WoW Forever Launch Memes From Players Who Remember Every Single Queue

Hot take: a World of Warcraft launch without a queue feels fake. WoW Forever went live Wednesday at 3 p.m. Pacific, and a look at the WoW Forever server status tracker that night showed no Blizzard notices about outages or queues, which left the WoW Forever launch memes with nothing new to chew on. So players went back to the September beta, when the line was the main event. I never even had a beta key, and I still refreshed that subreddit for two hours like my character was in danger.

On September 17, the official Warcraft account thanked everyone waiting to get in, and associate production director Clayton Stone admitted the crowd hammering at the door was insane. GamesRadar’s story on how the World of Warcraft Forever beta struggled to launch caught the mood: queues, disconnects and a lot of jokes.

The WoW Forever Memes Basically Wrote Themselves

The name did half the work. Call a game Forever, put a queue in front of it, and every player becomes a comedian by the second loading bar. The best ones barely try, because two words and a lol can carry an entire thread when everyone reading it is also stuck in line.

The journey joke hurts the most because it is true. Every WoW player has a story about an epic journey, and for a lot of beta testers that journey was the login screen.

Reaching the Front of the Line Was Only Half the Fight

The real pain was not the wait. It was reaching the front, watching the screen say it was retrieving servers, and getting disconnected anyway. One player made it to the front twice and got booted twice, then added an edit about a third time that was mostly the letter E. Another went from roughly 14,000th in line to 23,667th after one disconnect, which might be the most WoW sentence ever typed.

Veterans Called It the True Classic Experience

Longtime players were weirdly happy about all of it. To them, a queue followed by a disconnect is not a bug, it is tradition, like wiping on the first boss because somebody went to make a sandwich. One player came back after 14 years away and was touched that nothing had changed.

My favorite in this group borrowed a beta code from a kind Australian stranger just to join everyone in line, which is the most wholesome way anyone has ever signed up for suffering.

Everyone Found Their Own Way to Cope

The rest of the subreddit coped however it could. One player stared at the queue window long enough to notice its border was bronze instead of the usual black metal. Others lowered their expectations to the floor, or decided that watching streamers get disconnected beat trying to log in, which honestly describes my whole relationship with MMOs.

Not everyone was laughing, of course. A few players were too busy complaining about the people complaining, which is also a time-honored WoW tradition.

Still, the sweetest reply in the whole thread pointed out that it is pretty great so many people were this excited about a beta.

So now that the full launch is here and the lines are shorter, I have to ask: did you actually get in on launch night, or did you miss the queue so much that you came here to read about it?

Stuck in a queue of your own? The cure is 28 Gamer Memes For My Peeps Spending Their Weekend Online, followed by a dose of Retro Gaming Memes: 32 Jokes For True Millennial Gamers for anyone who still misses 2004.