World Of Warcraft Classic Game Director Explains Decision To Wait Before Adding More Servers

As expected, a flood of humanity descended on the World of Warcraft Classic servers when the game officially went live yesterday. While this might be every developer’s hope and dream, it seems that Blizzard Entertaimnent severely underestimated the horde of players waiting to get into the new servers. This resulted in overly-long queue times, particularly in small to medium population servers. Game Director Ion Hazzikostas explains why they waited until the last minute to add more servers:

“From the start of planning for this launch, we’ve tried to prioritize the long-term health of our realm communities, recognizing that if we undershot the mark in terms of launch servers, we could move quickly to add additional realms in the opening hours. But if we went out with too many servers, weeks or months down the line we’d have a much tougher problem to solve. While we have tools like free character transfers available as a long-term solution to underpopulated realms, everything about that process would be tremendously disruptive to realm communities, and so it’s something we want to avoid as much as possible. Thus, we took the path of launching with few enough realms to still thrive in the event that our most conservative estimates ended up proving accurate, while having enough servers ready to activate at a moment’s notice if needed. And clearly they were, and are, needed.”

Blizzard has since added more than 20 new servers in the past 24 hours, the latest of which is the new Oceanic Realm, Felstriker. The studio, however, has yet to reveal whether they’ll be giving out free Realm Transfers.

Head over to the World of Warcraft Classic forums to learn more.