So why has blizzard stopped connecting servers togheter?

[PenguinChan]

What's the difference?

Losing character names and server identity loss, main things. Not saying that's excusable but probably the main ones.

[Relapses]

I hope not. Just have some pretty bad memories from the firelands daily zone. One time i was trying to do the dailies before i had to go work. It was the only time i was able to do them because i was doing stuff after work and wouldnt be home and able to play more that daily reset. What happened was me figthing mobs alone. A group of 4 players came. They left me alone. So i thought. They observed me and then when i was low on health they attacked. All 4 of them. I was thinking they saw the opportunity for a easy kill. Then i ressed and managed to heal up and they came towards me. Did nothing. Left me alone. Then when i was fighthing a few mobs again. They attacked me when i was low. Under 50 % hp. That happened a few more times and only thing i could do was log off and curse in a corner.

This is why i hate pvp realms with a passion.

LOL, yeah. I think we all have some pretty shitty memories from PvP servers. One of the realms I play on (Kil'Jaeden-US) is Horde dominated but there's a very small, yet extremely organized group of Alliance players who do nothing but corpse camp raiders trying to zone into HFC or hang out in Vol'mar. It's extremely frustrating. I can definitely understand not wanting to submit yourself to that and I do agree cross-realm guilds would be a pretty nifty work-around.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

Well, my realm (Darkmoon Faire EU) is only connected to one other RP realm (Earthen Ring). There are two other RP realms available on EU (Argent Dawn and Steamwheedle Cartel) yet for some reason, the merger didn't take place.

Generally speaking, if you look at the wowprogress server population, it will give a you a clear idea of what (connected) realms are almost dead

Steamwheedle Cartel EU is connected to the RP realms Moonglade and The Sha'tar.
Argent Dawn has too many players for the realm to get connected to any other realm at all.

What Blizzard should have done was connecting all RP realms(excluding Argent Dawn) to each other. This is also something several players told them, but they didn't listen.

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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?

I followed the EU connections closely, like an addict, and one of the things we were told was that they can't connect realms that are already connected. So if Frostwhisper and Magtheridon were connected, they wouldn't be able to connect that new realm to another pair of realms that had already been connected - only add realms not yet connected.
If this is actually true or not I don't know. Could be that it is possible, but they could run into many technical difficulties and maybe loss of data.

I can also tell you that Blizzard are really afraid of queue timers. They are more afraid of a connected realm getting a short queue timer than connecting too few realms so the population ends up being too low anyway. This was a big mistake they did, and I and many others tried to tell them in the forum thread for connected realms.

And as I wrote 49084359043 times to Horde players on pve realms back then that whined about too few people: stop whining and either move to one of the few pve realms with high Horde populations, or move to a pvp realm.
There are not enough pve realms with high Horde populations, and the few that exist are most of the time super populated and belong to those few realms that won't be connected at all(Draenor EU for example). And connecting so many pve realms with low Horde populations that you eventually get a nice number won't work either because by doing so the Alliance side will be too big.

[Shadow Fox]

I feel the US realms need to be forcefully merged / Mega-servered... NA region has 234 servers.... And there are only, what, 10 that are Full or Locked?
With 2 or 3 of those being in the same "CRZ" server?

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

There won't be any more merges - they want to squeeze out every penny they can from server transfers.
In EU they didn't even complete the merges, Chamber of Aspects is not connected at all.

The same botched, half-assed quality that became the trademark of WoD.
I certainly hope they re-read their core values before Legion launch and try to act like they care.

No, they are done. They didn't mean to connect CoA, so they are indeed done.
CoA has the population number that most of the connected realms ended up with, so CoA was already in a good place according to Blizzard(players won't agree though). CoA is also marked for new players, so the realm will keep getting flooded by those. Yes, I know these players won't have an effect on the raiding scene and max level play that much, but they do have an effect on the population number.

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What are you talking about?
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.

You have absolutely no idea what you are even talking about, because connecting all the realms took Blizzard over a year to complete.

[Sting]

They're probably waiting to see what impact Legion has on the server populations.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

You know, I don't know what their phasing tech all entails, but outside of the client-side of phasing I can't see much stress being put on servers considering they are all still seperate servers. Yea, I am kinda confused why they haven't done mega-servers. Can you imagine how epic it would feel seeing tons of people out in the world. With the mob tagging changes in Legion there really isn't a bad reason for doing something like that.

Not sure I understand you correctly, but connected(not CRZ) realms are only one realm/server after they are connected - not several different servers.
The only thing still telling you it's not just one server is the name, but that's that.

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This thread once again really shows how clueless people are about realms and population numbers.
Even if they connected more realms, the possible flood of players returning for Legion would only have an effect on extremely few realms(talking about possible queue timers here).

The realms with low populations would need a really big increase(double their numbers to the least) in players to even come near the big realms such as Silvermoon, Draenor, Twisting Nether, Kazzak, etc(EU realms).
This together with the fact that they in WoD increased the population capacity for /all/ realms means there's very little chance connecting more realms would cause queue timers.

[Deleted]

I'm sure they'll merge them soon, their server team is more than likely very busy working on Legion and now PTR. Personally, I hope they do something soon regarding servers, as there is simply no reason to have so many servers anymore due to the new server technology they've added.

[alexkeren]

Forget connecting realms, realms need to be merged.

Then what do you do when on Legion launch day a few million people come back to the game?

The cost of hardware is such that connected realms is the better solution. Also all the other MMOs that have merged realms proved it really didn't help them at all.

[Relapses]

Then what do you do when on Legion launch day a few million people come back to the game?

The cost of hardware is such that connected realms is the better solution. Also all the other MMOs that have merged realms proved it really didn't help them at all.

It's an issue without an easy, broad solution.

Cross-realm has some pretty clear disadvantages. Merging is sort of an admission that the game has failed to retain customers. I don't know exactly which direction Blizzard will take to resolve this problem. I'm almost positive we'll see another bell curve (though likely less pronounced) boost in subscriber numbers at launch followed by a lull similar to that of WoD's. I think we'll hear from Blizzard about proposals for realm population issues around the time that 7.1 hits.

[Puri]

Cross-realm has some pretty clear disadvantages.

For example?

[Tharkkun]

Not sure I understand you correctly, but connected(not CRZ) realms are only one realm/server after they are connected - not several different servers.
The only thing still telling you it's not just one server is the name, but that's that.

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This thread once again really shows how clueless people are about realms and population numbers.
Even if they connected more realms, the possible flood of players returning for Legion would only have an effect on extremely few realms(talking about possible queue timers here).

The realms with low populations would need a really big increase(double their numbers to the least) in players to even come near the big realms such as Silvermoon, Draenor, Twisting Nether, Kazzak, etc(EU realms).
This together with the fact that they in WoD increased the population capacity for /all/ realms means there's very little chance connecting more realms would cause queue timers.

They are one realm virtually but all the server hardware is still present. So if you had 3 servers connected there's still 3 physical servers. It's a software solution.

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It's an issue without an easy, broad solution.

Cross-realm has some pretty clear disadvantages. Merging is sort of an admission that the game has failed to retain customers. I don't know exactly which direction Blizzard will take to resolve this problem. I'm almost positive we'll see another bell curve (though likely less pronounced) boost in subscriber numbers at launch followed by a lull similar to that of WoD's. I think we'll hear from Blizzard about proposals for realm population issues around the time that 7.1 hits.

Other companies merged because their population dwindled below 1 million and they never had the amount of players circulate through their game like WoW did. They knew people won't be returning so they merged with very little fallout when players lost guild and character names. When Wow still had 7 million people there was a very strong chance of guild and character overlap. Both from current and returning players that would resubscribe for WOD. Players get seriously pissy when you mess with their names so Blizzard chose a more difficult solution than just merging. Merging is the easy way.

Connecting servers is admitting that your servers is empty.

[Relapses]

For example?

Read the last page's worth of replies which pretty clearly outlined them?

Other companies merged because their population dwindled below 1 million and they never had the amount of players circulate through their game like WoW did. They knew people won't be returning so they merged with very little fallout when players lost guild and character names. When Wow still had 7 million people there was a very strong chance of guild and character overlap. Both from current and returning players that would resubscribe for WOD. Players get seriously pissy when you mess with their names so Blizzard chose a more difficult solution than just merging. Merging is the easy way.

Connecting servers is admitting that your servers is empty.

That's a hyperbolic way of looking at the same information and interpreting it differently. I don't think Blizzard likes to merge realms nor do they like connecting realms. I mentioned them simply because they're the most common solutions offered when players discuss dwindling realm populations.

Anyway, I personally think the best solutions might be the ones I offered a few pages back. One easy solution which I do not think will negatively impact players is a free realm xfer on a resetting cooldown. Another is to allow character services to be purchased with WoW gold. I have a sneaking suspicion sometime shortly after Legion's release they'll readdress the issue and potentially offer their own solutions. Regardless, at some point in the indeterminate future Blizzard will have to make tough decisions about realms since it's clear there will come a point in the game's life cycle where the number of individual realms it has will no longer be sustainable.

[dacoolist]

Darkspear, and Mal'Ganis (US/NA) are perfectly fine as is - NOT DEAD - Don't touch our realms Blizzard (don't listen to them)!

[Puri]

Read the last page's worth of replies which pretty clearly outlined them?

I just did, could not find any.

[Kazgrel]

I just did, could not find any.

With CRZ at least, it pretty much eliminates the advantages being on a lower pop server had for farming crafting mats and/or rare spawn mobs, among other things. Now you have to fight with every Tom, Dick and Harry from "insert name of uber mega pop server that's connected to yours via CRZ".

Years ago, when I was on Ysera (US), with the introduction of CRZ, the amount of people encountered out in old zones went up tenfold, with 9 of those 10 being from Area 52. Made farming any sort of old mats an absolute nightmare, because for all of those people grabbing mats, those were mats we would never see in our server's economy.

[Spl4sh3r]

Sounds like people want the realms to become overcrowded. Wait for the Pre-Patch and see how many are playing then, then you wait for Legion to see how many are playing then. Just because you think it's empty when this expansion most seem to think people are in their Garrison doesn't mean that it is empty. I don't want to be on a server that is lumped together with too many others (it already is at the moment with 2 others) and end up having to wait on a queue because the population spiked when something happens (Pre-Patch/Expansion release).

[Puri]

With CRZ at least, it pretty much eliminates the advantages being on a lower pop server had for farming crafting mats and/or rare spawn mobs, among other things. Now you have to fight with every Tom, Dick and Harry from "insert name of uber mega pop server that's connected to yours via CRZ".

You know there is a difference between connected servers and CRZ? No mega pop server is going to be connected.

[KaPe]

Sounds like people want the realms to become overcrowded. Wait for the Pre-Patch and see how many are playing then, then you wait for Legion to see how many are playing then. Just because you think it's empty when this expansion most seem to think people are in their Garrison doesn't mean that it is empty. I don't want to be on a server that is lumped together with too many others (it already is at the moment with 2 others) and end up having to wait on a queue because the population spiked when something happens (Pre-Patch/Expansion release).

Garrisons are a convenient excuse, but the realms in questions don't have thousands of players hiding in there. One doesn't need to look much further than WowProgress for general raiding situation and see that some servers have dozens, some have one or two. Or just check the auction house and notice zero high end epics being put there.

I'd love to return to my old realm and worry about it being "overcrowded". Chances of that happening are next to zero, as it was already "dead" a year ago, and nothing really improved. Hell, WP puts it at the bottom of non-rp EU realms. "Wait and see" approach pisses me off in two ways:

1. It's easy to say that when you're on a big realm. Yeah, the one I'm currently on is pretty crowded and will almost certainly have queues during pre-patch. People who started here, don't know what it's like to play on a dead realm, so it's a non-issue for them. Waiting doesn't hurt them at all, since people migrate toward such servers, not in the opposite direction. *You* sound like one of those, unable to understand common "peasants" stuck on backwater realms.

2. Waiting on dead servers only makes situation worse. No players transfer there because they don't want to be stuck/pay extra to go back. People keep quitting or migrating, making population problems even more severe. Even if Legion does revitalize the game, there's little reason to return there, because population surge will most likely be short lived.

Plus there's some people with their "it's your fault for not transferring earlier", which is just compounding the problem.

[Relapses]

Garrisons are a convenient excuse, but the realms in questions don't have thousands of players hiding in there. One doesn't need to look much further than WowProgress for general raiding situation and see that some servers have dozens, some have one or two. Or just check the auction house and notice zero high end epics being put there.

I'd love to return to my old realm and worry about it being "overcrowded". Chances of that happening are next to zero, as it was already "dead" a year ago, and nothing really improved. Hell, WP puts it at the bottom of non-rp EU realms. "Wait and see" approach pisses me off in two ways:

1. It's easy to say that when you're on a big realm. Yeah, the one I'm currently on is pretty crowded and will almost certainly have queues during pre-patch. People who started here, don't know what it's like to play on a dead realm, so it's a non-issue for them. Waiting doesn't hurt them at all, since people migrate toward such servers, not in the opposite direction. *You* sound like one of those, unable to understand common "peasants" stuck on backwater realms.

2. Waiting on dead servers only makes situation worse. No players transfer there because they don't want to be stuck/pay extra to go back. People keep quitting or migrating, making population problems even more severe. Even if Legion does revitalize the game, there's little reason to return there, because population surge will most likely be short lived.

Plus there's some people with their "it's your fault for not transferring earlier", which is just compounding the problem.

I don't understand what you look to accomplish by pouting and stamping your feet about the situation on your dead realm. Everything is open cross-realm right now so if you really feel like it's an issue, now is the perfect time to find a guild on a more populated server to raid with come Legion. Hell, if you perform well enough some guilds will even offer to help pay for your transfer.

In the meantime, it doesn't seem like Blizzard is going to be condensing realms any further until after Legion hits. You can whine about it here or you can make a concerted effort to find a resolution. It doesn't have to be a "have" vs. "have-nots" discussion. The tools are readily at hand and you're refusing to use them. That is not Blizzard's fault.