WoW Classic Queues Will Persist Unless Players Transfer To Other Realms Says Blizzard

It’s a bittersweet moment for Blizzard as hordes of players descend on Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch last week. The resurgence in the cult classic MMORPG’s playerbase, however, comes with a hefty price as the dreaded queue monster wreaks havoc on those wanting to brave the starting journey to Northrend.

As we reported yesterday, it seems like Blizzard isn’t doing anything to help alleviate the ridiculously long wait times. Apparently, it’s not that they don’t want to do anything, it’s because they can’t. The servers are now so overwhelmed that increasing capacity will have a huge impact on the performance of other game systems in Wrath of the Lich King Classic servers such as the Auction House and even global chat.

“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,” explained Game Producer Aggrend.

“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,” he added.

Blizzard has now disabled paid character transfers and new character creation indefinitely on all US and EU mega-realms. Aggrend said that it was a difficult decision to make and one that the team feels is very heavy-handed but necessary since it will “cut off opportunities for new and returning players to their friends on these large realms, possibly for many months.”

Even realms that have been designated as free character transfer destinations are quickly filling up. Aggrend reports that Sulfuras-US, one of the free transfer destinations, had a peak daily concurrency of around a third of the size of a 2008 realm prior to last week. Over the past week, the realm has seen nearly 40,000 incoming transfers, with hundreds of transfers occurring every hour. Sulfuras is now roughly four times the size of a realm in 2008 and character transfers to the realm have now been closed to prevent it from getting a queue.

A new destination realm called Eranikus (PvP) has been opened as of last night and the developers are practically begging everyone to transfer to the less-populated realm. “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,” said Aggrend. “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.”

For those who returned to the game for the big hit of nostalgia that Wrath of the Lich King offers, you definitely got your wish because it definitely feels like 2008 all over again.