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from the most high-population realms

Not just ‘full’ realms.

your ‘high’ realms still have a real chance of achieving a queue during their peak hours, like a friday night. They’re trying to eliminate queues altogether.

This is not how layering works.

You just said this though.

I’m sure it will come but Activision wants paid transfers.

Huh? Ya, my point is that my server should not be on this list lol.
Diluting healthy population realms for the betterment of these mistake extra realms helps no one in the end.

A deadline helps move them along?

They need to end transfers before or right when the destination realm fills up.

If they leave transfers open after a destination server fills up and then announce a deadline, there might be a mad rush causing the realm to become too full.

If your realm is on the list, according to blizzards numbers, it’s not healthy.

I don’t know what population level they’re going for, but I’m certain they’re about to decrease the concurrent amount of players per server a bit. They’re preparing for a one-layer server, and if your server has too many active players for that, it’s on the list.

Well lets hope you are wrong then, because in all likelihood this will damage many of the realms severely as their growth has halted.
There is no reason a realm that almost never reaches a queue should have encouraged vacancy and certainly not this early.
If there were issues with queues AFTER those changes happened, I would understand.

But as it stands right now, we don’t know anything specific about this topic, so I can see no reason to be satisfied with it.

I really think you are overthinking the amount of people that are transferring. The servers that are already medium/high population have an enormous amount of players on them. High population servers are probably on this list because of what will happen when layering is removed. It seems more like an attempt to try to mitigate the problems that will happen with so many people on these servers come phase 2.

Just because you log on every day and don’t have a queue, doesn’t mean that your server isn’t close to that “full” point, or close to the point where phase 2 could potentially cause big issues with server stability.

Also find it pretty strange for someone as an “MVP” to say that they hope no one transfers to these new servers. People are in different situations and have different goals/time/energy to put towards the game, it’s a really selfish comment to make. Blizzard is clearly trying to provide as many healthy servers as possible, and anyone sitting on the sidelines without knowing all the details should take into consideration how difficult of a task it can be given the nature of this game.

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A realm reduced to one layer is probably going to have a population concurrency in the range of 3-5k. I am pulling that number out of my butt based on previous dev comments about Vanilla servers having pops around 3k, and Classic aiming for Vanilla sized realms.

If you are on a high pop realm, they are probably letting in somewhere between 9-15k players concurrently with layers. Once the layers go away, your “healthy, high pop realm” will likely have 10k queues every evening. That is why they are encouraging players on realms that don’t have queues to transfer off.

Earthfury is still dead and people aren’t moving there because they have too many restrictions about who can transfer where. Open it up so all high pop servers can transfer there if you really want people to move. Too many friends and guilds are scattered across multiple realms and until they can guarantee all moving their characters together on a low population server, you won’t get many people moving.

Well, I probably AM overthinking the amount of people that are transferring, because I have seen time’s disastrous effects on servers over the years and that is my biggest concern with Classic’s future.

I will not be leveling a second paladin. I am making memories and friends on this server now, and if it ever comes to pass that this server can not support those any further, I will likely just stop playing Classic.
But they said they are considering transfers, so I suppose that might help in the long run.

Either way, I think YOU and many others are equally overthinking this “phase 2” stuff.

Until it happens, there is no reason to be reacting like this.
We have already seen how server populations and enthusiasm decays over time, especially in a product that charges monthly, so even if I am over reacting, there is some historical precedent.

We have never experienced tech like this being implemented then removed, so we have no idea what will happen.

For all I know, it might actually make the server better! Because right now, activity levels are extremely low in the 50+ range.

Either way, don’t twist my words. I am saying, that if you want to play classic for years to come, you do not want to be transferring to these realms.
They will undoubtedly have issues, as all realms will eventually, but much much sooner.

I do not believe Blizzard is trying to provide as many healthy servers as possible.
I believe they fear the player base doesn’t want classic enough to deal with extreme population and queue times.

From where I sit, that appears to be the driving motivation here.

And that has been the #1 thing that has concerned me about Classic since the day it was announced.

Diluting the playerbase will result in unsavory situations like realm mergers or paid transfers.
Its inevitable. It might not happen in “phase 2” but it will happen at some point, unless they suddenly start developing some remarkable new content for this version of the game.

Nope, layers are each a capped vanilla realm worth of people at maximum. When they go down to one layer it will be one vanilla server worth of people which is 3k at max. They have never indicated they would let more people in concurrently than they did at the time, the game breaks when you go over that number.

I don’t think anyone is overthinking phase 2. If you have any experience on a PvP server and have firsthand seen the way world PvP works without BG’s, you will understand why Phase 2 is such a concern. The fact that Blizzard intends to focus so much on removing layering in Phase 2 proves that point even more.

And yes, historically server population and the drive of players declines. Which is also clearly part of the reason that they are trying to populate the lower servers at the moment.

Twisting your words was not what I did either, you literally said you hope no one transfers to these servers. If you support this game and community and hope to see it thrive for the next couple years, you should be on board with hoping things work out for all players on any server. Saying something like that just deters people away even more from moving to these servers, and it’s based on your own selfish thoughts because you feel like it could be detrimental to the server ‘you’ are on. Keep in mind that it isn’t just 1 server going to 1 destination, but multiple servers.

I don’t see how you could claim that having a full list of healthy servers isn’t in Blizzards best interest. This is a pay to play game by the way. Seems like it would be quite the waste of the last 2 years to get this launched only to not care about whether it succeeds or not.

IKR at the worst in Mankrik I’ve seen is maybe a queue of 500 people and that goes by in like 10 to 15 mins.

You are by default overthinking it, because it hasn’t happened yet.
Anyway, I have said all I can here.

I would recommend Blizzard stops making new servers and find better ways to contain the current servers for years to come. Making new servers is thinking only about today, not next year and in direct contradiction to what many of us what - a server population we can see develop with rich nuance, including ninja looters, trolls, hard core, and every thing in between.

I would also recommend players do not go to those new servers unless they are only interested in playing there temporarily, because sooner rather than later they will not support a diverse population and you will be forced to either level new characters or pay to move yours.

These are my “selfish thoughts” as much as what you posted are yours.
Just giving my opinion.

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Ya, I saw 385 on Labor day, took 17 minutes.
No queue since, and in the afternoons its medium.

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Its only High Pop on prime time and weekend, until then medium :slight_smile:
Just the way I like it…

Can this character migration have limits placed in, specifically, if a source server is highly populated on 1 faction but not on the other faction, to limit the migrations from the source server to be only for the highly populated faction?

Come to Heartseeker its Nice

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