Queue times restricting play, creating even more problems

[Homerjay-nerzhul]

Background: Queue times for Benediction increase throughout the day. If i enter queue at 7am, it is a mere 1 hour queue, if I wait till 9am, 3 hours… noon - forget about playing my characters for the day.

Result: I log in first thing in the morning when there’s a 1 hour queue time, and play when i can play, doing my best to keep my character online throughout the day until I am done playing, at which time I log out. Otherwise, I will not be playing my characters for the day.

Personal Impact: During queue I can not do anything with my battle.net account. I can not switch around to play Call of Duty, Wow Live I am fully locked out of - if I switch during the day to check in on my characters for > 5 min I push myself back to the end of the log in queue. If I switch to Sulfuras to check my horde toon and do a daily, same problem. Back to the end of the queue. Try on another pc? no dice - get logged out of my prime PC account - sent to the back of the line.

Community Impact: Everyone is forced to stay logged in to their toons all day long, or lose the ability to play for the day. This creates an artificial queue where people not actively playing the game are retaining spots from others who want to play.

TLDR - the queue system is a cancer that is reducing the play-ability of the game. Semi-afk players are a necessity due to the broken queue system, players are fettered to this one instance of the battle.net suite if they wish to enjoy one of the plethora of games in their selection for the day, and other players that want in are standing in line waiting for the zombie horde to leave the amusement park.

Fix it!

[Sheita-grobbulus]

You have 4 options. Wait in queue, take the free transfer, reroll or quit.

[Classic] The unacceptable state of Classic servers

Hi All, First off, thank you for the comments. I understand this is an incredibly frustrating time if you happen to be playing on one of these heavily impacted realms. I sincerely and personally apologize for the situation on these mega-realms. Please do know that this is the top issue on our minds right now and we are actively working on solutions for the specific realms that are full right now. Reading forums, reddit threads, Twitter comments, etc., one thing that struck me is the sheer amou…

[Chris-mutanus]

do you think he doesn’t know that?

[Homerjay-nerzhul]

You over-simplify the issue.

No guild bank allowed with transfer?

Blizz is pushing that the only way out of this 6 hour queue purgatory is to take a free transfer to w/e server they decide. Only problem is, I have a guild bank so my alts can share bank storage. Blizz states that transfer of the Guild Bank is restricted. Great, so the 9k gold investment will forever restrict me from jumping off Benediction. I already had to pay to get off Fairbanks alliance server as alliance population dived to 1% during TBC… and had to re-purchase all my guild bank tabs the…

Some of us can’t just jump so easily.

And the “wait in queue or quit” options are trollish and ignore my key points.

[Sheita-grobbulus]

It’s not ignoring anything. It’s just the reality of the situation. Those are your options.

[Fùry-stormrage (Fùry)]

Yeah queues have been really awful for launch.

Pre patch I’d get like maybe a 30-45 minute queue at noon and 3-4 hours max during high activity hours.

Now it’s become a choice of do I want to wake up at 7-8 am to play a video game like a job, or sleep in and wait 4 hours at noon.

Benediction of course

[Chris-mutanus]

of course they are. we all know that.

do you know that blizzard asks for feedback to be posted on the forums?

[Bandagium-benediction]

You make good points, but you’re about 4 days late to the party, there are dozens if not hundreds of posts about this since launch.

Blizzard doesn’t care. They say it’s a player created issue and they want you to just quit or stop playing with your guild and transfer.

[Homerjay-nerzhul]

OFC, my point is Blizz should re-evaluate how they handle their queue system.

They are smart and have millions at their disposal. I’m sure they can spend a little time figuring out a fix for this issue.

A couple options… allow gamers to play other games while waiting for their queue, and consider a way to ease the queue system so people are less inclined to afk idle on servers to retain their log-in status.

[Homerjay-nerzhul]

oh, and cross realm play… this really needs to get added! This is the prime issue - I paid a couple hundred dollars to transfer toons off fairbanks when it died on alliance w/the launch of TBC because i figured a mmorpg should be played with others, not just myself. Silly concept.

I won’t transfer off Benediction because i dont want to be caught on another Fairbanks server needing to pay another couple hundred to Blizz to be able to play with others once again.

[Sheita-grobbulus]

@Aggrend

The Mega-Realms in US and EU are full (also; Layers are not the solution)

We’ll start with the easiest and most clearcut statement to make. The mega-realms in US and EU that are queuing are completely full. This statement is the absolute state of things, and there is no additional capacity we can add to these realms to allow more players on, or to reduce queues.

One common suggestion we get is to “just add more layers”, and it’s very important to understand that layers do not add in any way to capacity. Layers are a Classic-specific solution to alleviate congestion in the game world in densely populated areas. The way they work is that when a certain threshold of players congregates in a small area in the game (say, in Blackrock Mountain) the service will spin up another entire copy of the game world to try to load-balance any new players that log in. This is to prevent a situation where large numbers of players congregating, casting spells, sending server messages and updates to one another causes a severe degradation of the entire service/game world. This functions in some contrast to the “sharding” system that modern World of Warcraft uses which basically does the same thing but spins up additional shards on a per-zone or per-area basis.

Neither of these systems increase realm capacity. Realm capacity is dictated by the total number of connections that the service itself can handle. Every time a player connects to a realm, that connection interacts with numerous services, systems, and adds to the total load on the persistent database that the entire game relies upon to fetch data related to players, spells, quests, creatures, Auctions, etc. When that total number of connections to a realm’s DB and services reaches a certain number, the service will degrade or fail on multiple levels, leading to symptoms like severe Auction House lag or outages, Chat performance degradation, or lag when attempting to loot items. Never in wow’s history had the capacity of realms been as high as they are now, and even with our modern capacity we can still sometimes experience performance degradation when the realms are full and DB load is at its peak.

So put as plainly as possible, we cannot increase capacity any more without inviting additional and likely cascading failures to the service. At present, the best and only way to resolve this issue for the impacted realms, is for people to leave the realm via free transfers. There’s no technology solution to this. There is no hardware solution to this. This situation will not improve when Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26th, it will only get worse.

And no crossplay, this isn’t retail

[Bandagium-benediction]

The intelligent blizzard has long since passed.

Their short-sightedness about this problem, their blaming the paying customers for a problem they created by letting servers die, the “There is no technical solution” excuse for a problem they themselves solved literally a decade ago…

Alienating their playerbase, inability to innovate, and seeing this is a long term profitable endeavor… Smart isn’t a thing associated with a once forward thinking company that believed loyalty to be a long term profit gain

[Drooler-grobbulus]

@Homerjay-nerzhul

Background: Queue times for Benediction

Ah, stopped reading there.

You wanted a mega server? Enjoy your queues.

[Bandagium-benediction]

They are Lying or Lazy or Terrible Engineers. That post is an embarrassment to anyone who works or have ever worked at a large technology that has had to scale

[Hyacintha-ashkandi]

Better than I could have said it

[Sheita-grobbulus]

Whether they are lying or telling the truth doesn’t change the situation. You have been given options. You may not like them, but those are what we have. Should they have done more in the past to prevent this? Sure. But we don’t have a time machine and we are stuck with this situation for the time being.

[Ruroki-grobbulus]

@Homerjay-nerzhul

I won’t transfer off Benediction because i dont want to be caught on another Fairbanks server needing to pay another couple hundred to Blizz to be able to play with others once again

You and the 20k other people who abandoned good enough servers to go create that monstrosity did it all to yourselves.

FWIW I have guildies who came from Fairbanks, and I am a dead server refugee myself.
But there are plenty of good servers to play on. Bene WAS NOT the only answer.
Should have thought for yourself instead of following the herd.

[Drohn-illidan]

People actually think its acceptable that if you don’t log in before 12 pm or use remote desktop you can’t play for the day. Little wonder Blizz does nothing with all the deluded fanboys defending their every move.

[Balerinka-atiesh]

Ok whoever you are. I’ll take your word over the guy that literally runs the game and knows the ins and outs of how this 20 year old software platform works. If you think they are lying why would you give them your money? Just quit.

[Balerinka-atiesh]

I log in daily anytime I want on my full server…we are only 3-4 times the size of a full 2008 server though…I also jumped to Eranikus from Mankrik as soon as allowed w friends horde side to avoid any issues there. I like to play, not queue.