Someone says we will know it is the beginning of the end of World of Warcraft when server migrations begin. However a BP responds as follows (and as you'd expect!):
Personally, I would say probably not for a while. At least not at as long as we continue to hit what looks to me like new concurrency records, and probably sometime after one of our largest population concerns ceases to be that many realms just have too many people on them.
Not that I need to justify it, just throwing in my own observations, but many people have limited views and thus incorrect perceptions on the status of player base size. The fact that we haven't opened new realms continues to be, I would guess, the main contributor.
If you've been around long enough you'll remember the large hardware upgrades we did about half a year before Burning Crusade when realms were down for something like four or so days. Those upgrades allowed and continue to allow us to pump up the population caps on the realms, something we couldn't really do before. So while populations rise we sort of give some head room as we go. Of course eventually, ie now, we start to see the end of the tunnel (the landmasses can only support so much) and open free transfers as needed. There are of course also realms which would be considered low population in comparison, but aside from literally a handful of realms (I could count them on one hand), every other realm has a population that would have been considered high to overpopulated before the launch of Burning Crusade.
