Its not that the tech to solve the massive queues doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Its call connected realms. Its called cross-realm play. Its called phasing. Its called Shardding. Blizzard faced these same problems 10 years ago, and fixed them with the tech that’s still on retail today.
The fact is that the classic community has made it very clear that they reject this approach. They want old school realms. These queue problems come with the territory. You can’t realistically have one without the other.
To the people who are asking to “just add more capacity and more layers”, how does letting another 100,000 people into your server help with building a realm community? The entire point of having old school realms was to foster a sense of community by keeping the realm populations small enough that you recognized people and could build a reputation. Increase the population of your realm that much and in essence, you have the same thing as a retail realm.
We need to decide as a community if we want true old school realms and are willing to deal with the queues, or if we want to embrace modern load-handling things like connected-realms, phasing, shardding, etc and have low queue times.
THAT BEING SAID…
Blizzard is also not helping by being so stingy with free realm transfers. Greed is contributing to this problem. Blizzard could easily just open up free transfers to all players and let the community sort itself out for the next couple months.
Blizzard could easily offer a 1 year free transfer-back if you transfer off of a mega server. This would give players the confidence to transfer off, knowing that in 6 months they can go back when the population dies down, if they don’t like their new home.
Blizzard keeps saying “Trust us, transferring to a new server will be fine! You’ll have just as much fun there!” OK. Put your money where your mouth is and give us the free transfer-back. If we love it so much on our new server, we won’t use it anyway.
As far as I can tell, its simple greed and the desire to sell transfers that is preventing this from happening. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that every blue post dances around this part of the issue.
Its also just bad business sense. Right now blizzard has lighting in a bottle with the launch of Wrath Classic. This moment will never happen again. They have millions of players interested in coming back to WoW, and they are squandering it by delivery a terrible user experience. And for what? The hope that they might sell a few more server transfers?
Capitalize on this moment. Give players what they need to play, and you will hook way more into long term subs. See the sunk cost of server transfers sales as an investment in long term gains and good PR. A player who pays $15 a month and gets free transfers is more valuable than a player who quits in frustration.
Blizzard, you are losing control of the narrative again, and the community is turning on you. Make good, change the narrative back to a positive one and make the launch of WotLK a celebration not another moment of embarrassment.