WoW Classic servers are on fire and Blizzard is trying to put them out
World of Warcraft Classic, in the weeks before the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, is overflowing(opens in new tab).
As players slam the US and EU servers, Blizzard is trying to reduce hours-long queue times before original WoW's most pivotal expansion re-releases in WoW Classic later this month. Players will no longer be able to create new characters or transfer existing ones to the most packed servers, known colloquial in the community as «megaservers,» until the populations decrease.
«We’ve been hesitant to [do] 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,» the game's producer Aggrend wrote(opens in new tab) in a forum thread of players criticizing the state of the servers.
Blizzard is also offering free character transfers to servers that haven't reached their max capacity yet. Aggrend detailed in a series of forum posts why it's the least disruptive solution to the problem, but said that Blizzard is considering other incentives to keep players evenly dispersed.
WoW Classic, even more than standard WoW, thrives on robust player communities. It's built to emulate the old definition of an MMO (before cross-server technology existed), where a healthy server population significantly affects your ability to participate in raids, PvP, guilds, roleplay, and other social parts of the experience. Players naturally seek out high-population servers where these activities are guaranteed to flourish, and when they get comfortable, they don't want to leave.
Long queue times and faction population discrepancies shatter the idealistic image of what WoW Classic aims to be, which has
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