How to remotely queue for WoW Classic while you work

We're now a couple of days out from the launch of World of Warcraft Classic, and unfortunately, the insanely long queue times don't seem to be getting any better. Players are facing 6+ hour queue times just to get into some of the more popular WoW Classic realms, and though Blizzard has added more servers in the time since launch, it doesn't seem to be helping the problem much.

Until Blizzard figures out a permanent solution to this problem, we're all stuck dealing with these queues. For many of us who have jobs and can't play the game all day like we did 15 years ago, these wait times become even more of an issue, as spending the day at work and then another 5, 6, or 7 hours waiting in queue leaves very little time to play, if it leaves any at all.

Thankfully, there's a way around this sad reality, as you can access your PC and queue up for WoW Classic remotely. If you have a smartphone and you use Chrome as your web browser, one of the easiest ways to do that is to use the Chrome Remote Desktop extension. It isn't the most elegant way to gain remote access to your PC, but it's easy to set up and it works well enough for the purposes of sitting in a WoW Classic queue.

How to set up Chrome Remote Desktop

To get started, you need to head to remotedesktop.google.com – the app that's listed in the Chrome Web Store is actually depreciated these days, so we'll grab the extension from the website instead. Download and install the app, then when that's done, click the Chrome Remote Desktop icon that's appeared in the upper right corner of your browser, right next to all of your other extension icons.

When you do that, you'll be taken back to the Chrome Remote Desktop website. Select "Remote Access" from the top and then click the "Turn On" button. You'll be asked to name your PC and then create a PIN. When you've done that, download the Chrome Remote Desktop app from either the Google Play Store [download] or the iOS App Store [download], open it, and select your computer (which will appear automatically after you log into your Google account) to gain remote access to it using the PIN you created during setup.

Once you're in, you simply need to open the Battle.net launcher, boot up WoW, and enter the queue for the realm you want to play on. By queuing remotely while you work, you can take a lot of the waiting out of playing WoW Classic, but as with most things, this approach isn't perfect.

What happens if I get in before I'm ready to play?

If you actually make it through the queue while you're still working, you need to ensure that you don't get logged out. You'll need to a little bit a babysitting at this point – while we don't know for sure how long it'll take before you're logged out for inactivity, players on Reddit believe that the AFK timer kicks you back to character select at 30 minutes.

Once you're at the character select screen, you've likely got another 30 minutes before you're kicked from the server entirely and have to re-queue, but again, this isn't something that's been outright confirmed by Blizzard. It's worth noting that the Vanilla WoW Wiki article on Away status corroborates the 30 minute in-game AFK timer and the 30 minute inactivity timer on the character select screen, so it's fairly safe to assume you have that much time.

Regardless of what those timers actually are, you're going to need to perform some kind of action or move around to avoid getting timed out, which isn't very easy when you're remotely accessing your PC using a smartphone. Still, having to do a bit of babysitting every half-hour is probably vastly preferable to waiting until you're home from work to queue up for most players, so it's likely worth the annoyance.

Wrap-Up

The queues WoW Classic players are currently experiencing are excruciatingly long, but you can beat them by remotely queuing using the method above. Hopefully this method of remotely accessing your PC just to wait in a WoW Classic queue won't be necessary much longer, but we're left waiting on Blizzard to make that a reality.