I don’t really know what to think.

I don’t really understand how a Producer’s letter for a mmorpg can start with this resonant objective:

Dispersing the Population

I mean, it’s just wickedly wrong.

I know the reasons, the situation and all the rest. I know what it means and why they talk about this.

But think to what a mmorpg really should be. There’s obviously something that just isn’t working as it should.

Something at the core.

At least this is followed by something better:

The new zones added to the game in The Burning Crusade will increase Azeroth’s current land mass by 25 percent. To insure that Azeroth continues to feel vibrant and populated, we will be increasing the player caps on all our realms by the same percentage.

EDIT: I was thinking about this. They are adding another starting zone for each race so the “space” for the entry levels will be upped of 1/3, which means 33%. I also guess that there will be less content in percentual connecting the early and late game, leaving more of it for the 60-70 range and the endgame.

Now if we think about the expansion it’s quite obvious that there won’t be many reasons to reroll new characters. I suppose that the large majority of players, or returning players, will log in their level 60s and rush to 70. This means that 90% of the newbie characters as the expansion launches will be of the new race. So we will have an overload of one noob zone while the other three are deserted. In the longer term all four will return to their semi-empty status.

The rest of the players will be once again packed at the cap, or moving toward the cap. Considering that 90% of this endgame is trapped in private rooms, the percent of the land mass added won’t really matter much. There will be another temporary overload and then another stagnation at level 70.

Considering that the current cap is around 3200 players the 25% increase will bring it up to 4000.

—
They also say that this summer they’ll finally open the character transfer service and they hint they’ll use this as another way to balance the servers.

Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player’s will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag.

I’ll return on these arguments because they are of a general importance and Blizzard’s workaround is lame at best.

Anyway, it’s quite sad to read a producer’s letter just about hardware issues.

“Yes, two years have passed and we are still swamped trying to unfuck a fundamentally flawed infrastructure.”