Ellis, Senior Game Producer for World of Warcraft, made a statement earlier that Blizzard is completing approximately 10,000 character transfers per hour. This was an unforeseen limitation, as many players attempted to transfer their characters as soon as the realms unlocked, creating a long queue time.
Blizzard has made an official statement on the matter, stating that the character transfer system is “very, very, very busy”, and they suggest not logging into any character you have queued up for a transfer to avoid errors from occuring.
Hey folks,
We just wanted to give everyone an update and reassurance as we head into the night, the character transfer system is… busy. Very, very, very busy. Our client and the system doesn’t handle this level of busy very well so as many of you are aware you’re seeing various error messages. We want to assure you that we are still successfully transferring many, many thousands of characters per hour and no data is being lost.
The most helpful thing you can do for the system at this stage is avoid logging into any character you have queued up for a transfer. The transfer code needs to acquire a “lock” on your character data to proceed and it cannot do this if the character is logged in, it will also slowly retry less and less often to protect itself from… itself. What we’re seeing right now is a massive backlog of characters that the system can’t proceed on.
We believe at this time the vast majority of transfers will process without issue over night once folks log out and incoming requests subside, we thank you for your patience and we’ll keep you updated.
