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In a post on the official World of Warcraft forums Shane Dabiri, lead producer of WoW, revealed the third World of Warcraft Battleplan. Unlike the two previous installments, this plan focuses more on upcoming hardware changes than on teasers of future content. In an effort to deal with ongoing server difficulties Blizzard has developed a multifaceted plan which will include hardware upgrades, a focus on individual problem realms, and releasing the much sought after paid character-transfer service to allow easier realm to realm character migration.

Going Retro
The new zones added to the game in The Burning Crusade will increase Azeroth's current land mass by 25 percent. To insure that Azeroth continues to feel vibrant and populated, we will be increasing the player caps on all our realms by the same percentage. The new hardware installed on our 5th and 6th sites will be able to handle this increase in concurrency with some adjustments, but the hardware on our mature sites cannot. Therefore, over the next few months we will also be retrofitting our mature sites with the same top-of-the-line hardware deployed at our new sites. Players won't need the expansion to notice the performance boost this new hardware will bring to these sites.

Upcoming Character-Transfer Service
On top of our efforts to evenly disperse our player population through coordinated realm transfers and migrations, we've begun testing our paid character-transfer feature. Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player's will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag. We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented, so we'll share further details as soon as more information becomes available.

World Of Warcraft Battleplan Vol. 3

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