Not too long ago, we discussed the extraordinarily long queue times that some World of Warcraft servers have been facing on the Classic client. One of the many reasons for this is that Classic doesn’t have the cross-realm capabilities that the modern iterations now have, which can help to shuffle characters around to stop a realm from being too overwhelmed.
We also discussed, thankfully, that Blizzard has plans to provide some relief in that regard. There are times when signing onto a server can take hours due to the queue to sign on, and once you’re there, all you can do is pray you don’t disconnect and get thrust right back into the queue, waiting another hour or two. Blizzard is fully aware of this issue and are implementing fixes, with what seems to be the first round of possible implementations hitting servers soon.
Really, one of the best ways to fix overpopulation is simple: restrict population. Players normally have the ability to pay to have their character transferred to another realm – something that many have done to get away from overpopulated realms, but also something that some do so that they can go to a realm with a high population, as more players means more people to play with. Blizzard will be restricting the ability to do this – as well as create new characters on these realms – to help curb the population.
On April 10th, Blizzard disabled Free Character Moves for Horde characters from the Incendius realm to help tweak the faction difference and overpopulation. They also disabled Paid Character Transfers to Incendius, Faerlina, and Whitemane, to make sure the people going out weren’t just immediately replaced with more people coming in. These three realms also had character transfers leaving the server made free to help players that wanted to move away.
They’ve updated the restrictions now, making it so that new players can’t make a new character on Faerlina or Whitemane. They’ve also added the realm Arugal to the list. If you already have characters on these realms, you can still make new toons, but those that aren’t already players on the server will not be able to.
Given that Incendius isn’t on the list, and that the developers re-opened paid character transfers to the realm, it seems that the population issue there may be approaching a better balance. In fact, to test this, I created a new toon on Incendius and had no issue logging in, no queues or anything! The population of the realm is now listed as “high” rather than “full,” whereas Faerlina is listed as “Locked.”
Luckily, I already have characters on Faerlina, which enabled me to test the queue time for the realm in order to provide an accurate insight into the issue. Unfortunately, I’m currently 2,142nd in queue with an estimated wait time of just shy of three hours, so it looks like Faerlina might be a good bit away from being fixed.
