World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has been utterly rammed with server issues—issues that I'm pleased to say were fixed in relatively short order, and one I certainly don't resent anybody for. What does jump my eyebrows up my head is the fact that its developers are shocked that the game's popular.

For those not in the know, Forever's essentially Classic+. A version of the game as it was back in 2004, but with a bunch of changes made not to modernise it, but to make that old school vision better. Over 1,000 extra quests, new zones, redesigned talented trees, new racial abilities, and some major improvements to lighting.

It's pure, distilled liquid nostalgia. A fat, juicy worm for shmucks (like me) to chomp onto and be shocked when there's a hook in our mouth—a fact that apparently completely disarmed the beta's development team: "AHMAGERD, this game is 20 years old, how do you still suck at this!?!" Rhetorically asks Tom Ellis, senior game producer, on X:

"Heh, fair enough, short answer is, this is our BETA PTR environment stack, it's not a production stack by a long, long, long, long, long, long shot. Betas for WoW aren't usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn't that powerful. This led to the first problem you saw today."

From the dev's end, nothing was amiss when players were being booted out after a long queue time: "We were hitting the BGS metering system that protects their services from falling over under extreme load. Our tiny little REGIONAL [server] with its two connections that were trying to login A LOT of users, even though it was nowhere near capped on CPU, was completely screwing the math that system was using. We scaled that 2 to an 8 and immediately the flood gates opened once again."

Ellis adds that this is completely unprecedented: "First time anyone's seen it kick in when there wasn't an obvious CPU issue to go along with it. 20 years, always something new."

You can read the full post for the technical mumbo jumbo, but the point is, it's all working better now: "Right now things are incredibly smooth for the first few hours of a public beta, Classic teams watching and fixing anything blocking that comes up but we're otherwise pretty much done for the night, enjoy!"

Josh Greenfield, also a senior game designer, commented: "The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost eight years on classic. We've got something really special here."

And you know what, I'm inclined to agree. Forever has me in a chokehold. I've both had rose-tinted goggles forcibly drilled into my face, and I've been genuinely impressed by the changes made already. Forever crawled out of an alternate universe where the modern MMO was never invented, and all the inconvenience and friction of the past was conserved, but not entirely left to burn you.