Obviously Blizzard could have stopped the massive influx of populations on the mega servers long ago. Why didn’t they stop the problem? Because of corporate greed, plain and simple.
What needs to happen is Blizzard needs to chop the server in half. You can’t request people to self select to transfer off, they simply won’t do it (can’t blame them). You literally need to force the issue and just chop the server in half and put people on a new realm. Each sever then having 15k players. New guilds will be formed on the new server, people will figure all that sort of thing out. Yes there may be a little initial grumbling, but in a few weeks people will be a LOT happier (on both servers) as they don’t have to endure the 5-10k queue times. A server with 15k people is still MASSIVE by any measure, and would make everyone happier in the long run.
No, layers only fix the spaghetti 17 years old code in game, it doesn’t fix the fact they are using individual servers instead of scalable servers using cloud tech.
The craziest part to me is Blizzard seeing the Firemaw EU situation play out and then after that seeing Blizzard offer PVE to PVP server transfers when they really should have figured out how bad of an idea this was.
People doing things like moving from Pagle to Benediction absolutely 100% added to the problem we’re seeing today. I called it this happening too, immediately, as did others. It makes no sense to me that Blizzard couldn’t foresee it.
People have been talking about the Classic server issues for a while, it always seems too little too late with “solutions”.
I blame both the players and Blizzard for all of this personally.
Edit: I do not think your solution of splitting up everyone including guilds is a good one, people would absolutely quit the game over it and possibly in mass. You may not have any connections that you want to retain but others do. Real-life friends and relatives even would be split up. That suggestion would lead to a disaster.
Otherwise, I do agree that the server issues have been a problem for a while though.
I don’t know what role members of the WoW Community Council play and I know it isn’t up to you, but if your voice is elevated within the community it feels worth mentioning this.
For what its worth, opening transfers to servers that are severely underpopulated is not an appealing solution to many.
Many people chose to transfer away from these situations because at the core of it all, people just want to play the game. This ultimately means they need people to play with and, a situation that isn’t so slanted in their favor that instead of queues they get corpse camped and rez timers.
People flocked to mega servers because it was the only guarantee to play when they wanted without being on an underpopulated server or, getting ganked non-stop on a severely lopsided server.
When it costs $25 to transfer servers, who wants to spend that x multiple toons just to risk being someplace that may be as bad or worse than where you came from?
While admittedly some people do want to play on mega servers, many people also don’t. Those that don’t either felt they didn’t have a choice or the choice they initially made played out differently than intended.
Either way, at this point the likely best solution is to lock transfer-In to mega servers and open up transfer out to anywhere that players can.
I know this is a super unpopular opinion… But blizzard needs to allow cross realm play in wrath. I am stuck on Grobbulus, my friends are all on Whitemane, I literally cant transfer to whitemane to play with my friends… and I’m not going to give up all my unobtainable items like tabards etc. to also then level a level 1 to 70 in 1 week… its ridiculous
Can we mention how this issue was manufactured in part because when Blizzard closed all the dead/dying servers, those players were ALL redirected to the same servers (i.e all the dead PvE server players were sent to Sulfuras) in addition to the free xfer options from PvP to PvE.