Being on a full server with the launch of Mists of Pandaria has been a nightmare for probably thousands of players. Blizzard have had ongoing free character migration to try and ease the pain, here are some options for those interested.
Now, I have to admit I got rather upset about logging into Outland and being over 3000th in the queue, I couldn’t play the expansion when it launched and had trouble doing so the day after too, so I made use of the free character migration and have no regrets. However, that being said I didn’t have a guild that I was particularly loyal to and can see how things like this could be on the negative side for some players.
It’s not really fair for players to be forced to migrate and no longer be able to play with their guild mates or stay on the servers they love and should they transfer for the first period of time when these queues are a problem and want to go back to their old servers, they’d have to pay to do so, which is even more unfair. In my opinion Blizzard should have known that this problem woukd exist and made provision for it. Just look at the mess with the launch of Diablo III and people having trouble to log into the game they paid to play, but couldn’t. This is where I can understand the overflow in Guild wars 2, meaning there weren’t any queues, people could log in and jam their game until there was a spot on the sever for them to play.
This leaves me with the question of, when will other MMO’s adopt this much better option? One might argue that, that kind of coding might take some time to convert a game like WoW to that option, but it’s got to happen at some point in time right? If you know that in approximately X amount of time you’d like to start developing on an expansion, it should be rather obvious to start working on solutions for full servers and server queues. Hopefully we’ll see some improvement to these kind of situations in the future, but until then, yes free migration is okay for some, but no it isn’t a solution and shouldn’t be accepted as one.
Anyhow, here’s a link to the free character migration option available in WoW at the moment.
Last Updated: October 4, 2012
