I rread the post and a number of folks are complaining about faction balance. It had me wondering if WarHammer will learn from WoW's experiences and perform some kind of faction balancing controls on it's servers.

Tobold, have you tried the new Lotro patch yet?
 

From the comments you have excerpted Drysc seems to have entirely missed the point. In fact he seems to be thinking about the companies perspective rather than the customers.

This is most telling in his use of "queuing" as a measure of when a server is OK. From the companies perspective queuing is a good thing because it means the server is full. A customer doesn't see queues as a good thing. The customer would be happy to play on a sever with only 30% capacity as long as they could get groups and the economy was fairly active.

A server stuffed full of level 70's will keep Blizzard very happy but won't help you get groups for your level 30.

This is a problem common to many games and I really think the answer (from a customer perspective) requires some novel thinking along the lines you suggested previously e.g. cross server grouping (at least for instances) and possibly even a cross server AH.

I don't know why more companies don't play around with the Guild Wars model where servers are created as demand grows and players can move freely between servers. It is actually win-win for both company and players. Players can group with whoever they want whenever they want and server population is automatically sorted.
 

Well even on those middle-end realm could happen large problems if Horde side is unpopulated. Having 600 active hordies on my realm makes it impossible to raid beyond Kara if you are not in top 3 guilds, which pinch all top players from less 1337 guilds.
 

Either Drysc is an idiot, or Blizzard and/or Vivendi are stupid to actually want servers at "near capacity". This late in the game, with other alternatives already out there or on the horizon, lengthy queues could drive away enough customers to make Blizzard realize "near capacity" servers are not a good thing for their customers, and something that's not good for your customers is NOT GOOD for your company.
 

well having done it both ways. I'll take ques and being able to form a pug in a reasonable time over no ques and spending hours trying to form a pug any day.

One is annoying till you get logged in. the other just ruins entire blocks of playtime.
 

If people enjoy the single/solo game, rather than the group game, then having smaller populations is a good thing.
If people want to group a lot, then high population servers are best.

When I am playing my alt (lv 44), I prefer not to see any other players when I'm grinding mobs. I want to be alone in the game world!

When I am playing my main, I don't want to do solo quests any more - I want to group and go to heroics and raid dungeons.

Bit of a dichotomy: my alt wants an empty server, but my main wants a busy server.
 

It's a simple issue of "the grass is always greener on the other side".

I can't tell you how many people leave our medium-population server because it sucks, blah blah blah. They transfer to another server and realize it's terrible.
 

Blizzard wants servers NEAR capacity, not AT capacity. In a perfect situation, every server would be getting to 95% full every night.
 

The problem with servers at Near Capacity though, especially if you're looking at a "per evening" basis, is not everyone logs on every evening. So if you have servers at 95% capacity every night, you're not looking at 95% of the population being online, you're looking at maybe 80% of the population (maybe even less, maybe 70%, or less still). So come the weekend when the other 20%-30% want to log in, they push the server passed 100% Full to 120% or more, which means queues.

And a Full server is going to be laggy, which means people may get lagged out and DCd, and then it's back into the queue again. Or they get lag-killed, or find themselves competing for Mobs to farm or kill for quests. All of which will be frustrating.

As I said, Blizzard's perfect situation of a 95% capacity server is perfect only for Blizzard, but it's not really perfect for them either because frustrated customers are bad for business, especially when they have alternatives available, and alternatives are becoming available.

I'd say in a perfect situation every server should be getting to 95% during peak times on weekends only, and whatever the population gets to during the week is irrelevant.
 

I honestly think a lifetime subscription would solve all these problems.
 

Don't particularly like the blue reaction there. Got curious and checked the raiding progress of US realms. The people who reported that their server is above 70 others at rank 150 on wowjitsu. But if you do look in the raiding scene does look grim for alliance, only one alliance guild with any sizeable progress into SSC/TK. That is pretty poor.

I really wonder why blizz doesn't merge? Maybe because they don't like what it signals?

Or they know they get a huge boost with WotLK and then need the capacity possible?
 

Blizzard isn't missing the point on server capacity. If we ignore the skewed level bracket balance for a second, the optimal situation for both Blizzard and the player is a server that's at near-capacity at all times. The player gets the maximum amount of people to play with and doesn't have to suffer about perofrmance issues, and Blizzard gets the optimal use from their hardware.

While cross-server instancing or instancing everything like in Guild Wars might seem attractive at first, those solutions are not without their own problems. Solving them would require major overhauls to pre-existing architecture and code, so I doubt that we'll be seeing those implemented into the existing game.
 

I dissagree with Capn John. The times that server capacity is relevant is not the weekend but peak times during the week. That's really when you see problems (if any). A lot more people play during that time than the weekend where people either have other things to do or play at different times during the day.

Almost every time I have had a queue it's been on the weekday peak time and only just every once and awhile on the weekend. And even than it was usually Sunday night which meant it was predictable.
 

If Blizzard says that the servers are ideal, then I trust them. They have the billion dollar MMO and everyone else commenting doesn't.

They know how to run a game to maximize profits, which in turn means that people are having fun and willing to pay money.