New Servers: A Month Later
by Elizabeth Harper 
Apr 24th 2006 at 5:00PM
Remember the slew of new US servers that opened about a month ago? Well, a lot of players from other servers jumped on the opportunity to start anew - myself included. The chance to start on a fresh server has been a thrill. No queues, no lag, and no gold farmers. But the servers have already started growing up. Gold and characters are available for purchase on most and queues on my new server have already surpassed those on my old. After weeks of watching the queues increase, I'm starting to realize that this may not be just a passing thing - people aren't just coming to visit the servers just announced or tagged new, they're sticking around to play.
So what does this mean for population balance? I haven't heard anything about queues or lag dropping on older servers - though perhaps people are too busy playing to post about it. Short of establishing draconian policies that force players to one server or another, it doesn't seem like there's much Blizzard can do to normalize server population aside from making new realms and transfer servers attractive options to players. But a month after a major wave of new transfers, new realms, and new hardware, are we seeing improvements - or are the problems just moving from one server to another?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Eric Hadley Apr 25th 2006 2:04AM
A very common evening queue of 15-30 minutes on Whisperwind has dropped to no queue at all at any time of day for me for at least two weeks. Very refreshing.
Mike Apr 25th 2006 8:45AM
Here's the thing: I have never ever ever been put in a queue to log on to my server. Never. Sure, I've gotten the "Unable to Connect" business and the endless "Authenticating..." but I have never been told explicitly, "There are X people waiting ahead of you to log on."
Now I'm not going to tell you what server I play on (although I've mentioned it before on this site), but my server seems problem-free. I certainly don't feel the venom towards Blizz that a lot of people seem to. But it always gets me thinking: if I've never experienced these problems, most people on my server have probably never experienced these problems either. And there are probably several other servers out there just like mine. So how many people are really having these troubles consistently? Maybe I just got extremely lucky. Or maybe the problems aren't as widespread as a glance at the WoW forums would have you believe...
elizabeth Apr 25th 2006 10:34AM
It's really difficult to tell. No one can play enough to get a feel for how queues and other connectivity issues effect every server - so you can only go from what you personally experience and what you've seen others discuss.
I cannot say that, from my personal experience, I've seen a big improvement. Nor have I seen a sudden lack of complaints about server performance. Of course, with the number of servers, it's possible that the majority are just fine as well - but that there are problems on enough servers (one server this week, another next?) to keep the forums hopping with complaints... if that's the case, I'm going to have to start hunting around for some of these queue-freee oases. (But even if I find one - who's to say it will be queue-free next week?)
I agree, though. It's difficult to judge the full extent of the problem when all we have to go on are user complaints (which tend to be written by the most frustrated customers in the first place).