Greatbobbo: Greatbobbo: You MUST have known there would be long queues. Why the hesitation to have servers in place to handle extra players? (not characters)

I understand the frustration: Anticipating and planning around jumping back into this world we’ve all missed, only to be stuck in a long queue, is not the experience we want anyone to have.

But 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.

We’ve released over 20 new realms worldwide so far since launch, and we’ll be up around the clock continuing to do so until everyone who wants to experience Classic is able to. But even still, as we bring new realms online in a given region, we wait for them to fill before opening new ones, because we want to make sure that each and every realm has a healthy population in the long term.