Players dealing with long queues while logging into a World of Warcraft Realm may receive a free character migration from Blizzard.
Character migrations will stay free for the week or until other realms fill up. Blizzard posted about the free migrations through their forums (via Polygon) and is now available when players login through Battle.net accounts. Blizzard detailed the steps to character migration on their support page.
During the 5.4 patch release in 2013, Blizzard connected low population Realms to increase player density. The connected realms didn't permanently merge Realm populations as each player receives identification of their original realm.
Although the World of Warcraft subscriber base far exceeds the player count of other MMORPGs, the studio continues to report declines in active players.
