New Servers: A Month Later
Remember the slew of new US servers that opened about a month ago? Well, a lot of players from other servers jumped on the opportunity to start anew - myself included. The chance to start on a fresh server has been a thrill. No queues, no lag, and no gold farmers. But the servers have already started growing up. Gold and characters are available for purchase on most and queues on my new server have already surpassed those on my old. After weeks of watching the queues increase, I'm starting to realize that this may not be just a passing thing - people aren't just coming to visit the servers just announced or tagged new, they're sticking around to play.
So what does this mean for population balance? I haven't heard anything about queues or lag dropping on older servers - though perhaps people are too busy playing to post about it. Short of establishing draconian policies that force players to one server or another, it doesn't seem like there's much Blizzard can do to normalize server population aside from making new realms and transfer servers attractive options to players. But a month after a major wave of new transfers, new realms, and new hardware, are we seeing improvements - or are the problems just moving from one server to another?
