World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Interview

Massive Gamer Magazine has kicked up an interview with Wrath of the Lich King production director J. Allen Brack about some of the issues that have crept up since the World of Warcraft expansion pack went live.

In a candid interview, Brack ran through many of the controversies that have surrounded the game’s launch. Not the least of which was login queues.

(That’s sort of a challenge, because the vast majority of people are going to buy the game in a short amount of time and then immediately log in,) explained Brack. For them, it’s a question of short term pain versus long term misery. It would be easy for them to turn on dozens of new worlds for players, but Brack pointed out that they didn’t want to create future low-population servers just to make things easier for a few days.

(We’ve got some realms that are very overloaded and we’ve got some realms that have no queues at all and are not even close to queuing,) said Brack. As such, they opened free character transfers from the high population to lower population worlds prior to launch. They also opened a few new servers and have more on hand if necessary.

In the short term though, queues do remain a huge priority for Blizzard. He said that they have meetings every couple hours and constantly make changes to improve the flow of players into the game.