are there any other solutions being developed for the long queue times aside from asking people to abandon the names and communities they created during the name reservation event?
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Imagine being locked out of being able to play with all your friends, with no warning
That would be a terrible solution. They should have started with more servers though
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#KICKTHESTREAMERS
#NOCHANGES
haha well done Blizz, thank you.
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I understand the frustration: Anticipating and planning around jumping back into this world we’ve all missed, only to be stuck in a long queue, is not the experience we want anyone to have.
But from the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritize the long-term health of our realm communities, recognizing that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours. But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible.
Thus, we took the path of launching with few enough realms to still thrive in the event that our most conservative estimates ended up proving accurate, while having enough servers ready to activate at a moment’s notice if needed. And clearly they were, and are, needed.
We’ve released over 20 new realms worldwide so far since launch, and we’ll be up around the clock continuing to do so until everyone who wants to experience Classic is able to. But even still, as we bring new realms online in a given region, we wait for them to fill before opening new ones, because we want to make sure that each and every realm has a healthy population in the long term.
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Is it possible to get better notification to move beforehand on new servers? Like announcements saying “Server XYZ is at % capacity. Please consider moving?”
Herod was already Full when the first round of new servers came out.
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are you adding these servers to accommodate the initial high demand (as a way of lowering queue times) or are you adding these servers because you all are actually projecting a healthy population size (long term) for each server you add? Only going on filling a server up doesn’t equal healthy server population (retail kids passing through could easily saturate a single server for instance).
Are adding new servers the only solution space you’re working in for addressing queue sizes?
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Recognising if you undershot you could move quickly? I would say not quickly enough in terms of OCE servers.
By not having at minimum 4 or 5 OCE servers from the onset you bottle necked us into queues of 9 - 10 hours. And once we were disconnected due to server outages we are again forced to endure another 8hour queue. How is that reasonable?
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The problem is the longer you left it the more people planned. Entire guilds started shifting and now won’t move because theres 30-50 people who know each other moving to the same server. I’m posting from EU, I’ve been in queue for 2 hours and I’m not even halfway through the queue on my server. I can’t move because everyone I know is playing there. What’s the proposed solution for that beyond playing on my own?
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I think yall need to hire the old team back lol
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Stagger people.
There is still competition for mob tagging in starting areas.
If you leave the login servers wide open it will start causing world server crashes.
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Thanks for the clarification on the subject, Watcher, that makes sense. Don’t mind some of the posts. It’s like lashing out at the agent at a call center like its their fault your AT&T plan isn’t active on your brand new phone yet.
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Community: More servers are needed!
Blizzard: You think we do, but we don’t!
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Not like this at all, actually.
It’s more along the lines of knowing there is a high demand, having the ability to meet it but choosing not to.
Basically Nintendo. But Nintendo does this to create a buzz as they do this all the time whereas Blizzard just doesn’t pay attention to their own community as is well documented.
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I knew you guys would have a solid plan on servers and I’m happy I got to at least play for a little bit last night when so many didn’t. Do you expect the disconnects to lessen as the population in servers spreads out and will you give us some protection from the queue if we do get disconnected?
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That’s happening here in the US too bro I feel for you. Tough when a guild isn’t all in game together and those of you left out will never catch up.
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But is Watcher to blame? They’re probably not in charge of making those calls. I mean, if the team was wanting to push more servers and Watcher vetoed the idea, then, yeah, that’s their fault. But I think it’s safe to assume the big wigs aren’t scanning the forums at 3 am PST to answer basic questions.
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Echoing others, so we now have guilds and friends seperated and forced to different servers. whats the plan for ensuring that people can play with their friends when you set the expectation of reviving that nostalgia?
Why did you launch with only one OCE PVP server and were not proactive around customer experience on that region like you were with US and EU?
In this day and age you can automate spin up of new instances in AWS (where you host OCE assets). You cant tell me that you dont havent leveraged automation to cut costs and improve scalability like every other modern business which relies on computing resources? You can spin up whole environments in minutes these days on AWS and Azure. Don’t romanticize this by talking about ‘nostalgia’ - the fact of the matter is that capacity management is always a question between financials and customer experience - the difference between how you handled US and OCE with proactive additions of assets was extremely telling in this regard.
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Oh sure, let me just ring up Brack real quick or Ion.
Do you see them here?
Better question: Do you understand how representatives work or why they are used? They are used so you don’t bother the higher ups who make these decisions.
These are the folks you air your grievances with.
That’s why they are here. That’s why they have call centers, per your example.
How is this news?
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Disappointing. I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume Watcher is not taking notes on any of these greivances. The guy probably is just here to clear up any misinformation or reasonable questions. I doubt they’re taking notes like some kind of suggestion box.
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But this is obviously not what is happening. People are creating characters and filling up these new servers, but how many are going to stay there long term? Lots of communities targeted a specific server pre-launch. If these new servers had been named and available during the name reservation period, maybe they would have a chance long term. But now? I assume they are being used to set up UIs or to mess around on until the original servers loosen up.
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