I set a timer explicitly so I would be gone less than 30 minutes. Come back to being disconnected and in an 80 minute long queue.
Connect realms, increase the number of layers, I don’t care. I just want to play the game with my friends & guild. Telling me to transfer to a dead realm isn’t an option. Every realm I played on in the past (Incendius, Netherwing, Kromcrush) is gone. I didn’t set out to play on a megaserver, it just ended up being the only place with friends & guilds of good quality players.
I think Faerlina has it better than most because we’re a PVP-East realm with a significant west coast population.
I legit feel bad for you Grobbulus players though. Ya’ll have more right to complain than any of us. Blizzard literally closes dead realms and offers those people the option of transferring to your server, now your server has 7+ hour queues. Great. Job. Blizzard. /golfclap
I sympathize with your queue issues, but you do realize how you’re the bad guy and justice was served in your story, right? Everyone is dealing with queues and yet, at the expense of other players, you were intentionally trying to game the queue system and knowingly AFKing and taking up space on the server which could be used by another player actually playing the game.
I’m unhappy with the queue situation in general, and that it is causing players like you problems. I’m happy that you were booted as an individual. I also believe that openly admitting to griefing the system should result in a punishment, frankly.
The system shouldn’t be so broken that it incentivizes people to grief it to the extent Blizzard has. You can rage at players all you want for setting AFK timers, etc., but that is a response to the bottom line issue of Blizzard failing to expand server capacity. WOTLK is about to be orders of magnitude larger than TBC, and Blizzard has made it so that only a few servers on both NA and EU are viable. It’s up to them to invest in better server infrastructure, there’s nothing to be gained by punishing players for working around a bad situation.
yes wow these que times lol. the fella who tried to shame a dude for trying to take a 25min break without logging out must have a sad existence indeed. anywho i thought i would try classic era again and guess what? full on raiders and their grand marshals are less than 3k lifetime kills. yup it’s that bad. the que is more fun.
So you intentionally walked away leaving yourself logged in and you don’t see how you’re the problem, and not the people trying to play while you’re selfishly online but not playing?
The existence of any sort of lengthy queues only exacerbates the problem because people who would normally wait to log in, or who would log off for some time to do other things, are heavily discouraged from doing so. You can say “people should log off,” but when it means waiting 90+ minutes to play again, they simply aren’t going to do so. Let’s be honest about how humans behave.
The lesson Blizzard taught me isn’t “log off when you need to do other things”. They’ve taught me that I should be using a remote desktop app from my phone and checking every 5-10 minutes while I’m working out, to make sure this problem doesn’t happen again. They’ve also taught me that I should just wait until I’m absolutely sure I’m done playing for the day to finally log off for the day and do other things. Otherwise, I’ll just AFK in a city while doing stuff on a second monitor.
Because I’m sure that you always exit the game every time you step away from your keyboard. /s
Again, let’s be honest about human behavior. I had a few options:
Not work out, continue to play WoW
Delay my workout until late at night when I’m sure I don’t want to play any more WoW (and when I’m likely too tired to have a decent work out)
Log off to do my workout, resulting in not being able to play the game for 90+ minutes once I return to my computer
Set a timer so that I’m not AFK too long and can resume playing WoW when my workout is finished.
You can say “you should’ve logged off,” but so should have a lot of other people who are staying logged in right now. Me, the individual, making a better choice is only going to punish me. This whole idea of “if everyone just logged off appropriately, it wouldn’t be an issue” is 1) likely wrong judging by server capacity and 2) ignorant of human behavior.
So in all, it took close to 100 minutes to get logged back in. Absurd.
I rolled on Incendius at launch because Blizzard told me that was the best way to avoid lengthy queues. It was a balanced PVP server with minimal/no queues, until Blizzard allowed thousands of Alliance players to pay $15 each to transfer in and bring 5+ hours queues with them.
I took the offered free-transfer to Netherwind. It was, again, a fine home until Blizzard allowed all the Alliance from Incendius to transfer in. My husband and I saw the writing on the wall, and paid to transfer to Kromcrush, which was a medium-to-high pop server.
I stayed on Krom until the free transfers to Faerlina were offered, making me part of the last wave of people to leave prior to the server being discontinued.
It’s incredibly frustrating to have made numerous choices over the past 3 years to avoid these queues only to see Blizzard turn a blind eye to this. I made many responsible choices, yet it’s not enough, because Blizzard doesn’t lock servers until it’s far too late, and doesn’t feel it necessary to increase server capacity during surge periods.
An actual solution is to offer a transfer compact.
You agree to transfer, but only unless/until 4,000 other people also agree to transfer to the new server.
I know that my guild would certainly discuss transferring if there was a reasonable destination to go to. However, the only server we would currently consider (Mankrik) is locked. Everything else is too low pop. If we could be assured that there would be a significant population transferring with us…
It’s a secret ploy to extract more money from players who don’t want to free xfer to a dead server so they pay to xfer to another more populated server.
If I knew there was a massive queue for my server I absolutely would if I were doing anything other than just going to the bathroom or grabbing water.
In this case you logging off directly impacts another individual. It doesn’t solve the queue problem immediately but this is an instance where you don’t have to solve the entire problem to be able to concretely improve the situation.
It’s 7pm. You need to AFK for 20 minutes. Your raid is at 8pm. You’re telling me that you’re going to log off, and miss your raid, just so you can AFK for 20 minutes? Don’t bother answering this question, you’re either going to tell me that I’m right, or you’re going to lie.
Me logging off doesn’t solve the queue problem at all when the issue is server capacity. The queue will exist whether I log off or not. Even if every person playing right now logged off “perfectly” according to when they actually intend on actively playing the game, it seems that there would still be a queue.