Let me preface by explaining my situation as a player, and move more into detail as I go. I will post a TL:DR at the end so you can simply scroll down, but I would appreciate players reading through it, as this is an important and potentially deciding factor of Classic WoW’s future and longevity.
** HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED TO ME **: After one too many long shifts at work, I came back to a ‘‘once again’’ long queue for Herod, the queues didn’t bother me too much and were expected, I knew exactly what I was in for the moment I picked Herod. But in a moment of weakness, of REALLY wanting to play World of Warcraft on a Thursday night, I cave in, and transferred to the only servers they allowed me, Earthfury; now at first I was relieved, I could finally grind the night away, except, I couldn’t even form a group for Wailing Caverns or BFD, I couldn’t see anyone in Barrens chat, I was alone in the Crossroad Inn, this sucked, a lot.
As most of you may know, Classic WoW developper’s severely missed the mark in terms of server load. It’s hard to blame them, too many servers leads to much bigger problems in the long run, and this is exactly why i’m exploring this topic right now.
Server transferring off during queues was a good initiative on Blizzard’s part, however the way they did it is abysmal. Blizzard took the absolute worst route, and created an excessive amount of new servers too fast, leading to several dead realms already.
This is my suggestion to what COULD have been: Offer transfers to a handful of medium pop servers of the same category, once those medium pop servers become full, you THEN create new servers to transfer people off said servers, until they stop filling up. This would have created a nice trickle down effect, allowing people to transfer off to reasonably healthy servers, instead of 5 dead server which has no chance of ever filling up.
As far as my main goes, I have no intention of keeping up with it, the empty feeling I get from Earthfury crushes my will to go on leveling, especially if there are no plans of implementing paid transfers in the future.
The joy I get from WoW has always been socializing and creating a sense of community first, and one bad mistake sponsored by Blizzard’s bad option making has ruined a character for me. I will be making a new character on a high pop server again and laugh at this mistake in the end, but the fact that this is made possible really begs the question of why that was an option to begin with.
** TL;DR ** : The server transfer alternative was really bad, as it transfers you to excess servers with merely 2% capacity, I made the mistake of caving in to queues, and subsequently got frustrated that those servers remained as dead as they are. If you are reading this, do not transfer to these realms, at least not Earthfury, as it is too empty to be enjoyable and viable.
The point of this thread is first see if I’m not the only one in this boat, and talk about alternatives to this, because as far as servers go this is probably the worst string of decisions I have seen by Blizzard, and the poorest management of the initial damage.
This is by all means an opinion piece, make your own conclusions.
Edits: spelling.