UPDATE: The migrations and downtime have been rescheduled for Thursday, April 6 at 12:01 AM PST.
Very little of this makes sense to me — mostly that 20+ realms have to be downed for (up to) 24 hours with four other realms migrating to new server hardware — but maybe it’s something that only hardware nerds would understand. Condolences and congrats as follows, per Blizzard drone, Ordinn:
First off, we’d like to thank everyone who helped us test our new hardware on the public test realms over the last month. The testing allowed us to move forward ahead of schedule with the improvements outlined at the beginning of March: (link). We were able to bring the new World of Warcraft site live more than a week early, which in turn allowed us to open 12 new realms over the last two weeks.
The next step in our ongoing efforts to increase game performance is to migrate a set of realms to the new site this Wednesday, April 5, beginning at 12:01 AM PST. The migration could take up to 24 hours to complete, so we will be crediting players with active accounts who had characters on these realms as of 12:01 PM Monday, April 3. The realms that will be affected are listed below.
The goal with this realm migration is to further balance our player population between multiple World of Warcraft sites. Our estimates about the noticeable impact of this individual procedure are conservative, but it is nevertheless a necessary step that will then allow us to move forward with the subsequent portions of our overall plan.
Following the migration, we plan to next week offer character transfers from existing realms to fresh realms located at the new World of Warcraft site. These transfers will allow additional players on realms that had been experiencing intermittent performance issues to continue their character progress on the new hardware. This will in effect help us further disperse our population and continue improving performance on our most severely affected realms.
We’ll provide you with additional status updates as often as possible as we continue implementing the plan we announced this past January (link).
Realms that will be down but not migrate:
Aggramar
Andorhal
Anetheron
Burning Blade
Burning Legion
Dentarg
Duskwood
Earthen Ring
Eonar
Eredar
Executus
Gilneas
Gorefiend
Haomarush
Kargath
Laughing Skull
Lightning’s Blade
Llane
Malygos
Scilla
Shadow Moon
Steamwheedle Cartel
Thunderhorn
Thunderlord
Turalyon
Ysera
Ysondre
ZuluhedRealms that will migrate:
Archimonde
Dalaran
Khadgar
Mal’Ganis
Yes, that’s in a little less than 12 hours from now. Ordinn didn’t recommend this, but if I played on one of those realms, I’d empty game mailboxes, pull my auctions, make sure all my e-souls were firmly attached to their e-bodies and I’d log off early.
Accidents will happen and screenshots, petitions and emails have never saved me.
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF THEIR HARDWARE PROBLEMS!
*sigh* Whew, I feel better. I don’t know why I (or anyone else) puts up with this. I just don’t.
I’ll try to be more constructive next time.
KK
Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side..
Sheesh, Duskwood and Kargath are on the list. I created a new toon on DUSKWOOD (NEW realm) to get rid of crappy performance on KARGATH…!!!!
WoW is eating my brain!!!
Idea: STOP with the new content and FIX yer hardware ye Scallywags! YARG!
if you want an explanation why 24 realms have to be down, for the time, its because the 4 servers are most likely sharing server clusters with those.
(as in 8 servers / cluster before the transfer and 7 servers / cluster after the transfer).
It’s a very sensible thing to do, and something they should have done back in June 05….
Totally agreed that it should have been done LONG before the Christmas Holiday of 2006. Did they think that the game wouldn’t be flooded again with nooblets?
If so, they were SOOOOOO wrong.
KK