My realm is dead, No really it is.

[corebit]

I don't know why Blizzard hasn't yet moved WoW to a megaserver model. With the megaserver there's no such thing as dead servers.

And don't give me any of that shit about realm identity/community, it disappeared long ago with connected realms and cross realm-hopping.

[Bosen]

Communicate and coordinate with those that are on.

[Mhyroth]

There are dead / empty realms. There even were dead / empty realms during the peakdays of TBC and WotLK. I don't understand how this is supposed to mean anything.

Don't roll characters on low population realms, play on one of the many dozens of full / high population realms instead. Easy.

A lot of people rolled on those servers when starting out because high populated servers had/have qeues tied to them. I'm sorry but I'm not paying to transfer 10+ toons to a high pop server. Although high pop servers have their positive sides, there's also negative ones tied to them which people can't deny. I will enjoy the release of Legion without qeues and fighting for questmobs/resources the first month of the expansion.
The real-merges was a solution from Blizzard to make realms look more populated, but it failed. It's not the player's responsibility (not entirely) to solve that problem where everyone flocks to 5 servers. It's to the company who wants to make their customers satisfied and keep playing to do this (my opinion).
This is a problem which evolved over years, to tell people to f*ck off now and take the full blame/responsibility themselves and pay over 200€ to play with other people is not what people see as enjoyable or possible in a lot of cases.
It was predictable this would happen and Blizzard knew this, yet they anticipated too late and not enough to solve problems like the OP has.

Personally I don't mind playing on a smaller server, since it feels more like a community where everyone knows each other, I don't have to worry about questmobs getting tagged 24/7 (with realm hop scum this happens more often now) and a lot of other things, yet I won't deny there's also downsides which I have to accept exist.

[Thetruth1400]

Those numbers are downright sad OP, even if you did a /who and it was a /who 100 only.

There is a real reason they stopped reporting their sub numbers and it isn't because they're a false metric for the health of the game. They stopped reporting the numbers because this game has been on a downward spiral since Cataclysm, and WoD was the biggest flop for WoW, if not Blizzard, to date.

I just did a log in to check on my realm, which used to be so full it sometimes had a queue. It's not labeled as low pop and breaks down as follows.

Shaman - 19
Priest - 24
Warrior - 13
Rogue - 18
Paladin - 32
Hunter - 38
Mage - 19
Monk - 12
Warlock - 28
Druid - 33
Death Knight - 15

Total - 251. That includes all the people that are in my server cluster as there were at least 4 different realms showing up in my lists, as well as people of all levels and people everywhere, including battlegrounds.

Considering the server I was on was a Horde dominated server and I checked those numbers on Horde side, even being gracious and doubling the numbers for Alliance, that means that server cluster not just my server, is only managing 502 people at a peak time of 11:30 PM EST on a Friday evening.

Frankly, it's a downright pathetic. The game is dead, how anyone can argue it's not is beyond me. It's not buried yet, but it's really time it is. The "talent" that Blizzard has running the show for WoW is mediocre at best, and I honestly hope Legion is the final nail in the coffin for this game.

Don't roll characters on low population realms, play on one of the many dozens of full / high population realms instead. Easy.

You're obviously oblivious to the state this game is in. Currently there are 7 "New Player" realms, 199 Low Pop, 11 Medium Pop, and 9 High Pop (Absolutely no Full Pop) realms right now, at 11:30 PM EST on a Friday night, which is pretty much peak time.

For you to even try to imply that it was a person's choice to play on a low pop realm or that "But Vanilla - WotLK era also had low pop realms" is just a show of how ignorant to the issue you really are. There are exactly no, none, nada, zero, zilch full pop realms. There are exactly nine high pop realms. Your claims of "dozens of full / high pop realms" is baseless.

The game is dead, and it isn't the fault of the players that they're stuck on dead realms, it's the fault of a company that got lazy and tried to offer next to nothing to do, but then have the audacity to sit back and go, "Yep, WoD was a success."

[corebit]

Frankly, it's a downright pathetic. The game is dead, how anyone can argue it's not is beyond me. It's not buried yet, but it's really time it is. The "talent" that Blizzard has running the show for WoW is mediocre at best, and I honestly hope Legion is the final nail in the coffin for this game.

Why do you ignore the obvious fact that it's the tail end of an expansion with Legion right around the corner? It happened with every other expansion, people go AFK and will return when there's new stuff to do.

The "WoW is dying" horse has been beaten to dust particles and gets repeated right around these times it's so predictable.

[Mullet Man]

Why do you ignore the obvious fact that it's the tail end of an expansion with Legion right around the corner? It happened with every other expansion, people go AFK and will return when there's new stuff to do.

The "WoW is dying" horse has been beaten to dust particles and gets repeated right around these times it's so predictable.

But it doesn't have to be this way.
Blizzard says they have better server technology.
They should merge many, many of the smaller servers into a mega server with a steady population of 10k online.
Having tons of other players around is an amazing feeling.

[Barnfargen]

.

For you to even try to imply that it was a person's choice to play on a low pop realm or that "But Vanilla - WotLK era also had low pop realms" is just a show of how ignorant to the issue you really are. There are exactly no, none, nada, zero, zilch full pop realms. There are exactly nine high pop realms. Your claims of "dozens of full / high pop realms" is baseless.

The game is dead, and it isn't the fault of the players that they're stuck on dead realms, it's the fault of a company that got lazy and tried to offer next to nothing to do, but then have the audacity to sit back and go, "Yep, WoD was a success."

I remember WoD launch having long queue times and Blizzard fixing this issue by increasing the realm pop max by a large margin. That seems like it would adjust all realms down so perhaps medium size realms are what would have been considered high in the past. Don't take this response as me saying WoW is as populated as it was in the past but I also refuse to jump on the WoW is dead team as well.

[corebit]

But it doesn't have to be this way.
Blizzard says they have better server technology.
They should merge many, many of the smaller servers into a mega server with a steady population of 10k online.
Having tons of other players around is an amazing feeling.

Megaserver would be a good thing, that I can agree with you.

[Thetruth1400]

Why do you ignore the obvious fact that it's the tail end of an expansion with Legion right around the corner? It happened with every other expansion, people go AFK and will return when there's new stuff to do.

Sure, the end of expansion lull has existed since WotLK, but with WoD these numbers are downright off the scales bad.
- WotLK, the sub numbers dropped from 12 million to 11 million for the lull. They returned to 12 million for Cataclysm.
- Cataclysm went from 12 million at peak to 9.1 million, but bounced back to 10 million for MoP launch.
- MoP went from 10 million to 6.8, but bounced back to 10 million for WoD.
- WoD lost half of their sub base in the first 6 months of the expansion, then another 100K right after their last content patch, then they just up and went "we're not going to report them anymore." Judging by the fact that they lost 1.6 million per quarter when they were actually offering content, it's safe to say they're not exactly holding onto the subs in the year without content that players have been in.

For you to even try to compare the actual lulls to what WoD is is just laughable. WoD is a flop, and even it's best offerings of content couldn't hold onto the subs, yet you still think that this is just a normal end of expansion lull we're going through. You want to talk about ignoring obvious facts, well there's a whole pile for you.

[Bosen]

Megaserver would be a good thing, that I can agree with you.

I'm sure some would then claim WoW was dead again.

[Mullet Man]

I'm sure some would then claim WoW was dead again.

I'm guessing this is the reason they don't do it.
It would look bad to investors/stockholders.
Overall, it would be good for the game.
But would probably have a short term negative impact on the stock price as the uniformed panic and sell.

[Deleted]

I'm sure some would then claim WoW was dead again.

I am sure it won't be the 99% WoW fanboys who mocked and hyped server merges into a capitulation for dying MMORPG in first place, with some of the worst offenders here in this forum now finding themself in defense and denial themself, trying to play everything down and feign ignorance over the declining population, pulling up 'expansion cycle' excuses, glossing over the fact that everyone already is aware of that and its is bad even for that or pointless excuses like 'it is still more popular than any other MMO' like as if that is relevant .

[Bosen]

I am sure it won't be the 99% WoW fanboys who mocked and hyped server merges into a capitulation for dying MMORPG in first place, with some of the worst offenders here in this forum now finding themself in defense and denial themself, trying to play everything down and feign ignorance over the declining population, pulling up 'expansion cycle' excuses, glossing over the fact that everyone already is aware of that and its is bad even for that or pointless excuses like 'it is still more popular than any other MMO' like as if that is relevant .

So you are saying that you don't like the way others here have addressed the issue of server merges in other MMOs,and feel some WoW fans have mocked other MMO server merges as something negative?

What other boards do you frequent?

I'm curious because any time I see people toss out "99% of whoever does whatever" kind of posts,it seems to me that someone's coming from a place of feeling and not fact.

It can feel like a majority of people are jerks when the most obnoxious are screaming in your face,if you know what I mean.

[Deleted]

Reviews and first looks so far have all been generally positive about the expac

Just like WoD, and look at how that turned out.

[Deleted]

My realm is so very, very dead. It's not even connected to any other realm. All alone. In darkness.

It's been marked for "New Players" for ages, but I don't really see it working, I think one new raiding guild has formed in the past 6 months - not enough to replace all those 25 that have folded or migrated to other realms. There's not a single guild with 13/13M on my realm. There's no PvP community. It is probably the saddest little realm in the entirety of WoW.

Connected realms was such a shoddy job by Blizzard. They should really offer free transfers to/from (mostly from, but let's face it, they'd never do that) here, but that doesn't seem to be on the cards either.

I don't mind WoD being shitty and I can even live with the content gap, but Blizzard's shady "added value service" pricing really makes me quite angry. Fucking modern day piracy is what it is. Fucking bloodsuckers.

[Glorious Leader]

You are BS'ing yourself if you think there was ever anything positive to be gained from those numbers.
No, you simply want to crow about how the game is dying and blizzard took away the most visible measure that you could claim as proof of that.

Blizzard seemed to think their was lots positive about the number when they spiked up to 10 million in wod and were media darlings about the while thing. How fucking convenient..

[ComputerNerd]

Blizzard seemed to think their was lots positive about the number when they spiked up to 10 million in wod and were media darlings about the while thing. How fucking convenient..

And when those numbers were positive some in the the community still went out of their way to bash blizzard.
Those are never going to be a useful metric for discussion.

In fact nothing is ever going to be.

[Deleted]

on a dead server? Start a movie "I am legend".

[hulkgor]

I love how people brush off the severe issue of low populated realms (and there are too many of those) to a "/who doesnt work well".

Sure buddies.

Blizzard has way too many realms for the active population, and apart from a couple dozen healthy ones, the vast majority are completely on the shitter, and x-realm zones isn't what's going to save them. And the people stuck on them either pack up and migrate their characters (which will be more than a couple at this stage of the game) by coughing up 20\40\60\80$, which can be a prohibitive amount for certain players, or they just endure it, eventually leaving due to the poor quality of their environment.

So yea, either properly merge realms in a decent fashion, or offer\force free migrations out of them, eventually close some off.

There is no reason to have so many realms right now. Even with the population spikes at new expansions, most of the realms are ghost towns.

[ComputerNerd]

Sure they are, the spike in WoD showed that players are still loyal to Blizzard, all they need to do is provide a game people actually want to play and those numbers will spike again. I'll be very surprised if it doesnt spike massively in Legion, but what matters is the patches following release, we may not have sub numbers anymore, but a dead realm is a dead realm.

And even during the peaks some realm populations declined, purely because of the community.
So a realm being "dead" is not anything new, and can't be attributed to sub numbers definitively without more context than that one.
I am not arguing that sub numbers are not low, but going by the narrow context of sub numbers alone being to blame and therefore blizzard are the sole cause is just wrong.
Look at the impressions anyone else would get if they look at any forums, any potential new player.