World of Warcraft Server Issues are Blizzard's 'Number One Priority'
World of Warcraft's latest expansion, Shadowlands, is now available. And much like with all of World of Warcraft's expansion launches, there's been an astonishing surge of players, as old subscribers, new subscribers, and crossovers from World of Warcraft Classic are rushing to check out the new content. Yet also just like previous expansion launches, some World of Warcraft servers are struggling under the stress. According to Blizzard, these server issues are its "number one priority."
To Blizzard's credit, most World of Warcraft servers are doing alright. Maybe not as great as every player would like, but generally okay. What Blizzard is addressing when it says there are server issues is five servers in particular. Area 52, Frostmourne, Illidan, Stormrage, and Tichondrius are seeing traffic unlike anything Blizzard says it has experienced before. These servers are currently being monitored and worked on "around the clock" for unspecific service problems.
What's abnormal about the situation is that Blizzard says it has already increased realm capacity on these servers, with the new realm capacity higher than Blizzard has ever done for a single realm before. Players apparently took the increased capacity as a welcome mat to further stress the servers, so Blizzard's decided that wasn't a great idea after all. Blizzard even says that it has "dialed down some of [its] earlier changes" as a result.
For the time being, players on these servers are likely to continue experiencing service stability issues and problems with accessibility. That likely means random logouts, queues, and trouble logging in, as well as lag within the game, too. Blizzard is working on it, but as Blizzard has made clear the answer isn't as simple as opening up server capacity. The technology just isn't mean to handle this much traffic. It may be wise to switch to another server.
Speaking of switching to another server, players are surprised that Blizzard has yet to open up transfers on these heavily-impacted servers. Allowing free server transfers off of them would allow guilds and players angry with their service disruption the chance to start somewhere with fewer problems. Perhaps Blizzard prefers to keep as many players centralized as it can, or perhaps it's enjoying the transfer fees. Blizzard did just merge some World of Warcraft servers recently.
The unfortunate reality may be that server issues will continue until some of the returning player base cools off. There are a lot of players putting in a lot of time in World of Warcraft right now. Once they've played most of the content at hand, they'll play less, which is the nature of new MMO content. And there's only so much Blizzard can do otherwise.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands is available now on PC.
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