In World of Warcraft, the temporarily reduced server capacities have been restored to normal levels.
The first half of the day in World of Warcraft was characterized by maintenance work for us Europeans today. In the morning, the game was unreachable, and around 1 PM there was another server restart. Thanks to some hardware upgrades and a new instancing technique, the server capacity could now be increased back to its normal levels. Temporarily, the population cap had been lowered to cope with the server issues that arose with Warlords of Draenor. This led to unusually long queues on smaller and medium servers, and extremely long queues on the larger servers.
According to community manager Bashiok, Blizzard is satisfied with the new measures and is closely monitoring how things develop while peak values are being reached in Europe on Saturday evening and the action is slowly starting in North America.
Currently, the first results are encouraging and work is ongoing to further stabilize the servers and possibly increase capacity. Additionally, free server transfers are being offered and further ones are being considered.
However, there are problems with a group of servers in Europe. There have been issues with server, instance, and garrison crashes. Which realms exactly this concerns is not disclosed by Blizzard. They do mention, however, that this likely has different causes than sheer population density. The density during Warlords of Draenor is extremely high across all areas. The influx is there. They are now investigating the problems of the European problem realms to ensure that they do not occur elsewhere.
