Blue News for Jan. 7th: Population Balance, Transfers, and Theorycrafting

Theorycrafting with PTR numbers
We pay attention to player-generated numbers, but you must admit that if we took all player-generated numbers as gospel that the game would end up in a pretty funky state.

Your build will nearly always be behind ours, even in beta and on the PTR. We get the benefit of seeing the combined effects of many changes at once, including bug fixes. To estimate the effect that changes will have, you have to do just that — estimate. Some players can still generate excellent numbers, and others, whether through mailicious intent or just because they forgot to consider something, do not.

But if we are wrong, I have no problem admitting we’re wrong. We were wrong about Elemental shamans — they are lower than what we thought they would be. We were wrong about warlocks — they are probably too fragile in PvP. If we nerf hunters too much, we will fix them in later patches. But we can’t be so terrified of making mistakes that we don’t make changes when we think they are warranted. (Source)

Paid character transfers blocked on some realms
The primary goal right now is to reduce the most severe queues on our realms. At its peak concurrency Dalaran saw over a 400 person queue last night. This isn’t the highest queue across all US realms by any means. With that said, allowing transfers to the realm would have a greater negative impact on all players of Dalaran, than allowing Horde to transfer to Dalaran would have a positive impact.

At the largest gap last night between the Horde and Alliance populations of Dalaran, the Horde made up for roughly 40% of the total realm population to the Alliance’s 60%. While faction balance is a concern for all realms, overall population and realm queues have the better part of our attention at the moment, particularly as is the case for Dalaran.

Transfers may be reopened to Dalaran if and when the realm is no longer experiencing exceptional wait times at peak hours every day. (Source)

Balancing realm population
The answer at this time is not to provide experience incentives for players to transfer. We are reviewing realm populations, wait times, and faction balances at the moment to determine what solutions will work best. We’ll provide additional updates when they are available.

[...] We’re looking to open up free transfers for a number of high-population PVP realms to low-population PVP realms as soon as the request goes through the appropriate people. We would also like to make a new PVE realm available and open it up for free transfers from a number of high-population PVE realms. Lastly, we’re looking to open up free transfers to Gundrak from the high-population Oceanic PVP realms. (Source)