At the moment we are seeing queues of up to five hours, beginning in the afternoon and continuing long into the night, just to enter Arugal. No doubt COVID-19 plays into this somewhat, but the major reason is the total mismanagement of Classic WoW by Blizzard.
In my view there are two major causes for the queues. The first is allowing paid transfers onto our realm (we’ve very recently seen a huge influx from Yojamba) and two, allowing hundreds (if not thousands) of bots to run around the world while real people can’t play.
My questions for the Community Manager are as follows:
- Why is Blizzard allowing paid transfers onto realms that are high pop and full?
- Why is Blizzard tolerating bots? and
- Does Blizzard intend to address these issues appropriately?
Blizzard’s current proposed solution to the queues is to turn on layering. Let’s unpack that a bit. Firstly, Blizzard promised there’d be no layering past phase one. Then, they allowed paid transfers to full servers, creating ridiculous queues and our current problem. Next, rather than actually addressing the problem they created, Blizzard said “Well, we could turn layering back on.”
I won’t go into the reasons layering is terrible for Classic in this post as it is self evident. Layering is not a sustainable solution and shouldn’t be considered. Blizzard needs to actually address the problems they’ve created through their active mismanagement.
The first step to doing that is rescinding paid transfers and giving refunds to those who paid. Send them back to their old servers to alleviate queues. Blizzard should also allow free transfers off high pop and full realms to lower and medium pop realms, and they should allow this regularly. No player, already paying a sub and who can’t play due to five hours queues, should be forced to pay for each of their characters to be transferred because Blizzard couldn’t properly moderate transfers.
Blizzard should also consider faction based player caps for each realm, with faction based queues as a result. This is essentially a two birds, one stone solution. Players on heavily imbalanced realms and with long wait times can transfer, free, onto less populated realms. This will assist in addressing serious faction imbalances and bring quality of life improvement to servers that are heavily imbalanced.
Finally, Blizzard needs to take an interest in moderating the servers and banning bots. Anyone who has quested in the world recently could not help but notice the world is more filled with bots than real people. What sort of experience is this? It’s ridiculous. No doubt that’s a long term project but Blizzard needs to commit to it and it needs to start now.
In my opinion most disappointing aspect of the current state of Classic’s servers is that many of these problems, and the lessons learned on how to address them, have already been experienced by private server administrators. Pserver admins with their limited resources were able to anticipate these issues and attempted to address them (with varying effect). It defies belief that Blizzard, with all of its experience and resources, has been unable to predict or address the problems they themselves are causing. Or maybe they have, and they just don’t care because they get money for subs and money for transfers. Either way, the outcome is a poor experience for the player.
At the end of the day, we are all paying a subscription for a game we enjoy and a game we want to play. There’s no point paying that subscription if we can’t play the game, or if the experience once we finally get through the queue is terrible. At the moment, there’s little doubt that it is. If Blizzard can’t answer the above questions, or won’t do anything to address the problems their mismanagement is creating, then people are going to stop paying the sub.