WoW Forever World PvP: Hundreds of Players, Almost No Lag

Dozens of Forsaken facing a tide of Alliance players, guards everywhere, reinforcements arriving in the nick of time, and not a single screen freeze. In his video « WORLD PVP IS BACK IN FOREVER CLASSIC | NO LAG », streamer Savix shows what many had stopped hoping for: WoW Forever world PvP holds up under the load.

Asmongold pushed things even further, with hundreds of players moving together in the open world. For anyone who lived through the battles of Tarren Mill or the opening of Ahn’Qiraj on Classic, the contrast is striking.

Savix: a pitched battle that never slows down

Savix plays a Horde paladin, in a group made up mostly of Forsaken. Over more than twenty minutes of footage, his group goes through one clash after another with the Alliance: a first skirmish won without losses, a retreat under pressure from the guards, then a long fight around a boat, where Alliance players pile up by the dozen.

The funniest moment: cornered, Savix calls for help from a group of French players. The reinforcements arrive, turn the situation around, and the streamer gives them a shoutout live, since his chat often jokes about the French.

But what stands out to him most is the performance. In the middle of the chaos, he praises Blizzard’s work: he says he’s almost never seen a load test go this well, when a fight with this many people would normally lag hard. His spells go off the moment he presses them, and loading screens pass quickly.

Asmongold and Olympus: hundreds of players in the same place

On the other side, that’s exactly where Asmongold’s guild comes in. In his stream titled « We Broke WoW Forever.. », he hit the maximum guild member count, to the point of creating dozens of numbered « Olympus » guilds just to keep recruiting. The guild’s Discord already had 3,000 members by the time of the stream.

The footage speaks for itself: a column of players filling an entire bridge, a square where you can no longer see the ground under the characters. And yet movement stays smooth. Asmongold says it himself during the stream: he remembers the Classic servers that kept crashing at launch, and he’s amazed that Forever can handle this many people.

Not perfect either: a crash and some limits

The title of Asmongold’s video isn’t just a joke. During his stream, Blizzard restarted the servers, according to his chat, to expand the layers (parallel copies of the same zone). Shortly after, the servers went down, including the PvE server. Asmongold pointed out that his guild had been doing the same thing for three or four days without any problem, and that the trouble only started after that restart.

There are also two limits worth keeping in mind:

• Layering is still there. Not everyone ends up in the same place: major cities allow more players per copy than the rest of the world, so some players get spread out elsewhere.
• The server holds up better than PCs do. At one point Asmongold asks everyone to go into an inn to « reset » their frame rate. With hundreds of characters on screen, it’s the graphics card that struggles before the server does.

What WoW Forever World PvP Makes Possible

Even with these caveats, this is miles ahead of anything WoW has seen before. In vanilla, a big battle at Tarren Mill turned the game into a slideshow. On Classic, the opening of the Ahn’Qiraj gates brought servers to their knees. Seeing hundreds of players move and fight with this little lag is a real step forward.

For WoW Forever world PvP, this opens up possibilities the game never really allowed before: guild raids against entire cities, battles that actually last, reinforcements arriving on time. There’s still a question I raised in my article on PvP damage reduction: with this many players on a single point, fights will need to last more than two seconds for these big battles to stay fun.

For the rest of my impressions on the beta, you can check out my thoughts on the WoW Forever beta after 8 hours. And if you took part in one of these battles, tell us about it in the comments.