For those who have already conquered all that World of Warcraft: Classic has to offer, there might be some good news on the horizon. In an interview with PC Gamer, it looks like WoW Classic's next phase could be coming sooner than we thought.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Game Direction Ion Hazzikostas revealed that the next phase of WoW Classic can be expected to hit this year. Classic's content plans is to roll out updates in waves, or phases, but when the first one was to hit wasn't really known, until now.
"I think it's a matter of later this year, I think we can say definitively," Hazzikostas told [PC Gamer]. "Within that timeframe? It's going to depend on a few factors."
As far as when WoW Classic's next phase will hit is all about how the team can tackle it's largest issue: layering. Layering is how Blizzard was able to accommodate massive amounts of players on day one. It essentially layered players onto different versions of the game server, making it so the population was spread out and not one area was horribly over congested. However, it seems its this system that could cause the most issues when implementing phase 2 of World of Warcraft: Classic's roadmap.
"Without layering, we simply would not have been able to accommodate anywhere close to the number of players we have on our servers," Hazzikostas explained. "And with some of the natural attrition that we've seen, we would've had a number of servers right now that are underpopulated. Instead we had servers that were, due to layering, effectively massively overpopulated even with login queues, during the first couple of weeks, that have now stabilized at large, healthy populations that can endure for the months and years to come."
Thankfully, moving away from layering is only a few weeks out, according to Hazzikostas. So players can expect to start storming the new bosses and Dire Maul Dungeon sooner rather than later in Classic.
