World of Warcraft Classic servers are scheduled to go down for a brief maintenance period today.
Blizzard has confirmed that maintenance is scheduled for September 27. The hour-long period of downtime will begin at 07:00 PT/10:00 ET/15:00 BST and last for roughly one hour. Both World of Warcraft's current Shadowlands expansion and the recent arrival of WoW Classic's Wrath of the Lich King will be unavailable during that time. For more information, you can check out Blizzard's official customer service pages, although there's currently no word as to what the developer is hoping to achieve during today's downtime.
MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE09/27:#Warcraft #Shadowlands, #WrathClassic & #WoWClassic: 7:00am - 8:00am (PDT)https://t.co/MMvRkad9GD pic.twitter.com/kXcV9qDeQnSeptember 26, 2022
That's likely to be unfortunate news for those planning to delve into the new WoW Classic content. The long-awaited release of Wrath Classic took place last night, but as with any major MMO launch, many players swiftly found themselves trapped in significant WoW Classic server queues. Those who did find their way into the game ended up on packed boats as players rushed to make the trip to Northrend.
Despite busy servers, however, some players are already rocketing through the new content. Chief among those is streamer Noawh, who hit the new WOTLK level 80 cap in just nine hours by exploiting a decade-old bug that allowed them to soak up XP by despawning, rather than killing, enemy mobs (although they were helped on their way by a party filled with dead level-one players).
Wrath of the Lich King arguably cemented World of Warcraft's enduring popularity. The game's second major expansion remains one of its best and most-beloved additions, which means that the rush back into Classic comes as little surprise.
Stuck in a queue? Here's a list of some more of the best MMORPGs.
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I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.