So why has blizzard stopped connecting servers togheter?

[Lilija]

Cross-realm Mythic out the gate ruins the sense of server progression. People often respond "huehue server progression doesn't exist anymore" when I mention this but it does mean something to a good number of guilds. It also opens the door for predatory guild recruitment tactics and feeder guilds a la TBC-era. It even has the potential to make organized PuG raiding a viable alternative to guild raiding.

TBC era recruitment happened because of gearing restrictions and that if you wanted to completely fresh players or a coming back one, you would have to spend tons of time to gear them up - this isn't the case now.

As for server progression. I'm quite convinced, that if you asked Mythic community what they care more about: realm progression/identity or easier recruitment the vast majority will chose the 2nd option. For example Polish raiding community was for a long time more interested with Polish guilds ranking rather than server rankings. Nowadays, all Polish Mythic guilds has been forced on EU-Burning Legion Horde side anyway. We were the last guild that tried to stay Alliance and smaller server.

I would assume for international community it matters slightly less since they can chose between few more servers. But with smaller sub numbers, the situation will get worse before it get better when it comes to recruitment within your own server.

It'd be great for dead/dying realms who have trouble fetching the requisite number of skilled players for high-end Mythic raiding but I think there are solutions to the problem which do not involve cross-realm Mythic off the bat.

The others solution would be to make transfers free if you haven't transfered for longer periods of time. Having to pay money to transfer to a low pop realm and then realize that the guild didn't work out prevents a lot of people of trying to find the guild most suitable for them. Instead, what happens is that people focus on few realm/faction combinations with decent raiding population and the majority of servers die. And connecting them doesn't work at all. My old realm got connected at the end of MoP and nothing has changed for any better except for AH becoming more messy :P So while my guild really enjoyed the server itself (it was nice and peacefull) and most of us were long time Alliance players, we had to transfer to another server and change faction in order to continue to exist. While there were people potentially interested in joining us, having to change both realm and often faction stopped them from it. Afaik, noone on our old server is doing Mythic raids at this point.

So basicly, I would welcome any change that would help people play with people they want to play w/o worrying about the transfer/faction change costs (in some countries this fee is quite significant)

[Magnosh]

Examples? If that is truly the case open a ticket and get it on their radar.

Grim Batol and Aggra for example.

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Might want to reread the 6.2.3 notes ...

Cross-Realm Mythic Raiding

Cross-Realm raiding has been enabled for Hellfire Citadel on Mythic difficulty. You’ll now be able to join with friends or fill that last raid spot to take on the most difficult encounters in Warlords of Draenor.


As for guilds, they aren't really needed since Group Finder and RealID features means you can do all content from any realm.

LOL

So you are saying that you will have a stable group out of randoms every raiding night that you added in the past to your Bnet or that you just pugged. Sounds like you never leaded a guild trying to progress and never faced attendance issue nor insta leavers while progressing with pugs....

[MrKnubbles]

Maybe they don't need to merge anymore.

[Mad_Murdock]

Maybe they don't need to merge anymore.

When our two servers merged, the population went back up to 1600 alliance and 1400 Horde on during prime time, which was roughly what our single servers was at, at the end of Wrath. After the 6 month mark, those numbers have dropped steadily. Now it's been a pretty steady 600A/400H for the past 6 months or so. Absolute best case, Legion brings that number back up to 1600/1400, but I'd say highly unlikely and if so, I seriously doubt it for more than 6 months.

Obviously some logistics to consider, but if they aren't planning mega servers soon, I'd like to see our server have 2-3 even lower pop servers added. The overall wow population isn't going back up, it's only going to get smaller. I'm a little disappointed they haven't addressed this already.

[Themanintobuildafire]

I don't feel confident that people are going to come back to WoW in massive numbers.

I am not sure how long I will stay subbed. The game is just getting stale and boring. It is the same old thing, and after 10+ years, that formula just gets stale.

If it wasn't for free money with the garrison I'd have unsubbed months ago. There won't be free gold in Legion...so what will keep people subbed?

My server was PACKED 3 years ago. My friend's list was like 30+ 3 years ago. I barely have 1-2 friends online now. My server is pretty damn empty. Wed/Thur gets the most traffic for raid and then the weekend might be busy 6-10pm...it sucks.

[alexkeren]

Grim Batol and Aggra for example.

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LOL

So you are saying that you will have a stable group out of randoms every raiding night that you added in the past to your Bnet or that you just pugged. Sounds like you never leaded a guild trying to progress and never faced attendance issue nor insta leavers while progressing with pugs....

Somebody failed reading comprehension and logic classes in school.

[xChurch]

Maybe because people stopped complaining? At least I don't see nearly as many complaints now as I did before they started merging some.

[Magnosh]

Somebody failed reading comprehension and logic classes in school.

Yup, you did I guess!

I left school quite some time ago, also did my Master's degree after the regular University too so now I don't have any contact with a teacher but since you probably haven't left school you might want to ask for help there. Your teachers might be able to help you getting better at arguing and backing up your points without resorting to some lame posts like that one that end up saying 0 (zero) in your favor and just downing your poor line of thought even more.

When you post something as this:

Might want to reread the 6.2.3 notes ...

Cross-Realm Mythic Raiding

Cross-Realm raiding has been enabled for Hellfire Citadel on Mythic difficulty. You’ll now be able to join with friends or fill that last raid spot to take on the most difficult encounters in Warlords of Draenor.


As for guilds, they aren't really needed since Group Finder and RealID features means you can do all content from any realm.

You start by talking about how possible Cross Realm Mythic is and you lead your point to the conclusion that Guilds aren't really needed nowadays with Group Finder and RealID, this is using comprehension and reading skills of what you wrote. Logic helps me, and anyone who reads what you wrote, to assume you have no idea what your talking about, hence my reply to you above.

Mythic raiding is something that requires commitment of the same players each raiding day specially for certain boss's. You can't expect to have progress done with random players you get from Group Finder that come one day and either never show up or just hop in casually, players that do not stay to improve after a wipe, players who refuse to join Teamspeak or players who want personal loot or they leave.

Plus, your are also lacking some degree of information, Mythic raiding is NOT going to be cross realm at the start of that tier, so probably only after its relevance is nearly gone or after nerfs/player's buffs. The issue with dead realms or really low population realms is that recruiting and building a team for Mythic Raiding will be extremely hard and doing progress on these conditions is near impossible so for the purpose we are talking here Mythic is not open for when its needed so you can consider it doesn't exist until the tier is no longer relevant and so is progressing on it.

[MoanaLisa]

People should really begin to imagine that cross-realm guilds will be implemented someday. Perhaps in Legion. They've talked about it a little bit but there's some tech that needs to be done to make that happen. If and when that happens--granted that this is pure speculation but more sensible than a lot of what I've seen--there's little need to ever merge or connect realms. It's a cleaner and simpler solution, even if it takes some time, than the hassle of merging realms with all the hassles of names, etc., connecting realms which watching that happen from a distance a couple of years ago seemed to be a pretty painful process with a remarkable amount of data cleaning and delays required.

Some of you will call BS and that's fine. No one has yet explained why Blizzard would make as much of the game cross-realm as it is now because it's an inconvenient fact that doesn't play into the "Blizzard is greedy and wants to collect realm transfer money" agenda. Again, if that was true, why would they go to the trouble of connecting realms and doing cross-realm stuff in the first place? If they are working on the tech for cross-realm guilds why would they bother doing anything else?

[Alvito]

Because the servers they connected have stable realms?

Not even close. In NA you have about 6 or 7 busy realms then it drops off rapidly after that.

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People should really begin to imagine that cross-realm guilds will be implemented someday. Perhaps in Legion. They've talked about it a little bit but there's some tech that needs to be done to make that happen. If and when that happens--granted that this is pure speculation but more sensible than a lot of what I've seen--there's little need to ever merge or connect realms. It's a cleaner and simpler solution, even if it takes some time, than the hassle of merging realms with all the hassles of names, etc., connecting realms which watching that happen from a distance a couple of years ago seemed to be a pretty painful process with a remarkable amount of data cleaning and delays required.

Some of you will call BS and that's fine. No one has yet explained why Blizzard would make as much of the game cross-realm as it is now because it's an inconvenient fact that doesn't play into the "Blizzard is greedy and wants to collect realm transfer money" agenda. Again, if that was true, why would they go to the trouble of connecting realms and doing cross-realm stuff in the first place? If they are working on the tech for cross-realm guilds why would they bother doing anything else?

We can imagine that all we want, the fact they still gouge people for server transfers and things of that nature and their slow nature on this for years says otherwise. They still gate things behind servers. Say you want to do current mythic raiding at the start of a tier, better be on a busy server because if you aren't tough crap. I am sure further merging is headache for many reasons. Just to do what they did in MoP took them almost a year to execute completely. Their feet dragging on this, whatever the reason might be, is killing the lower end servers though. Look at the raiding progression on the lower half of servers almost each tier a top raid from each server vanishes. It isn't that they just all quit or the raid broke up they give up on the nightmare it is to recruit on the ghost town servers and leave. You can see them popping up on other servers or fracturing onto multiple ones. The the poor bastards left behind are still on what was a hard to pve on server that just got worse and the snowball keeps on rolling.

[ComputerNerd]

Because people already complain that they cant go offline in a MMORPG. So having so many people on your server will sure bring some whinners to the forums.

MMO is about the access to that number of players, in the shared spaces.
It is not about a requirement to be avaiable for others all the time.
If people would actually pay attention to, and abide by a desire to not be disturbed then such a feature would not be in such demand.

Not by a long shot. Some of them may be, but a lot of other connected dead realms are still dead.

If some are dead but otherwise similar to the live ones then that is due to factors outside of blizzard's control, the players.
The very cause of a single realm originally either dying or thriving.

[Alvito]

Remember the "cyclical nature of WoW subscriptions"? Well, they will NOT connect any servers now, cause Legion launches soonish and they expect a player return. Plus it's the end of expansion and many ppl unsubbed waiting for Legion. See if your connected server gets back up at pre-patch and stop whining for now.

So what if those connected servers even after being connected were still low population and dead? Should those people hold on to your snarky hope and just wait it out?

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That's temporary. Nobody cares about HFC anymore either, we look towards the future, i.e. Legion Mythic raiding, and those on low pop realms will yet again go through hell just because Blizzard cannot properly connect realms.

Good news you can reroll and go through the joy of a new toon on another server or pay Blizzard more then you already to role the dice on a new place and start again. Now if you play more then one toon it is going to ramp up to a few hundred dollars quickly, but hey the good people at Blizzard are doing all they can to help you out!

[SteveRocks]

Or am i missing something?
Back at Mists of Pandaria they actively tried to solve the dead realm issue and they were working hard on it, almost weekly an announcement of servers mergconnecting and now in Warlords of Draenor they just dropped the ball and stopped connecting even 1 realm togheter.

What is their excuse?

When did you return to the game? In the time that you have been gone, the developers implemented cross-realm-zones, commonly abbreviated "CRZ." For the most part this resolves any "dead realm" issues you might see in the game world. In addition, the Group Finder tool is also cross-realm, so you should encounter very few problems in finding raid, pvp, and dungeon groups to join, even on low-population realms.

[Deleted]

blizzard only care about money so why would they realm merge for free when they can make money out of people for transferring, anyone who thinks otherwise clearly has no idea how blizzard is now

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Or am i missing something?
Back at Mists of Pandaria they actively tried to solve the dead realm issue and they were working hard on it, almost weekly an announcement of servers mergconnecting and now in Warlords of Draenor they just dropped the ball and stopped connecting even 1 realm togheter.

What is their excuse?

What are you talking about?
They connected all the low-pop realms with some medium pop realms at the time.
It wasn't "weekly," that implies it was a perpetual thing. It took them weeks to do them all, but there were all mostly done within a 2 month window.
They haven't "dropped the ball" you are just oblivious.
They did the job they set out to do, and now its over.

Based on your comments here you assume that every few months for the rest of the video game random realms just get squished together?
Its not something they are going to do randomly. They did it to establish larger player pools, and I must say it worked well for my group.

[Fabinas]

So what if those connected servers even after being connected were still low population and dead? Should those people hold on to your snarky hope and just wait it out?

No, but that's something Blizzard will be bothered to address THEN and not now, while expecting people to return for Legion.

[laughtrey]

Then why would they ever have implemented all the cross-realm stuff they have plus connect up a bunch of servers to start with?

Giving people a taste is how you get them hooked.

We've gotten quite a few x-realm transfers to guild because we found them in the LFG tool or we able to trial them cross realm.

[Spiral Mage]

Because they're happy with how things are for now, duh.

[Darkeon]

Back then? They did just enough to make people think\say "Yeah, they are clearly working on fixing the issue", but not fixing it enough to the point that Realm Transfers aren't needed.

Why aren't they doing it now? Because of the same reason above, money - and that the population numbers don't really reflect the amount of people that might arrive with Legion.

[Relapses]

So basicly, I would welcome any change that would help people play with people they want to play w/o worrying about the transfer/faction change costs (in some countries this fee is quite significant)

I agree. I've actually offered the suggestion of allowing players one free transfer up to every 12 months on a resetting cooldown. I think this will alleviate some of the burn associated with realm transfers and the cooldown is long enough that it can't really be used maliciously. Another solution I've offered is allowing character services to be purchased with WoW gold. The WoW token has already made WoW gold and cash nearly liquid with one another and I don't think broadening their scope would make the game "pay to win" as Blizzard mentioned when asked this recently.