Blizzards response to server issues

[Harmoon-firemaw]

Just found this response from Blizzard in relation to some of the server issues many of us have been experiencing for anyone who is interested.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/classic-the-unacceptable-state-of-classic-servers/1323722/4

[Beefyclown-trollbane]

Hi All,

First off, thank you for the comments. I understand this is an incredibly frustrating time if you happen to be playing on one of these heavily impacted realms. I sincerely and personally apologize for the situation on these mega-realms. Please do know that this is the top issue on our minds right now and we are actively working on solutions for the specific realms that are full right now.

Reading forums, reddit threads, Twitter comments, etc., one thing that struck me is the sheer amount of misinformation or misunderstanding floating around, so I am going to try and explain as best I can what we are doing now, where we are going, the state and nature of the problems, and to provide a factual look at the actual state of realms that aren’t full right now. Please bear with me, as this is going to be a very long post.

We have disabled new character creation and incoming paid transfers to the US and EU mega-realms, and they will remain locked indefinitely.

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. 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. As a result, we’ve made the choice to effectively close US and EU mega-realms to new and additional incoming players indefinitely. We will also be monitoring our other realms and will take similar steps if they begin to inch into mega-realm territory in the future, and we may do so with little to no warning. We’ve been hesitant to this because we really dislike restricting player movements and potentially breaking up social circles, but that ethos is no longer compatible with the reality we find ourselves in.

Free transfers have been very successful so far, but we need more folks to move.

I want to express a very sincere and heartfelt thanks to those that took the plunge and moved from one of these huge realms to FCM destinations such as Sulfuras-US and Mograine-EU. I’ve seen countless success stories affirming that moving to one of these realms has been a positive experience. These anecdotes were not surprising to us in the slightest, because we know that almost every realm in service right now is a perfectly vibrant and viable place to play. Both of these destination realms are now extremely healthy if not nearly full at certain peak times. If you are considering moving to one of these locations, I advise doing so soon before they too become full, as we will endeavor to end transfers before we allow them to queue, and we may do so suddenly and without warning.

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.

The fact is, however, this isn’t enough on its own to fix the situation on realms such as Benediction and Faerlina. Now that Sulfuras and Mograine are starting to trend upwards towards filling up themselves, we need to look to other solutions and potential destinations. As a result, we’ve implemented a new FCM solution specifically targeted at Benediction, Faerlina, and Grobbulus in the US (for now; we haven’t forgotten about EU). You can read about this new FCM destination realm, Eranikus; here . As Sulfuras has proven, Free Character Moves can and do result in a positive play experience on the destination realm. We still have far more than enough players stuck in queue on these few mega-realms that we could easily fill multiple other Sulfuras-level realms if players take the next rounds of FCMs that we make available. We again strongly encourage you to take available FCMs especially if you want to jump in and join Sulfuras and Mograine in particular, as we will be ending the transfers to Sulfuras very soon, and we may need to do something similar for Mograine as well in the coming days and weeks.

The Mega-Realms in US and EU are full (also; Layers are not the solution)

We’ll start with the easiest and most clearcut statement to make. 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.

One common suggestion we get is to “just add more layers”, and it’s very important to understand that layers do not add in any way to capacity. Layers are a Classic-specific solution to alleviate congestion in the game world in densely populated areas. The way they work is that when a certain threshold of players congregates in a small area in the game (say, in Blackrock Mountain) the service will spin up another entire copy of the game world to try to load-balance any new players that log in. This is to prevent a situation where large numbers of players congregating, casting spells, sending server messages and updates to one another causes a severe degradation of the entire service/game world. This functions in some contrast to the “sharding” system that modern World of Warcraft uses which basically does the same thing but spins up additional shards on a per-zone or per-area basis.

Neither of these systems increase realm capacity. 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. 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. 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. 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.

A glimpse at other realms, in relative terms

This post is already long, but on the topic of “viable” realm options, I also really wanted to take some time to dispel some outright falsehoods about the viability of realms that are not mega-realms. I’d like to paint a picture of how large some of these realms are relative to a 2008 realm that would have been considered completely full:

US	Concurrency relative to full 2008 realm
Sulfuras	4x
Atiesh	2.5x
Windseeker	2x
Ashkandi	2x
Westfall	2x
EU
Everlook	3x
Giantstalker	2.5x
Auberdine	2.5x
Sulfuron	2.5x
Mirage Raceway	2x
Earthshaker	2x
Razorfen	2x

I wish I could share exact numbers with you but suffice it to say: the realms above have a peak concurrent population ranging from several thousand to well over ten thousand players each day.

These realms are not queuing now (many have never queued), have healthy and robust economies, and enjoy hundreds of groups forming for dungeons and raids per day. These realms would have been full-to-bursting based on realm caps that we had in place even as recently as 2014 in modern WoW. The narrative that these huge mega-realms are the only “viable” place to play is just untrue, and we want to do everything we can to drive home the absolute fact that these are great places to play. Any “demographic” data available on third party websites should not be used as a basis for a decision around where to play.

Closing thoughts

Overall, realm health and management has been the most challenging aspect of managing WoW Classic. 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. We hope that with your help and willingness to consider the current and future transfers we are going to offer, we can maintain a lively, vibrant community across all realms without the need for queues or increasingly heavy-handed actions.

[Kktynp-gehennas]

They also wrote that they are going to wait to do anything about the queues until after WOTLK release on the fresh servers.

[Mexi-der-rat-von-dalaran]

There is more than one post by Aggrend in that thread, so make sure to read them all.

[Черница-chromie]

So in general that means that they are on tight budget and will not open new realms, now that they closed some? Or that as long as they got unpopulated realms, players have to do first step and populate them?

[Kktynp-gehennas]

" So the fresh realms are a very unique situation and we want to be extremely careful about adding more realms. Adding a 2nd fresh PvP realm is very very likely to do one of two things:

1. Lead to both realms being unhealthy in the long term.
2. Essentially guarantee that one of the two realms becomes the “horde” server, and the other becomes the “alliance” server.

Additionally, Fresh realms are also much more likely to experience a bit of a decline once the game actually launches. Many people are leveling in fresh now during pre-patch but we expect some number of those players to return to their normal established servers and guilds once the expansion launches. This might be a situation where its better for us to weather the storm, as it were."

[Tabitha-kingsfall]

F in chat for Thekal then.

[Triva-theradras]

To be fair, without their free transfers to any destination (besides firemaw and later gehennas), the situation of mega servers would never have become the way it is now. Blizzards influence is much greater than the players when it comes to the problem.

I feel bad for new/returning players though. A vast majority of players is playing on high pop servers and the new/returning players wont be able to play with their friends now, unless they already have a character on that server.

[Necromon-tarren-mill]

Too bad it took the entirety of TBC to re-realize what they already knew …
This has already happened multiple times on the retail servers in the past, it’s only logical that it will happen again but on an even larger scale … you simply cannot let players do whatever they want and transfer wherever they want … should have just let the cap at 2 layers and have more healthy servers.

[Parkroy-draenor]

I think it means minimize effort, prioritize profit.

[Jokeern-firemaw]

Oh well, thats a RIP for Thekal and my Wotlk experience I guess. I’ll skip testing the new retail expansion aswell, Im just done at this point.

I can’t believe I subbed again and actually thought I would be able to play the game. I feel so stupid.

Have fun everyone

[Kktynp-gehennas]

I can see that in a 6 month period of time it is maybe positive to not open new servers and just “weather the storm” as they say, but at the moment and the coming month it will be a pain for all the people that wanna play the game on Thekal.

[Ceciliaa-gehennas]

That is exactly what happened to me. I might not be “returning” after all. Nobody wants to “gamble” and play on a small server alone, especially if you don’t have endless time.

[Ceciliaa-gehennas]

Exact same story here. At least your character is on Firemaw.

[Vanillataur-nethergarde-keep]

THANK you for confirming that FULL now is more than 2008.

[Ragemod-ravencrest]

@Beefyclown-trollbane

I wish I could share exact numbers with you but suffice it to say: the realms above have a peak concurrent population ranging from several thousand to well over ten thousand players each day.

These realms are not queuing now (many have never queued)

so Thekal is more than 20k players at least?

[Raiudd-firemaw]

Blizzard has washed his hands.
He basically blames the players. They lie saying that the technology does not exist, basically they have reached the top of the budget and have 0 investment margin.

The servers that exist, are the ones that are already there, nothing else will be enabled. if you can’t play move to another.

We have to pay them and on top of that they have to order us where to play, and when to play.
They try to persuade us to distribute ourselves homogeneously among the servers that already exist, so that we are not a nuisance, and they can continue charging us month after month.
They try to explain to us, that we are the ones who play, that a sparsely populated server in which you could only make content if you are in a good guild, is just as good as one in which there will always be people making content 24/7 and you don’t need schedules.
After a week of total neglect, they don’t even say anything about all the features that are still pending to be implemented in the game… about the problem with pvp bans and so many other things…

[Deadlydealer-mograine]

what EU mega-realms its a fresh server…

[Deadlydealer-mograine]

and Thekal is not even in the focus list…

[Thetallman-golemagg]

They mentioned fresh servers and their response was pretty much, “too bad, we aren’t doing anything till after WOTLK releases.”