WoW WotLK Classic: Queues from Hell and Blizzard is to blame
It had already become apparent a few months ago: As soon as the pre-patch and the launch of WoW: Wrath of the Lich King Classic are on the agenda, many Classic fans will have to face frustrating queues. Already in the second quarter one could observe how busy realms keep getting busier, while sparsely populated worlds turn into ghost servers.
But if in the final phase of Burning Crusade Classic, when various communities had already stopped raiding, the queues on some servers are so long that those who log in are not even allowed to queue (and instead with an error message from the game fly), and that, although Blizzard had provided the maximum possible number of layers on these worlds, then you can guess where the journey will go when WotLK Classic is the new edition of the most popular WoW expansion.
The status quo in the pre-patch phase
on Ironforge.pro unfortunately there is not yet the current data from the first ID of the pre-patch phase. However, a quick search is enough to see: yup, those fears are coming true, at least for some servers. Right after updating to the WotLK foundation we had via queues on various servers reported, and it’s still there almost a week later. Just look at them Field reports from the official WoW US forum on. Seat 14,500 and an estimated waiting time of 360 minutes? There comes joy! In the middle of the line of frustration are various streamers such as Asmongold and Staysafe:
And of course the appropriate memes should not be missing:
What annoys me the most about the situation, even if I’m not directly affected (I’ve only had a short queue on Razorfen since the pre-patch): The players have to pay for it again, although to a large extent the Blizzard managers responsible for the current situation. The developers laid the groundwork even before the launch of WoW (buy now ) Classic. Let’s take a quick look back.
Travel back in time to 2019
In the run-up to the WoW Classic launch, the Classic developers announced that they would like to make general EU servers available for Europe. Language servers like back then in vanilla were only planned for the Russian region. The first classic shitstorm swept through the official forum. Blizzard gave in and promised language servers for other countries, including Germany. For the start of the name reservation phase, the devs then named the planned realm offer: The list consisted of only twelve servers, only Everlook and Lucifron were marked with a DE. Far too small a number, considering that Blizzard wanted to achieve near-vanilla population sizes on the realms in the medium term.
The community raged again, the rush to the name reservation phase was enormous, as was the rush of players at the actual launch. But in the period that followed, the developers only expanded the range of servers in homeopathic doses. It should take until the end of October 2019 (i.e. two months after release) for Celebra’s DE server number 10 and DE-RP server number 1 to go online.
The problem with this cautious strategy: Many players who have already made a home on a world and found a suitable community do not feel like leaving everything behind, starting over and then maybe ending up on a potential ghost server (the motto : Better queues than no players). The last servers deployed were therefore never able to build up a population large enough to last for years. Other realms, however, continued to groan under the weight of the player masses.
Classic phase 2 caused the first server escape
While the biggest problems in phase 1 of WoW Classic were the queues and the big quest competition, the situation on various servers in phase 2 got noticeably worse. With the introduction of the honor system (without battlefields), the outnumbered faction on servers such as Lucifron, Venoxis and Co. was downright hunted. In the high-level areas, hardly any wind riding master was safe. You ended up… and ended up with the spirit healer.
Every run to the dungeon or raid entrance turned into a suicide mission. If you wanted to visit an instance in the Blackrock, you had to plan an extra hour just for the journey. The players were not even safe in their own capitals. It is clear that WoW was not fun for many of those affected. Blizzard responded with character transfer offers. The hunted fled until only one faction remained on the affected servers. The classic servers affected have not yet recovered from the mistakes that Blizzard made in the first two phases alone.
Back to 2022, with new bugs
Almost three years later, I unfortunately have to state that Blizzard has learned nothing from the mistakes just described. The developers are trying to improve the situation on the servers with various measures, but these measures always backfire:
- as Firemaw was bursting at the seams in May 2022, Blizzard set up a blockade and allowed server transfers. The result: Firemaw’s numbers fell, for that Gehennas turned into a mass server in no timealso because many players were able to take their entire gold fortune with them thanks to an exploit.
- Blizzard announced early on that various take sparsely populated servers offline in August would like. That was good. Less good: The final destination servers for the move were only communicated at the last second, and then affected all regions landed on the two English realms Hydraxian Waterlords and Mograine. What a – Sorry! – A. hole move!
- As a new option, there should be a restart server for WotLK Classic in time for the pre-patch. Some players had already hoped for it before the launch of TBC Classic. But hey, better late than never! But here, too, Blizzard waited far too long with the final details, only to provide just two EU serverswhich, by the way, are now also suffering from queues.
- And how is Blizzard responding to the current queues? With new blocks for Benediction, Grobbulus, Faerlina, Mankrik, Pagle and Whitemane.
Let’s be clear: Blizzard mostly reacts and rarely acts, and often far too carefully and slowly, while at the same time the developers communicate poorly with the community and too often on the issues where they then make the wrong decisions. Coincidence?
Blizzard has the solution, but doesn’t want to use it
From my point of view, the cherry on the shit show cake is that Blizzard has a tool in the basement that can be used to curb the desire of many players to switch from their own, rather sparsely populated server to a much busier realm. After all, behind the change there is often the concern that at some point there will be no more teammates to be found. And how could this problem be solved?
Unfortunately, the “new” dungeon browser from WoW WotLK Classic is no help.
Source: buffed
Well, you just have to look at what the Blizzard developers did back then. Right! Instanced content such as battlegrounds, arenas, dungeons, and raids could be entered over time via automated group searches that work across servers. And just such a tool, namely the dungeon finder, was introduced in the course of the WotLK era. But somehow it fits Blizzard in 2022 that the developers have this one feature that could solve so many of the problems they created themselves, despite all the criticism don’t want to implement.
My thesis: As long as there is no dungeon finder, extreme mass servers in the classic area will not only remain a problem, but will become an ever greater problem while other realms die in the course of the WotLK era. How does it look: Do you go along with the thesis or do you see it differently? How is the situation on your server at the moment? Tell me in the comments!
Reference-www.buffed.de