First and foremost, the queues are outrageous, certainly not a feature of Classic WoW we wanted you to port over. We’ve had 15+ years of expansion releases to learn from, and you just don’t have an excuse. You’ve dropped the ball on this.
But I’m not here to just complain. Here’s a few suggestions:
Most of us are paying for classic (not retail). Seems pretty obvious that I can’t play the game I’m paying for. Any reputable business would refund or at very least offer free time (as the original Blizzard did). Do the right thing.
When you open new servers, offer free transfers. I’ve already moved servers (which were low/medium) and are now full with 4 hour+ queues. Forcing me to re-level characters because of your poor planning is broken (and fixable by free transfers). Better yet, if you actually added incentives (extra game time?) for moving, I’m sure you could fix the imbalance in no time.
You supposedly increased capacity today. Did you consider not allowing new people to move to these crowded servers? I sure hope you didn’t just back yourself into a corner. (Same queue times and now higher server load).
Offer free (guild?) transfers to these “low pop” servers regardless. You can start charging for this service once people can actually play your game.
Fully agree, im really salty at the way this so called smooth launch has gone, another day of queuing and to make it worse i cant even play retail while i sit in a classic queue, its no wonder i see dozens of autoclicker users in inns holding spots in the game. And its illegal and all that crap but im sure its worth the chances for your stuff ups
Do you blame them for doing it though? I mean im a stay at home day, my play hours are between 9am and 3pm, wake at 6, logged into queue, still in queue now at 12.30pm and not looking like getting in any time soon. There were not enough servers from the start, i cant just start fresh as all friend have started making toons already and we are playing classic for the community feel. I feel they dropped the ball
The players? Of course not. That’s kind of my point. Player’s are incentivized to overpopulate a few servers, and responsible planning should have included incentives to player’s (or cross realm tech) to counteract that, rather than the “TOLD U SO” tagline Fanboi’s love pushing on behalf of Blizzard.
Just free server xfers. People will willing transfer off their servers. They don’t WANT to reroll and throw away what they have done now. Free server xfers=more balanced servers=less to no more ques
15+ years of every time a new content patch or expansion comes out, there’s a massive surge of people coming to look around and then after a couple days / weeks you never see them again until the next patch / expansion.
Plus remember, gaming is a legitimate addiction for some people. A lot of queues on servers are just because their main’s server has a queue and they can’t not be logged onto the game.
I still don’t think Blizzard is obligated by any means to give you free time. I wouldn’t oppose getting free game time, but that’s at Blizzard’s discretion, and we certainly shouldn’t expect it, especially considering Classic isn’t the only service we’re paying for.
I still don’t know that free transfers are going to do anything, and incentivizing a move would just make matters worse for the server being transferred to. Everyone would want to grasp at the opportunity to get something for free, to the point that clogged servers would get abandoned, and then we’d end up with the same problem except on a different server. The problem with free transfers is that there would need to be a coordinated effort by the server as a whole to decide who leaves and who stays, because then EVERYONE could leave, and EVERYONE could stay. It’s unpredictable and things like free server transfers have ruined servers for other games in the past.
This is something I’m in agreement with and would LOVE to see. Restricting NEW character creation on servers would probably help, considering the hype for the game is still at its peak, therefore people want to be where everyone else is. Final Fantasy XIV routinely blocks people from creating characters on servers if the server looks to be congested and it works wonderfully (and secures future stability). +1 for the most original argument I’ve seen on this forum so far.
They very rarely offer free game time (and haven’t offered any for things like this ever). They only offered free time for things like super extended maintenances (Like day or multi-day), so I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Free transfers (to my knowledge) would just tax the servers infrastructure more, plus they just increased the total concurrent player cap so queues should be diminished a bit. Ontop of that name changes would be another sticking point.
If they denied letting people make new characters it would just piss off people more since it would deny new people from playing with their friends. The backlash would be huuge.
Same rules as character transfers apply.
Give it time, the hype will die down and things will stabilize. Blizzard foresaw this and are doing the best they can.
They absolutely have offered things like free game time. I still remember getting two days because of the broken server queues at the launch of WoD.
It’s more probable that they will as a PR move to save face. It’s why people expect it. I’m not saying we should, only that it’s inevitable that they will.
I mean, when you can argue that it’s at the fault of the company for the long queues, I would say yes, you can expect it.
Long queues are par for the course of any WoW launch, but when you launch with 8 realms, and then release 20 over the span of a couple days and STILL have queue problems, I think there’s cause for blame with Blizzard’s complete oversight. If they had properly prepared, we wouldn’t be stuck with this problem.
Queues are going to go away as they always do, and for the most part I’m in the camp of telling people to wait it out, but you can’t really deny Blizzard IS to blame here. They didn’t take it seriously, and now they’re facing the consequences for it. Does that mean they OWE it? No, not really. TOS clearly states that servers aren’t always going to be readily available, and that there are no refunds on subscriptions.
Additionally, the way the subscription model is set up gives Blizzard an out. You’re not just paying for one server. You’re paying for two, and the other is up and available. You’re still getting something in return with your money.
That said, considering the amount of outrage and the amount of oversight on Blizzard’s part, I really wouldn’t be surprised if they did give free gametime. They did it in Vanilla. They did it in Draenor. It’s likely they’ll do it here, too.
They won’t. Because right now, the ONLY thing stopping people from being able to play is a complete refusal to not be on Herod.
Why are they going to give us free game time at the start of the game because so many people are refusing to just play on one of the servers without queues. I really doubt there’s THAT MANY people who are part of a guild that all 40 of them kept in touch since classic, conveniently all 100% committed to that server