Extremely Dissapointed

We're in the process right now of doing our quickest fix for queues which is simply raising player caps. Most realms that are seeing a high queue (once the cap changes go through) should see a substantial halving or more of their wait times.

Once that's done we can then continue to evaluate and take further action as necessary. In our years of experience, free character transfers are marginally successful in that the vast majority of players hate queues, but the vast majority also aren't willing to leave their realms and guilds to avoid them. It's a solution, and one we may employ, but it's one that isn't quick and easy, and with widely varying histories of success.

12/07/2010 4:04 PMPosted by KalutHere's an update on my previous post, this one is of the queue 4 hours after the original SS.

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/3093/fml3.png

Illidan is by far the most impacted, and should by far see the greatest improvement with a cap change.

I'm betting that it won't fully resolve the problem though and we'll likely need to look into additional ways to relieve it. One step at a time though.

Let's not start pulling the paying-customer card just yet, aside from being an inaccurate example, we're working to address queues as best as possible. Just hold tight.

12/07/2010 4:28 PMPosted by HassanSeriously, is anyone ticked off enough about this to quit?

I don't care if they are or not. It sucks to have to wait regardless of what lengths you're willing to retaliate, and we're working to hopefully make it suck a bit less.

12/07/2010 4:11 PMPosted by Quincannon

12/07/2010 4:02 PMPosted by BashiokWe're in the process of right now doing our quickest fix for queues which is simply raising player caps. Most realms that are seeing a high queue (once the cap changes go through) should see a substantial halving or more of their wait times.

Once that's done we can then continue to evaluate and take further action as necessary. In our years of experience, free character transfers are marginally successful in that the vast majority of players hate queues, but the vast majority also aren't willing to leave their realms and guilds to avoid them. It's a solution, and one we may employ, but it's one that isn't quick and easy, and with widely varying histories of success.

I am not so sure I would agree with the "vast majority" claim, as that sounds more like a broad generalization then a stated fact.

I oversaw the first free transfers ever for the game, and either personally managed or tracked the majority of the others. I can speak about it fairly accurately I believe. :)

I can not speak for everybody, but I think when it comes to free servers transfers, if you give them more options, then just one server you would find a better pool.

Absolutely agree. It's not always possible, or sometimes there's just a desire to point people in specific directions. But in this case I don't believe a 1:1 realm transfer would be in anyone's best interest, assuming we have the realms to work with.

12/07/2010 5:23 PMPosted by BluespartanBashiok... In reference to server transfers... have you ever offered transfers from say Seattle-based servers to Dallas or Boston-based servers? I live near Atlanta and happen to have started out on a Pacific Time server (Lightbringer) that is really far from me. Over the years I have leveled 5 80's. There's little chance I would ever pay to transfer these. But I almost took advantage of the last free transfer to an Eastern Time server until I realized that the new server would also sit in Seattle. The server clock would match, but I would still have the poor ping. But if I ever got the offer to move all my toons to a low-population EST server that was also close to me, I would likely jump on it. I would miss my guild but for latency less than 200 ms and no queue, it would be worth it.

We attempt to keep realm transfers grouped by time zone, but no we do not take physical server location into account. We can't, there would never be server transfers if we did. So yes, cross-datacenter transfers are fully possible if not very likely.

12/07/2010 6:30 PMPosted by SpinnycutcutANy news of Mal'gantis.. over 1.3k in line waiting to get in. Is this after the cap or is it still not employed on Mal yet???

Mal'Ganis is now at the max player cap and looks to be sitting around a 1,200 person queue. Yeah. :\ Raising the caps helped, for sure, but queues just keep climbing.

We do have another round of player cap increases going out in the next little bit but bottom line is we're most likely going to have to work toward free transfers. They're not super simple to execute so it's not something that's going to be available today.

Anyway, we'll keep you informed as we go.

12/07/2010 6:41 PMPosted by Gezzy

12/07/2010 6:40 PMPosted by BashiokMal'Ganis is now at the max player cap and looks to be sitting around a 1,200 person queue. Yeah. :\

We do have another round of player cap increases going out in the next little bit but bottom line is we're most likely going to have to work toward free transfers. They're not super simple so it's not something that's going to be available today.

Anyway, we'll keep you informed as we go.

What servers do you think will have their caps increased?

Blackrock is already maxed. Pretty much if your realm had a queue of 1k we put your realm at max player cap. It helped, there are just a lot of people coming back to play. It's launch day.

12/07/2010 6:47 PMPosted by Gozondo trial accounts have less priority in ques? We are on burning blade, im trying to introduce my friend to the game but his que goes up instead of down like mine did.

Yes.

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20590

12/07/2010 6:59 PMPosted by TelevatorI waited an hour to get onto Korgath, then it booted me when I was down to #65 in queue. Peeved, but I waited another hour... got to #100...then said "Unable to Connect."
Waited all day to play and instead I've wasted 2 hours trying to get in. Very frustrating.

I'm really sorry. :(

And I like your name.

12/07/2010 7:07 PMPosted by Bulldozursigned, you people succeeded on realm stability but yet failed horribly at forecasting 1-2 hour queue times. I would rather have stability problems than to not be able to log on for 1-2 hours if I have a power outage or a random DC... Complete and utter nonsense.

We knew full well there would be massive queues today. Full well. Without a doubt.

The question I propose is how does knowing about it make it a solvable issue? How do we handle the thousands upon thousands of people, per realm, that have come back from weeks, maybe years of not playing to play today on their old realm? Delete their accounts? Forcibly move their characters to low-pop realms while they weren't looking? I'd like to know what this foresight offers us because knowing it's going to happen doesn't mean there's a workable solution.

Upgrade your servers so that they can handle an additional X concurrent users, where X is the longest queue currently.

We upgraded all of our servers a couple months ago (remember the 24-48 hour downtime maintenances?) and now, I would not likely be wrong in claiming, have the most advanced server hardware in use for any game. So that's not the solution. What else?

12/07/2010 7:30 PMPosted by Meguas

12/07/2010 7:29 PMPosted by Bashiok

Upgrade your servers so that they can handle an additional X concurrent users, where X is the longest queue currently.

We upgraded all of our servers a couple months ago (remember the 24-48 hour downtime maintenances?) and now, I would not likely be wrong in claiming, have the most advanced server hardware in use for any game. So that's not the solution. What else?

Like I said, should have offered free realm transfers from the highest to lowest pop servers well before cata to help prepare. AND increased the cap limit on the highest pop servers ahead of time.

And what is someone's incentive to move off of a realm where everyone they know plays, and where they're perfectly comfortable? People won't move unless there's a reason.

12/07/2010 7:37 PMPosted by Boscoe

12/07/2010 7:35 PMPosted by Bashiok
And what is someone's incentive to move off of a realm where everyone they know plays, and where they're perfectly comfortable? People won't move unless there's a reason.

I'd say 3000 in que with a 818 minute wait is a pretty good incentive to move. Just sayin...

I'm going to stop responding because people are just consistently quoting things out of context or just not reading my replies at all before posting.

I am sorry about the queues, it's something we're going to keep working to address and get you in game as quickly as possible. Please feel free to continue discussing it here.