It’s hard to believe that an almost 20-year-old MMO is making such a splash again and with content that has long been known. But the thing is, right before the release of Wrath of the Lich King, the servers are crunching.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches on September 26th and the preparatory events and promotions are already in full swing. This apparently leads to problems, because the interest of the players in the re-release of the ancient expansion in Classic mode seems to be enormous.
The servers crunch enormously and players sometimes have to deal with hours of waiting when logging in. As a first countermeasure, Blizzard has now banned the creation of new characters, and free transfers to less congested servers are offered, while normal transfers are prevented until further notice.
“This was a difficult decision that we feel is very serious. By doing so, we will deprive new and returning players of the opportunity to join their friends on these large realms, possibly for many months. However, the situation on these realms is completely unsustainable, and even if we can eliminate the queues in the short term, this will continue to be an issue when new content is released as long as there are mega realms, which is why we have decided to indefinitely close the US and EU mega realms closing to new and additional players,” said one of the game’s producers at a Forum statements on the current situation.
An expansion of the realms is not an option due to the database structure, among other things, since there are simply limits, the only possibility is transfers to less busy realms: “We cannot increase the capacity further without provoking additional and probably cascading service failures currently the best and only way to solve this problem for the affected realms is for people to leave the realm through free transfers. There is no technical solution for this. There is also no hardware solution for this. This situation will evolve with the Wrath of the Lich King Classic launch on September 26th will not improve, just get worse.”
In any case, the mega realms seem to be reaching their limits: “When these mega realms emerged last year, we were concerned about their impact, but we were very reluctant to crack down for fear of disbanding friend groups and restricting player freedom At this point, however, we believe the time has come to end the concept of mega realms.”
The World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic pre-patch is here, and there’s a trailer to welcome it.
