese realms the least affected.

On X, players have been detailing their experiences on crowded Season of Discovery servers. Including hundred-player-long queues waiting to kill a single quest enemy. The Classic respawn rate is terrible.

It seems Horde players are having similar experiences. The below screenshot is from the Orc starting zone.

That’s even if you can log in, as other players have been hit with wait queues hundreds of thousands of players long. One in particular had a wait time of 127 minutes on Thursday.

“We’ve expanded the capacity of our realms for Season of Discovery to support more players. As a part of the initial launch, players may still experience some queues. We will be monitoring realm health and populations should additional realms be needed,” Blizzard said in a blog post published on Friday.

Season of Discovery brings special servers to the Classic experience, where players will be capped at level 25. The usual level cap for vanilla is level 60, with the cap going up to 80 on Wrath of the Lich King Classic. The low-level cap is purposeful as the Season brings a new level 25 endgame with revamped low-level dungeons now changed into small raids.

Blackfathom Deeps has been turned into a 10-player raid in Season of Discovery and brings new mechanics, reimagined bosses as well as new rewards and challenges to freshen up what is essentially a 20-year-old level.

Basically, Season of Discovery is all about going back to basics with the introduction of Runes, a new mechanic that changes the way Classic plays, adding new features to WoW’s iconic range of classes. Blizzard said during BlizzCon 2023 that the level cap and new features of Season of Discovery will be increased gradually over the years.

The new model will see you unlock new ways to play as you explore the world, which will be unique to your character, bringing a larger amount of build variety.

But the low-level cap brings one big advantage and fixes the largest problem with WoW Classic. That being the empty low-level zones. As the game gets older, players naturally head towards more difficult and higher-level content in bulk.

This leaves the low-level zones empty. Unlike retail WoW, Classic is a team experience and a huge amount of content is not solo-able, even in the early zones. At level five one murloc isn’t an issue, but two murlocs is a death sentence. This means that players are forced to group up and be social, which was the formula for the game’s massive success early on.