Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this post id like to say I love the game. The devs who poured their heart and soul into making the game: great job. The atmosphere, combat, lore… Its amazing. I can’t wait to delve deeper into it. Which is part of the problem isn’t it? I also want to say that aside from the queue times and the minimal other login issues this launch was surprisingly error free. When you got in the game it was fantastic. Again, that is another part of the problem isn’t it?
Heart of the issue:
You posted server names prior to release.
I know, you had good intentions doing so. You wanted players to form around each other and have communities and hype even BEFORE launch. However that would have happened regardless, just without the server names. To me, a root cause analysis of this problem shows that:
People want to play with their friends,
Their friends all chose a server,
And now nobody wants to transfer because they want to play with their friends(community).
Had you not announced server names prior people would have had to take a few minutes to get a lay of the land population wise. Yes there would still have been hiccups, no launch is without them, but fewer people would have felt such an identity with and affinity for servers such as Valhalla(which in retrospect should have be named for something in lore, as of course, people go with what they are familiar with. All server names should have been equally unfamiliar to help normalize distribution)
Of course, we cannot change that now, but going forward I hope with expansions of this game and newer titles you wish to release you learn these lessons. Blizzard took two releases to get themselves squared away. I hope to see you best that record.
Moving forward, I’m sure you all are astounded at the success of your game and I want to see that success continued. As a player I am a stakeholder in the the success of the game which puts gaming industry in a somewhat unique position of having stakeholders as customers. So to appease both your stakeholders and stakeholders as players, we need quick corrective action. I won’t waste breath, or I suppose finger movements on reiterating in depth the examples posted here, but a quick solution would be allowing more liquidity among the playerbase. For example, I am now softlocked into Takamagahara, I have a level 20 and to simply start a new character and redo the same things is defeating to say the least. Allow us to move between servers freely for a time and allow the population distribution to normalize and then with plenty of warning, allow players to lock in choices. The longer you wait the more entrenched players will be on their servers. So unfortunately quick action is needed here to allow this to be a smooth transition.
To the players, please try to keep the hate and vivitrol to a minimum. We are all upset and you have the right as a paying customer to to express the need for corrective action. We have done so, and now we have to allow them the time to fix the problem. Even in B2B contracts of multimillion dollar amounts, change isn’t instant.
I hope you understand that this comes from a place of altruism. I am a little upset I can’t just hop on and play for an hour at the moment but I have faith this will pass. I am a certified quality technician, so I know even the most catastrophic problems can be overcome with quick and decisive action.
The preceding insight is sent free of charge and deeper and more qualitative analysis can be provided on a consultative/ salaried and/or priority queue basis 