Blizzard knew what they were doing. What they weren’t counting on, was the big hype for a particular server before launch. This caused a huge imbalance. If something doesn’t happen we will have “ghost servers” by phase 2. I believe, Blizzard is giving a heads up before they will have to make an unpopular decision. Blizzard has to make this hard decision for the long term health of the game.
No, Justan is right about how servers work. I have been gaming since 2003 in multiple games and it happens in everyone of them. PvPer’s move to what is or at least what they perceive will be the server that gets them the most/best “fights”. My guild came to WoW late approximately 2 years after launch and we sat at server selection in Vent going over the choices and we only discussed the ones with high pop,. Once we picked one and rolled on it we still kept researching servers and about 2 weeks into the game we switched servers to the one that was considered to have the best WPvP at the time. We sat in queues on both servers, not big ones true but still there and never once thought about moving to a server without one.
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*meager
There - fixed that for you 
Herod, a cool name? Why? It’s a name of evil rulers passed on to sons in rome, some of which murdered children, beheaded others, and the list goes on.
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Yep there’s nothing better than seeing Blizzard eating crow for saying those words because we are now parroting them back to them.
Blizzard, when it comes to estimating just how many players will be coming back for classic you have NO IDEA.
You THINK you do, but you don’t
In the words of Illidan Stormrage…“YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!!!”
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You can say it until you’re blue in the face. Doesn’t make it happen.
Futhermore, Herod is where all of the younger community is going to be. Server pop will be the first to drop by 60 or 70 percent. That’s where the big fall off is coming from. Not people who are going to be bored playing Classic. Classic is way better than retail would ever be.
Why didn’t they limit the account creation to max server population? I said that months ago. They allowed for overloaded servers and got overloaded servers, Murphy’s Law 101.
And yeah blizz, blame the players for having to wait in queues when you allowed the servers to be overloaded in the first place. Definitely NOT the players fault.
I’m not trying to be a jerk about it or proclaim all the other realms as dead, because they will be populated too.
It’s just human nature though, that they migrate over time to the most populated server. It has happened in every single MMORPG ever that had servers. It’s just how it is, unfortunately.
I saw it happen with vanilla wow, tbc wow, wotlk wow, and even retail wow (everyone has flocked to 5 or so realms and there’s 200 dying ones with guilds openly talking about moving to one of the S tier realms)
Hell, even outside of WoW it happens in other games too. Anyone remember how SWTOR had too many servers and the pvp crowd bled over to Fatman over time, making all other PVP servers a ghost town while fatman had queues in the hours?
It will happen again here, the only difference this time is we know pre launch which pvp server is the “alpha” server. It is inevitable in a year or two’s time that Herod will continue to grow as migrants from the other pvp realms eventually move to Herod.
I’m going Herod for the long term security of having a populated realm long term. I have been burned by this 3x in wow, and several times in other games and either have to pay to move or start over entirely (example SWTOR)
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Back when WoW launched, Archimonde was the server that was chosen to represent the PvP community so the competition there would be the best, also because it was the first PvP server alphabetically, so we all rolled there. It was one of several servers that was forcefully taken offline for the entirety of opening weekend so Blizzard could “upgrade” the server to handle the load of players trying to login. This forced the PvP community to spread out to other servers and ended up crippling the original idea of a PvP server chosen as the competitive PvP server to represent the PvP community. Blizzard will 100% do this again. I say ride it out and don’t allow Blizzard to once again dictate which server will house the most competitive players.
I agree that servers should be locked when FULL.
But I can hear from here the cries when people can’t get their friends and late comer guild members onto the server they had previously staked out.
But at least then the fault would clearly lie with the groups that didn’t coordinate better with their groups. Now we have people who just assume the people who grabbed names early will be joined by the people who decided not to sub until game go live.
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Yeah, because 1 person is more important than the other 20k people. If he’s that important of an asset, he and his friends can go to a different server.
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that is a poor idea, despite the noble intentions, because all it would do is lead to bitter unhappy customers who /unsub and /uninstall.
If i had friends, who have never played wow, come in and be told “realm full, roll another” they’ll just refuse payment to blizz for the month, get a full refund, and /uninstall and never come back.
It’s horrible business, and blizz would never consider that.
The only games who do that are games like AION, which spoiler alert; they LOST more players over that decision than they gained.
Hundreds of players walked away from AION over being forced away from the good realm, into a new low pop realm.
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Man I am not arguing with you. In fact, I bet this week Blizzard will change the policy. It would only make the early arriving group members leave their original realm an go to a new one that has room for everybody.
you see, read Justin’s reply above. Blizzard can’t win.
Players are gonna play. If you uninstall and stop sub over something as trivial, you would do the same over other things as trivial, of which there are numerous. Layering took out more people than “no queue time ever” would ever take out.
Being told you can’t play with your friends/guildies on THE realm of choice is not a trivial thing.
It is business suicide. They’d LOSE more customers than they’d gain with that strategy.
I wish i had a better solution because they’ve set themselves up really poorly here. They should have added 2 extra servers from the get go, or offer better incentive other than “run away from queue times”
Layering is a brilliant addition for launch and the people whining about it need to catch up with 2019. The realms are ALREADY holding more than vanilla so that ‘authenticity’ is already gone, so adding new layers for launch is not only inevitable… it’s the right decision if need be.
The only other options would be to offer an INCENTIVE to transfer your main (including having preference on that name on the new server) such as a free mount in retail, or free month of play game.
Blizz really did this to themselves by capping characters at 3 (a lot of people won’t leave their names behind, that’s just reality) and not trusting in the product enough to offer 5 pvp realms like the community begged for.
It is too late now, Herod is THE pvp realm to be on.
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No, Being able to play when you have time is an incentive, and only the pro. No one told them they can’t play together, only that the realm is at maximum capacity and more accounts/toons cannot create there. They can play somewhere else. Don’t build a strawman to tear down, that is poor form.
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I think a lot of people are severely underestimating just how long a 10k+ queue could actually be.
Remember, as shown on this very thread, a queue of 3.5k resulted in an estimated almost two hour wait in WoD.
If it’s proportional, a 10k queue gives us a 5-6 hour queue, and blizzard is saying it could be longer than that.
I don’t see that many people willing to endure that daily.
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We can agree to disagree, but IMHO it isn’t trivial.
I have 3 IRL friends all in on classic who have NEVER touched retail; if they had to be told they can’t play on Herod because of blizzard’s arbitrary decision (not because the queue time was too long) they’d honestly just /unsub, get a refund, and go back to other games they were playing.
Those are 3 customers lost for life other blizz bullying them away from our selected realm.
NO SUCCESSFUL MMORPG has ever done this.
Go back and read the forums for AION when they did this; they honestly lost hundreds of new players and lost hundreds of current players who quit because they couldn’t play with friends.
Again, i understand the noble intention behind it and on some level i understand… but that’s HORRENDOUS business decisions. Having to wait in a 5 hour queue would be better than blizz literally saying “NO ONE ELSE ON HEROD UNTIL WE SAY SO”
that’s just never gonna happen, nor should it.
Blizz needs to solve this with incentives, not punishments. You attract more flies with honey, after all.
Offer free character transfers WITH a guarantee you have that name you want on that server, and offer a free month of game time if you main on that particular realm.
Sometimes in life you have to weigh pros and cons to determine the better decision. Overloading a server giving hour long queues or limiting servers to capacity and never have a queue. Sure some trade-offs have to be made, but I know which I would prefer. It’s a no-brainer for me.
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Final Fantasy 14 ( A Realm Reborn) has it as a common practice to add restrictions or lock servers that are congested/preferred servers. Individuals adept when faced with new rule sets. If you truly want to be with friends, you will find different paths to make it happen. Why can’t there be more then 1 popular PVP realm?
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