Why are there so few of each kind of realm in WoW Season of Discovery?

If you have logged into WoW Classic to play Season of Discovery, you may have noticed something a little odd about the number of available servers. There appears to be only one of each for every region instead of the plethora of realms in normal WoW or WoW Classic.

Fewer servers in WoW Season of Discovery reasons

While it may seem an odd choice when Season of Discovery realms are crammed full of players, it will make a lot more sense later on in Season's lifespan. To make this make sense, let's take a look at the stats from the original World of Warcraft Classic, which dropped back in 2019.

WoW Classic's population changes

When WoW Classic first became available, there were approximately four to five million players. That count is now closer to 1.8 million. With the loss of players over time, some servers slowly began to die. As more people lost interest in it and left, it would leave gaps in Guild rosters, forcing those looking to excel in the content to find other Guilds, many times on bigger servers. The more good players that left in search of a bigger server, smaller servers began to lose players, meaning Guilds no longer had enough members to continue to function.

Related: How to complete the Relics of the Light Quest in WoW Season of Discovery

This caused Blizzard to shut down a large amount of Classic servers in 2022, combining them all into bigger realms and condensing the populations. This allowed the economies, Guilds, and player base to thrive rather than slowly whither away, forcing players to either pay real money for a server transfer or leave the game entirely.

Season of Discovery server layers

This brings us to the launch of WoW Season of Discovery. Instead of forcing the player base into a whole bunch of servers, Blizzard chose instead to launch one single PvE, a couple of PvP, one RP, and two RP PvP servers. To keep lag at a minimum in the massive servers, Blizzard implemented a layer system.

In individual layers, there are player toons and NPCs, separate from other layers. These can be condensed together when the player count is low, like it is late at night, or broadened to include more layers during prime time. This allows everyone to be on the same server but without too much lag, as your computer only has to load the NPCs and players on your layer.

Problems with server layers in WoW SoD launch

The low realm count and layer system will be a massive benefit for anyone planning to play SoD for a long time. However, it did cause some issues on day 1. As millions of people flooded the servers worldwide, it became obvious that there were not enough layers for everyone loading into the same starting zones. There were moments when it was nearly impossible to see, much less interact with, any NPC; it even caused a weird lag glitch where quests couldn't be turned in because the NPCs all had the wrong text assigned to them. Some of the spawn spots got incredibly packed, even with super fast respawn counters. At one point, my server stopped allowing people to make new characters until some of left the starting zone.

Related: How to get the Aegis Rune in WoW Season of Discovery (Map)

As the game continues to grow, however, this will become less and less of an issue as characters disperse throughout the map, people make new characters, and fewer people are all in one place. And we'll all begin to see the benefits as player counts naturally drop away, leaving a healthy, massive server where everyone can join a Guild without worrying about paying money for a server transfer. This is great news for Classic fans, as it means that Blizzard is invested in SoD for the long haul.

For more WoW Season of Discovery, check out How to get the Molten Blast rune in WoW Season of Discovery on Pro Game Guides.