There will undoubtedly be significant demand for World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery on release, and players are split on how Blizzard should best deal with that.
When the original Classic launched in 2019, players attempting to log in to the servers often found queues of four hours or more. Though this problem lessened with later Classic expansions, it was still present, mainly when the games were in their infancy.
After some months, further problems emerged, this time with many of the servers created to deal with the initial demand subsequently becoming “dead.” Additionally, other servers saw faction imbalances as pronounced as a 99/1 split in favor of the Horde or Alliance.
With Season of Discovery set to be similarly popular, players are debating how best to deal with this issue, with some turning to another MMO for the answer.
New World could provide the solution for Season of Discovery servers
In a post on Reddit, one user suggested that New World had an intelligent solution for both initial demand and dead servers.
Amazon Games’ divisive MMO had an interesting system in place on launch. Essentially, servers are grouped in clusters where their constituent parts can be rolled together if the regular population drops too low. This also enables them to have a lot of servers at launch, though it is important to note that New World also had significant queues when it was released.
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The WoW community was split on whether this was a good idea. Many were quick to commend the OP, with one saying: “This is actually one of the best suggestions to this issue I’ve seen.”
Others were not so keen, saying that the complex system would do very little to prevent Season of Discovery from having issues caused by player behavior: “There is no way this prevents everyone from rolling on whatever the community has decided is going to be the one big server. People are a million times more concerned about ending up on a dead server at all than they are about keeping their name if they end up on a dead server and then get merged into another server.”
Others pointed to recent successes with the Classic Hardcore servers’ increased capacity to suggest that Blizzard has already learned their lessons from the past: “I feel like what they did with the hardcore realms has been pretty successful. They said themselves that these realms hold up to 5x more capacity than Classic ones did at launch, so they didn’t have to put up that many. Would’ve still be nice to have just one realm for each continent.”
Whatever Blizzard’s plans are for the servers, there is not much time left to prevent any major issues. With the full release of Season of Discovery scheduled for November 30, we will find out how successful they have been very soon.
