Cross realm battlegrounds, 10k server population and loot trading didn’t belong either, but you’re not complaining about that. Don’t be so one sided. A lot has changed in 15 years. The availability of information combined with the popularity of WoW has made this a totally different experience. No layering is causing problems. Wouldn’t a single layer on a server while they are figuring out how to fix this ease the pain? No one wants to pay 15 dollars a month to sit in a que. No one wants to take the last 6 months of relationships and just throw them away to server transfer. The classic #nochange community is just as blind and frustrating at the live min/max community.
Queues on whitemane started before covid
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Boy, everyday it’s the queues are too long. Why do people keep making posts about them. If Blizzard is going to do something they will do something. Why waste a post that will have no effect on the queues?
Better yet, keep to one layer but increase server capacity.
I don’t care that SW and Org are laggy, I’ll go out into the world.
I don’t care that 10 bots are on a node, I rather not have a queue destroy my guilds ability to raid Tuesday nights.
You’re free to scroll along and read other posts if you find these posts upsetting.
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Blizzard released too few servers on launch, which caused people to over congregate on realms. They were slow to release new realms, and failed to offer transfers from existing High/Full population realms to a variety of lower population realms until the official forum for their game was literally a raging dumpster fire of people complaining about having to sit in 2-3+ hour queues to even login to play on their character.
When Blizzard finally did address the situation, they were unprofessional and slow in doing so. Initially, they indicated that layering was an option, but they were also exploring ‘other fixes’ (Which turned out to just be turning on free transfers to other realms).
After they mulled it over for awhile internally, they switched on free transfers to existing server communities (some of which were perfectly healthy) and didn’t implement any sort of faction queue for transfers to those servers.
This was unconscionably sloppy and actually punished players who had deliberately re-rolled previously or paid to transfer to lower population servers months ago. Blizzard allowed large chunks of transfer players from other servers onto existing server communities totally changing the atmosphere and environment on those servers. Players on existing server communities expressed concern that faction queues and a hard population cap weren’t been used in this ‘fix’ and Blizzard basically ignored those concerns because it would have involved more work for them.
This was a bad move because the entire community had seen first hand what happens when paid transfers with no faction queue are permitted to a server people deem to be an attractive community to join. Even when the barrier to entry is higher, large masses of people will flock to a server that’s deemed ‘healthy’ or ‘popular’ overpopulating the server and tanking the faction balance.
This wasn’t a ‘maybe it could happen if we turn on free transfers’ - it was all but a certainty. A reasonable course of action would have been to turn on transfers that hard capped out at a certain # based on a servers’ existing population while utilizing a faction queue to keep the faction ratio(s) on different servers within a % range (say 20-30% for example).
The #nochanges people are extremely delusional.
Classic WoW doesn’t have progressive talent changes. Classic WoW doesn’t have progressive PvE content patches tuning the difficulty of the actual content beyond gates that just stagger a release of the content. Classic WoW doesn’t have progressive itemization. It has little semblance to Vanilla for all of those reasons, and also because the game has been ‘figured out’.
The inability of Blizzard to react in a meaningful and timely manner to service their community is a reflection of how far this company has deteriorated over the years. The Blizzard I knew years ago was never this grossly out of touch with what was going on in their own games, and appeared to care deeply about their players having a positive experience. It was a large part of what drove me to purchase multiple titles and play Blizzard games over games from any other publisher.
WoW Classic’s release and ‘maintenance’ handling has been abysmal. I have no intention of playing ‘Shadowlands’ ever - no matter what. I was considering playing TBC when it comes out, but may not even bother because the company cares so little about it’s own IPs.
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I find them fun to read. Just weird people cry about these things.
Its not really weird at all, given the actual whitemane queue times exceeded 4 hours last night in a game people pay to play.
Re-introducing layering isn’t the answer; but people shouldn’t be required to pay to transfer either.
If free transfers remain an option, and queues continue to be a problem, I don’t doubt that individuals and guilds, who initially chose to stick it out, won’t soon begin to reconsider their decision to stay if their servers have 4 hour queues.
That should be your ultimatum imho.
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Great so we can pick a server with half the population that is skewed and has people transferring off within weeks of getting there. That’s what happened to the people who went to Smolderweb. That was the best option given to Whitemane and it didnt work.
This is one of the best posts I’ve seen on the forum for a long long time.
Transfer options need to be faction specific, and maybe they should even consider consolidating some of the lower pop servers.
I’m certain realm population can be better managed without resorting to permanent layering.
Yes we would like better options. No one is arguing against better server management and working to improve those options. What we want is a fix short term as well so we can play the game.
I’m involved in my guilds leadership on Whitemane. We considered transferring. The guilds that did transfer had a horrible experience.
For us to consider it again would involve coordinating moving 150 plus active players another 30 casual or temporarily inactive players 2 dozen guild bank toons with thousands of mail items requiring creating and transferring dozens of more toons all in the course of a day or two.
We came up with a plan to do all of that because we have experienced leadership with military, IT and logistics expertise. The vast majority of guilds that would attempt that would disintegrate. We expected a 20 to 33% loss of characters that would drop us from 3 full raid teams to maybe two with a limited or non existent player base to market ourselves to for the remainder of Classic to fill holes going through AQ and Naxx.
If you are a serious leader making a call that will impact the lives and plans of 100+ people, their families and work arrangements that extend forward at least 6 months to a year and do not understand the ramifications and project out the results based on the last years worth of data then you’re an awful leader.
The data from the past year shows that layering while less than ideal is better and has a better experience than 4+ hour queues or blowing up the efforts of hundreds of people stretching back over a year with high likelihood of failure.
Is it the best solution for the long term? Probably not. Is it the best short term solution that we know Blizzard can enact today and alleviate some problems? Yes!
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They need to do a few things to help the player base re-organize itself across servers.
1.) They need to sit down and decide what the ideal server population is for a WoW server in Classic. This sort of question ought to have pinned down before any of the Classic WoW servers went live. It’s going to be messier to do it now, but they need to bite the pillow and establish a realistic answer to that question now.
Is the hard cap number roughly 2000-3000 players? Is it 3000-4000 players?
Is the number any higher than that? Blizzard needs to decide, and should base that decision on what realm population can reasonable be supported. If they intend to have a few ‘mega servers’ that are abnormally larger, they need to address the spawn times and spawn dynamics on those servers to support the player base on those servers more reasonably so that the ratio of players to resources isn’t so poor.
When I say ‘hard cap’ what I mean is "If somebody wants to transfer to a realm, the game looks at how many player accounts exist on that realm, and if there are already X Number of player accounts on that realm, the game does not allow a transfer to that realm. That doesn’t mean the server will prevent existing accounts on that server to create new characters *ie. Alts, or re-roll characters.
2.) They need to look at existing servers, and come up with many servers (not only 2-4 random ones they picked out of a hat) which are acceptable transfer servers.
3.) They need to implement faction queues. This means that if a realm is 60% Alliance, and 40% Horde, you cannot transfer to that realm if you are an Alliance player. **Part of rolling out a faction que change involves making a determination about what the acceptable faction ratio disparity on a server can be. Is a 20% disparity the threshold, or is it 25%-30% or 40%?
The reason this answer needs to be pinned down is - there may be more Horde than Alliance on PvP servers, and you are almost assuredly not going to be able to reach 50/50 on most realms. That doesn’t mean you can’t smooth out the faction ratio on realms by creating a server rule that indicates the faction populations cannot differ by more than a 20/30/40% disparity.
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Shortcuts make long delays.
If we give you a crutch solution to the problem using layers, people will never utilize the transfer option because the game will be playable in a fragmented state.
An ultimatum implies you’re going to have to make a difficult decision between either continuing to circumvent a substantial problem that’s preventing you from enjoying the game, or otherwise resolve that issue on an individual/group basis.
There can’t be a short-term solution, because that allows players to delay making the decision the developers need them to make in order to resolve the problem.
The best answer to the issue is to provide the option for free transfer services for the most severely impacted realms asap, and to regulate the availability of those transfers upon the basis of faction to promote healthier faction balance on those servers and their intended destination servers.
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That’s easy to say when the options they’ve given all do not work. We know that they aren’t working. The ultimatum might work but for the people that don’t want layers on Westfall aren’t the impacted players on Whitemane. Every single server we were offered is in worse condition than the server you are on.
Your solution of “too bad mega server and transfer” ignores the other huge negative impact to our players and community both short and long term without Blizzard doing real server and transfer management. We have seen throughout Classic that Blizzard has not done this. So we are advocating for a solution they will implement that we know works.
Im inclined to agree with you for the most part, but my server never had queues until covid.
I’d love a free transfer but i have no guarantee that any server i transfer to will not go into queues.
layers solve everything. they should keep layers on until covid stuff dies down more imo.
None of what you said makes any sense or pertains to what I said.
btw if you think Classic is anything but easy, then idk what to say
The population only seems to be growing, why they don’t just make new servers is beyond me.
Why would people go there new servers that have no economy no player base anything they messedd up by having a small amount of severs on launch and then think people are gonna transfer off when they are 60 and clearing content