recent connected servers? confused

[Urza29]

as of tonight 8/12 @ 9pm (central time) after a lengthy problem with the instance servers, world servers and basically anything but major cities being offline, aerie peak (USA) is now working again...other servers were having problems, and they were down/offline for a few hours.

But my question is...when i logged in a few min ago it said they are performing maintenance on THURSDAY morning (which its tuesday night atm...) that didn't make sense to me, but its not a maintenance its a connection thing, but the confusing part it says:

We will be performing maintenance on the realms listed below on Thursday august 14th 5 to 11, once that's done these following realms will be complete:

Kel'thuzad
Burning Legion
Agamaggan
Jaedenar
The Underbog
Archimonde
Aerie Peak
Wyrmcrest Accord
Cenarious
Jubei'Thos

I havent seen any recent blue posts on connected realms or scheduling...so what is getting connected to what then? it just has 1 list of servers says connections will be complete? They aren't connecting all these realms together are they?

I play on aerie peak, and the idea behind the server connections was to connect lower population ones together, aerie peak is not a low pop, its prob medium, and once in awhile we get a queue, small 1-2 min queue but still...i wasn't thinking aerie peak was getting connected, this is weird though

Can anyone shed some light on this or know whats going on? (i could ask in blizz forums but to lazy atm)

[Sinndra]

being medium pop doesnt exclude you from getting merged. med pop is an equal potential to be merged with a few low pops in attempt to make a med+ pop. also not sure what kind of realm is Aerie? being a certain type of server could mean there isnt very many others to merge with, thus, making your server a higher target to help the lower ones.

as to maintenance, thursday maintenance on those realms doesnt always mean mergers at the same time. they gave you heads up warning, what they actually do during that time is anyone's guess. dont confuse extra maintenance with connecting realms.

[Rivin]

Sometimes they take additional realms offline for extra maintenance while others are being connected. You can see here that some of those realms are being connected, but Aerie Peak is not among them, so it's likely just extra maintenance, probably due to whatever problems it was having earlier.

[Bigbazz]

Tarren Mill EU got merged and it was a high pop realm, it needed absolutely no more players. Still got merged though.

[Urza29]

ok cool thanks for clearing that up, yeah make sense now that i sat and pondered it, and a guildie informed me it might be that aerie peak needs connected to balance the horde pop, but i thought i read they dont do it for balancing factions or something so thats probably not it either.

Aerie peak is pve, so if anything if it does get connected it may just be connecting to pve servers from that list, its just the list itself was was confusing at 1 long list with no context or details, and yeah it might be that aerie peak maybe getting extra maintence cuz of the crazy stuff earlier tonight, maybe.

<3 mmo champion

[Laerrus]

but Aerie Peak is not among them, so it's likely just extra maintenance, probably due to whatever problems it was having earlier.

More than likely this, Aerie Peak is back to being a High pop server after it's month or so as a "New Player" realm. I don't see it getting merged.

Lightbringer now has this designation, I would imagine that it also gets extra maintenance when the "New Player" designation goes to some other realm.