World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Classic players have had a bit of a rough time trying to log in on the MMORPG’s mega-servers following the release of the third expansion’s pre-patch. If you managed to get past the lengthy queues that could take several hours, playing during the afternoon or evening also faced you with lots of lag and disconnects.
WoW: WotLK Classic’s mega-server queues and lag predictably caused lots of frustration among the player base, especially given developer Blizzard Entertainment’s perceived silence on the matter. But, after a couple days’ worth of waiting, WoW Classic Game Producer Aggrend took to the forums, offering some insight on the general server situation, what the team plans to do about it, and how players can help.
The lengthy post kicks off by explaining that the first steps taken to address World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King classic’s server queues and lag was that of disabling the creation of new characters and transfers to US and EU mega-realms (servers such as Grobbulus in the US region or Gehennas in EU) for an indefinite period of time.
“This was a difficult choice that we feel is very heavy-handed. By doing this, we will cut off opportunities for new and returning players to join their friends on these large realms, possibly for many months,” the developer writes. “However, the situation on these realms is completely untenable, and even if we can eliminate queues in the short term, this is going to continue to be a problem when new content releases as long as mega-realms exist.
Other realms are being monitored and similar measures could be taken to avoid them becoming mega-servers and running into the same lengthy queues and lag as the ones above.
Blizzard has also offered free transfers to less populated servers, describing them as “very successful so far,” but says that the situation could be controlled much quicker if more players used them.
One of the biggest concerns around the transfers – not counting players who don’t want to leave a guild or friends group behind – is that moving to unpopulated realms provides a less than ideal experience, given the lower number of fellow or opposing adventurers. That, however, may not be the case, looking at numbers shared by the developer.
“For a bit more specifics around these destination realms’ health, let’s take a look at Sulfuras-US. Prior to last week, this realm had low concurrency at around ½ to 1/3 the size of a 2008 realm. In the past week, this realm has seen almost 40,000 incoming transfers, with hundreds more still occurring per hour. These incoming transfers have made this a very robust and in fact nearly full realm that is now right around 4 times the size of a full 2008 realm.
Discussions around WotLK’s server queues often lead to players suggesting that more layers – instances of zones used to avoid massive crowding – need to be added or that the developer needs to improve its hardware. These, the post explains, are not actual solutions.
“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.”
The actual size of a realm is dictated by the number of connections it can handle and pushing it past the current limit could bring about even more issues. Layers mainly “alleviate congestion in the game world in densely populated areas,” which is why adding more wouldn’t solve the current issues.
“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, “ the developer notes.
The post also explains that the non-mega-server realms often have twice as many concurrent players as their counterparts from vanilla Wrath of the Lich King, the developer claiming that they’re perfectly viable places to play the game.
The developer also stresses that, currently, “the best and only way to resolve this issue for the impacted realms, is for people to leave the realm via free transfers.” It is looking into adding more destinations for players willing to transfer, alongside exploring other incentives for doing so. Whether or not that will actually happen remains to be seen.
“Overall, realm health and management has been the most challenging aspect of managing WoW Classic,” the post’s closing paragraph reads. When these mega-realms started to emerge last year, we were concerned about their impact, but we were very hesitant to take heavy-handed action for fear of breaking up friend groups and restricting player freedom. At this point, however, we believe the time has come to end the concept of a mega-realm.”
It goes without saying that players are approaching the classic version of World of Warcraft with a different mentality than they did back in vanilla.
With Wrath of the Lich King’s launch only a few weeks away, those who plan on sticking to the game’s mega-servers can only hope that Blizzard works whatever magic it can and that enough people take the free transfers to other realms, reducing the chance of encountering queues and lag.
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