Frustrated with WoW Classic’s queues? Grumpy because you expected Blizzard to have learned a trick or two about launches in the last 15 years? You’re not alone, as forumgoers are getting testy over the long waits. In response to one comment about server count and capacity, particularly in regard to some of the small-to-medium servers that still see long queues, Blizzard’s Ion Hazzikostas, best known to the World of Warcraft community as the live MMO’s game director, penned a few words.
“From the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritize the long-term health of our realm communities, recognizing that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours,” he told players. “But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible. Thus, we took the path of launching with few enough realms to still thrive in the event that our most conservative estimates ended up proving accurate, while having enough servers ready to activate at a moment’s notice if needed. And clearly they were, and are, needed.”
Blizzard has continued adding new servers to meet the demand, upwards of 20 new ones in the last day, Hazzikostas says. Most recently, the company added a new Oceanic realm, Felstriker.
