The WoW: Forever beta has had a bumpy few days on the server side. On 25 September Blizzard confirmed it was tracking stability problems affecting some testers and restarted the beta realms to deploy a fix. Two days later, on 27 September, it patched a separate bug that was trapping players in login queues after they disconnected.
The first acknowledgement came in a forum thread with the blunt title "Game is unplayable today", where community manager Kaivax replied to the reports:
We’re tracking server issues that are affecting some Beta testers, and our fix for this will almost certainly result in restarting servers today.
Thank you for these reports.
That prediction held. Later the same day Kaivax posted a short notice that the realms were coming down within minutes:
To implement fixes that should address stability issues, we will shutdown and restart the Beta in the next few minutes.
The maintenance period should be very brief.
Blizzard did not describe what the stability issues actually were, only that the restart was meant to address them and that the downtime would be brief. For testers that means the fix went in quickly rather than waiting for a scheduled maintenance window, which is the right call when the complaint is that the game cannot be played at all.
Login queues after disconnects
The second problem was more specific and arguably more irritating. Players reported that after being disconnected they were landing in a login queue when trying to get back in, in a thread titled "Realm is full". Kaivax replied on 27 September that the team had found the cause and already fixed it:
A player wrote:
Getting login queue after disconnect
We looked into this, and found an issue that was causing the queue to fill, and we just fixed the issue.
Thanks for testing with us!
So the queue was not a sign of an overcrowded realm, but a bug that was filling the queue on its own. If you hit a queue after a disconnect over the weekend, that is the likely explanation, and it should no longer happen. If you still see queues that look out of proportion to the realm population, the forum thread is where Blizzard is reading reports.
Why this kind of thing shows up now
None of this is unusual for a beta, and it is exactly the sort of problem a test period exists to catch. Stability under real player load and the behaviour of login queues are both things that matter far more on 4 November, when WoW: Forever launches and the realms fill with people who are not testers. Finding a queue that fills itself in September is a lot better than finding it on launch night.
Both replies are also a reminder that the forum reports do get read: in each case Kaivax responded directly in the player thread where the problem was raised, rather than only in a separate announcement.