Ever heard of the game Lemmings?
If you let the lemmings fall off the edge knowing that they’ll walk that way, the lemmings aren’t at fault for falling off the edge, you are for letting them.
Not much different than Blizzard allowing things to get this bad and letting the players suffer for it.
Blizzard is god here, they are the ones who control the server and have the power to direct players, knowing that players tend to congregate towards the most populous option.
Blizzard is 110% to blame here, not the players who are just playing the game they are given.
Never have they ever. Not anymore.
They primarily make decisions that bring big $$$ for low effort such as opening xfers ONLY between Bene/Faer so the biggest populations will buy faction changes.
I would agree that giving players the freedom to destroy realms is the wrong way to go, but at the end of the day it is a valid way with its own set of pros and cons. And importantly, the OP doesn’t mention anything about Blizzard “letting players” do this. He blames Blizzard entirely, which is incorrect.
lol
I mean, that was the idea behind locking the servers. So they certainly have ever.
Blizzard has almost 20 years of data on players playing habits. They know when we log on, how long we play for, how many people raid, and they damn well know when servers start going off the wheels.
So while I appreciate the absolute freedom for the wow population to kill their own realms ('Murica), yes it is their fault.
Yeah, that’s all true. It doesn’t mean that giving the players freedom is objectively incorrect though. Because technically, the existence of mega realms (horrible as they are) aren’t objectively incorrect either.
This is all just a matter of game design philosophy, and we’re fortunate that they’ve finally come around and decided on the method that actually agrees with WoW’s original design, which is to try and actually promote ideal population distribution.
Rather than asking Blizzard why you have to “pay to fix their mistakes”, maybe continue to ask for MORE steps to be taken to lock giant servers and encourage more of the population to trickle down to smaller realms. Threads like this one are unproductive spam that will never be graced with an acknowledgment.
I’m convinced that the servers were only locked for reasons of not wanting to spend money on coding or infrastructure. It was all just PR using “good words” but in the end was a smoke screen.
I’m pretty disappointed myself, I spent like a year during TBCC trying to urge Blizzard to do something with the servers. They made that big post about “trying to make things better” and I was hoping something would get better but it’s the same old, same old now. Most of the people who used to care have quit so threads like this don’t get much traction. instead, we’re left with a lot of people whose sole focus to play the game is themselves so if it’s not directly related to their own toon and being able to gear that toon they don’t care, which is bad for the game as pure selfishness doesn’t make a good community. Oh well.
I’m assuming you’re aware that a bluepost specifically said that there’s no technology solution to the problem? People have fought back on that relentlessly, but no one has given any actual suggestion as to how the problem might be solved with “better coding” or “more hardware”.
I’m aware of what the blue post said, but that doesn’t mean I need to trust it.
I’ve worked for very big corporations that anyone would know the names from and have been very aware of issues that got “covered up” to the public with flowery PR. “Oh here’s our statement, tell them that” and the statement is full of total lies or more often half truths.
The blue post statements about servers and queues also changed over time. I’m not going to take the time to break it down for sake of the debate but they did. I was truly hopeful that server things were going in a better direction so I even kind of overlooked this myself.
Every time Blizzard talked the blame got put right back on the player base. There was no responsibility shown on Blizzards part. Now, what do we get with all of the requests that come in every day? The most blatant cash grab ever - free transfers from Faerlina to Benediction and back. The one and only excuse for that is trying to get money from faction changes. Pretty much nobody asked for those transfers. it doesn’t fit ANYTHING Blizzard has stated to care about in those server blue posts, instead, it flies in the face of everything said.
I never trusted any of it enough to take transfers for my toons. My toons and the guild I run are sitting on Faerlina and I dealt with the queues and never complained about them. We raided every week even with the queues and people found their way on and I’m sure are now happy we didn’t leave, not that that was ever a solution to us because we didn’t trust that transferring off was a smart idea anyway, and as a leader of my guild the very worst thing I could have suggested would have been to transfer off and I knew it.
Conversely, the OP did transfer because he thought it would be a good solution and he was told to by Blizzard. Now he gets burned and mocked by empathy-free people and Blizzard white knights on these forums when he talks about it. So that’s great for him. Really it’s not, it sucks for him.
The server populations and imbalances are player made issues. Unless you want blizzard to institute hard caps on faction and overall server population, which leads to this same “why can’t I play with my friends on their server” situation we are in now. The other option is they should have just locked servers earlier to maintain balance, then again we get this same situation.
Yes blizzard put out server xfers, they did not force players to take them. Players chose that, most with no regard for balance. There is so much we can legit blame blizzard for, sooooooo much we can put on their shoulders as massive failings. This isn’t it though, this is player choices.
I’m not saying you need to trust it. But I’d like to know specifically why you distrust it. Unless you simply default to distrusting anything a corporation says when they say “This problem can’t be fixed.”
But of course, that’s conspiracy theorist territory. Why, in this situation do you have a problem with their answer?
In what way, broadly speaking? I ask because technology itself changes over time, so that could very well be why.
Have you ever actually seen them say “This is the players’ fault”? Or is it more like, “We let the players choose X, and as a result, Y tends to happen”? One of these things is blaming the players. The other isn’t.
When exactly did they open up free transfers in a way that contradicted what they were saying? I haven’t really followed the news about free transfers, so I haven’t heard about them doing anything suspicious like that.
That’s actually really great. Personally, I felt like the overwhelming majority of people who complained about the queue times and took the transfers were just extremely short-sighted. It was pretty easy to figure that the population spiked to an insane level and it would never stay that way in the long run. I’m always glad to hear it when people “took their lumps” playing on the mega servers and actually accepted the cons of their choices instead of demanding ONLY pros.
The funny thing is that the free transfer realms ended up dying because those very same people are so quick to jump ship.
Blizzard reps rightfully and correctly said that players on giant realms would have to choose between queues during peak times, or playing on realms where it wasn’t a problem.
Blizzard never to my knowledge said anything about the destination realms having a guaranteed comfortable population or that players wouldn’t destroy more servers. I have empathy for the OP, but I can’t possibly have sympathy for someone who made a bad choice and then decides to blame Blizzard for it.
It’s an unfortunate situation to be sure, and you can’t expect everyone to know this stuff, but the utter petulance we see on these forums from people who got burned is insufferable.
Ok but the first thing that happens when Blizzard locks servers is a chorus of whining from the players that they can’t play w friends. That leaves the only option as server community being sacrificed for a tech workaround a La retail.
Honestly, I’m not interested in debating with you more. I said what I wanted to say. You can believe whatever you want to. Maybe at one point, I would have been down to debate all your points but not anymore.
I’m on the thread because I have the OPs back. I will continue to post in threads like this saying similar things because people who get burned don’t get enough support from the general forum population and I’d rather be here to say that some people care and let posters like this know that the entire WoW community isn’t unempathetic, selfish trash (although thankfully in this thread a few more people had the OPs back that doesn’t always happen).
This forum has more and more people who are nasty at the core and that truly is a shame, seeing the good people leave one by one and the nastiest of the nasty stay makes me pretty sad.
I think that at this point the Sulfuras alliance should get free transfers back to Benediction. Not that anything I say matters for anything but that’s my opinion.
Edit: Actually I do want to reply to one thing you said and it’s where you praised me for keeping my guild on Faerlina. Sure that was good on me and my guild for dealing with the queues and not transferring.
It’s good in the same way I don’t reply to the “IRS” phone calls which would lead to them “wanting amazon gift cards from Target”. It’s good I supported my guildies dealing with the queues, in the same way, it’s good I allow my 11-year-old to watch “funny” youtube videos showing scammers having their computers taken over and the like by the caller even though they sometimes include swearing etc because I know it educates him. It’s good the same way I tell my elderly parents to not trust those types of phone calls and to hang up.
Just because I am there for my family and in this case, my “guild family”, doesn’t mean that if someone gets scammed they should be talked down to and told it’s great they lost their money and it’s all their fault, which is pretty much exactly a lot of what happens here. I feel for the people who get scammed even if their missteps caused the issues, I don’t berate them. While it could be argued this isn’t a scam, there’s a close enough resemblance.
the pick a server and then pick a character is backwards in logical thinking. What Blizzard should have done from the very beginning is have us load into a character selection first and than load up a server list to pick from what to play on. let us sign out and go back to the character list to pick the same or maybe a different server to play on…
That would solve all the server imbalance issues go away, but it would also cut into their bottom line of charging money to move your characters around
Your logic path is all over the place, so let me try and help.
When you have a toddler you child proof your cabinets, you keep them away from the stove, and you don’t let them run around by the fireplace so they don’t take a header into the hearth.
Blizzard is in charge of thousands of toddlers and instead of child proofing the realms they’ve laid out a giant table full of sharp objects, opened up all the cabinets & taken the caps off the bottles of 409, and turned the gas stove on high and walked away.
Without any control, every realm becomes lord of the flies and Piggy always dies. Always. If I could pay to child proof the island then great, but instead Blizzard just transferred me to another island where Piggy died yet again.
This is negligence, and they are very much at fault.
Yep. as there is no real answer. its the code base and limits to connections. that is extensive reengineering. that even flagship retail does not get really.
even retail gets this issue on the big boys like A52, tichondrius, illidan on major patch/release days.
BFA and SL they got slammed. DF they had less issues. But DF also blizzard admitted sold less. less people play DF than even SL. pop problems solved by…making boat anchor expacs back to back lol.
Some people gave them 2 chances and said hell no to a 3rd chance basically.
also, yeah, xrealm. this is why I don’t buy team classic’s line. It can be worked around . same as retail worked around it.
you can be on the deadest new player server and not know it. you have 75% functionality of wow and life is good. that last 25% is mythic raid. which is another matter really.
LFD, xrealm.
LFG, except for mythic raid, xrealm
PVP, xrealm
now being nice 10000 new players if picked up today do not have to be on THE hotspot server. they don’t need to be on A52 to function.
X realm gets them the (non mythic) raid, mythic Dungeon and pvp.
from any server in the game.
those wanting actual competitive mythic raid…yeah, they’d research that ahead of time.
All they care about is their balance sheet. The amount of bots was getting insane and they realised they finally had to pretend they were doing something about it. So they waited until the end of the quarter so they could make as much money as possible from these accounts before banning them. I guarantee they won’t do another ban wave for another year and this banwave won’t do a thing. Already seeing hundreds of bots right back too it, completely unfazed because they know blizz cares 1000x more about their spreadsheet numbers than the quality of the game.
You seem a bit defensive… It wasn’t a debate. The majority of my post was simply asking you questions because I’m interested in understanding you, or just adding my own thoughts to the discussion.
Huh?? I can’t imagine why you look at it that way. Migrating to a different server can be quite a disorienting ordeal and it comes with a lot of risks of things going wrong. If your guild was dealing with a lot of discomfort on their home server and wanted to consider migrating, it either takes a decent bit of luck, or forethought to pick a solution that ends up working out.
From the way that you discuss things, I would guess that it was the latter on your part. And good for you! It’s a good thing that your guild has someone they can rely on to give things some thought and make a mature decision when there’s a lot at stake. That’s a great quality in a guild master.
I’m not sure if you’re referring to me specifically, but I’m not “talking down” to the OP. Disagreeing with him that that he had no fault in this situation doesn’t constitute talking down to someone.
And to call this situation a scam is just disingenuous. Like I said before, it’s not lost on me how these situations can suck, and I also do agree with some people in here that it would be far better for Blizzard to step in and enforce healthier population distribution, but in no reasonable way could this situation ever be called a “scam”.