WoW realm migration

Today my dad asked me

Heard that there were big probs with WoW [World of Warcraft] - too many players. Have you been suffering?

I was chuffed he'd asked, and I thought I'd record my reply for posterity...

Indeed, I had been suffering a month or two back, when the 'realm' (ie server) that my guild played on was overcrowded. The main problem was that there was an upper limit on the number of players who could be online at any one time, so there was a queue to get on.

However Blizzard allowed us to move our characters to a new realm. In fact they allowed escapees from two realms to jump ship and populate a new world. So we've gone from queueing, to an earily quiet and empty world. It used to be that my PC juddered when I walked through the middle of IF ('IronForge', the major city) because of the number of people, spells, pets etc that it had to render. When we first moved over, however, IF was deserted! It's still quiet, which has it's advantages (out in the wilds there's plenty of space and monsters for everyone) and disadvantages (the auction house prices are rather high, slight problems forming groups and not much Horde-Alliance warfare), but numbers are growing.

Excellent game - my mage is lvl 45 now :)