The woes of dead realms, connected realms and the Paid Realm Transfer.

[FluFF]

So we all know by now they got this connected realm thing going ( although very slowly ), I've been following it since they announced it in September with 5.4 and looking at the most recent EU batch and the one for the near future one thing always pops up :

It's 80% pvp servers and then 1 PvE realm gets connected with 1-2 others ( atleast on EU side )... and that's it for another 2-3 weeks.
Now before you scream '' I'm off as bad as you are '' hear me out :

Ever since MoP launched there has been 1 guild shouting in Alliance trade chat for raiders in my realm ( and even then only for 1 healer ) and that's been it...
We got 3 raiding guilds on Alliance and barely 10k AH listings ( and most of them are just levelling greens...
On Horde we got 1 decent raiding guild and 1 average one and barely 6k AH listings and things like the str+mastery gems cost 600g cause there is 1 guy making them.

You can log onto Alliance here at 8pm and at midnight you can still scroll to the top of your chat window and see the 1st thing that was said in trade when you logged on 4 hours earlier....

So I took this to the official forums , and without much surprise, I got called a cheap c*nt for not paying the realm change fee and move to a better place.

So it got me thinking... Am I really cheap for not paying the realm change fee ?
Or am I correct to assume that Blizzard should provide a healthy player number on every server they got running? and if they can't they should give people on dead places FCM to ''High'' realms or speed up the connection process of dead realms with medium ones so I can finally look for a guild and secure my WoD raiding experience.

What irks me the most is there is no way as EU player to get heard by Blizzard , the EU sticky about connected realms gets 1 blue post a day ( if that ) and it just says '' its all i got guys , more info when i know more '' and that's all i had to to read for the past 5 months.

I've been playing this game for over 7 years and my realm was fine until midway Dragon Soul when guilds started dropping to wait on MoP, but 70% never returned or went off the realm and I'm getting more and more compelled to just stop paying after this month and wait on WoD and make that free instant lvl 90 on a healty realm.

[Ayarea]

I made this thread in 2011. http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...6509135?page=1

I think it had an amazing count of a few blues, and that with nearly 300 pages and 5000 responses?

You're not cheap for not paying. I do think that Blizzard is the one to blame here. There are plenty of options to keep communities healthy. They offer FCM from high realms, but then don't close down transfers, so what do you get? A small influx of players leaving, bit a bigger input people joining the realm. It's a shame that the EU community doesn't seem to be heard at all at times or just, like you said, get the generic response "it's all I got".

The rate of the connecting realms is pretty piss poor as well to say the least.

[Giscoicus]

Connecting small realms to high pop ones will yield some problems if it pushes high pop realms over the mark to the point where they get queue times. I love my realm because while we have a ton of active players, no queue times ever and the only time I can think of a server crash was one week before Oondasta spawned.

Blizzard cant make people go to other realms, and at this point blocking realms/realm transfers would be met with disagreement because of the people caught on the wrong side of what would be a cutoff. The guy who transferred 2 hours before me gets to move but I cant?

You can do most everything crossrealm now, and move BoAs cross realm as well. If their "toybox" is account wide then there will be very few reasons to not reroll on a new realm. The transfer fee is partially to deter people, partially because the playerbase insisted they would pay for realm transfers back when they couldn't move. Rerolling is probbaly your pest option, but in WoD everything but mythic can be done xrealm if you get friends.

[Demona3]

You are not cheap for not paying, I don't blame you for not wanting to pay. There have been so many, MANY suggestions regarding the dying population of realms, and blizzard has failed to listen overall.

The cross-realm idea was ok, but it still pissed people off. Why? People like their realms and not competing for some stupid spawn or resource. I find it kinda annoying, but I don't really care. It's nice to see people using a zone while leveling an alt.

The server mergers are just pure fail on blizzard's part. My server in particular was merged with Windrunner. (Darrowmere and Windrunner). We have been merged since Dec. 23, and they STILL have *NOT* fixed our armory. Not only that, but our trade chat has gone to complete shit. All day long, the constant "Windrunner is better than Darrowmere", or "Darrowmere sucks, you guys should leave" etc etc. We (Darrowmere people) did *NOT* ask to be merged with Windrunner, but yet we were, and now we are insulted the majority of the day. I feel like I'm sitting at a pre-school while in trade chat, watching 2 kids fight over who can use the plastic shovel in the sandbox.

Anyway, the issue remains, the server mergers were a HORRIBLE idea. What blizzard *could of* done was say - hey, we have monitored your realm and realize it is low population. Because of this, we wish to shut your server down, so here is a FCM for you to choose where you would like to go. Not - HEY, you're on a high pop realm, we are going to give you the choice of going to this Horde or Alliance populated realm so we can "attempt" to balance it.

What's even worse? The sheer fact that blizzard *did not * ask the community on their feelings on realm mergers with a chance to respond with suggestions.

So, TL;DR. You're not cheap for not paying for a transfer. Blizzard sucks for merging servers and not giving players a choice on if they want to merge or offering a FCM if they disagreed with the merger.

[slime]

Of course this is Blizz's responsibilty. But if their customer's are okay with footing the bill - of course Blizz isn't going to take responsibility for this and allow us to just pay for a transfer. Why would they do it if no one complains, or if one person (like OP) complains and then most of their customer base comes to defend blizz and say that there should be a fee for this.. lol.

[ComputerNerd]

People throw around the same suggestions with no consideration for the consequences.
Free transfers only make a problem worse, when there are players who have reasons for not moving.
Because YOU want to move, does not mean everyone does.
Do you really want to go down the route of forced transfers ?

The community killed the population on a realm, not blizzard.
The players chose to leave it.

Blizzard have listened, and dismissed the same stuff over and over again.

Stupid people are stupid, and blizzard combining the realms did not make them what they weren't already.
They just have a bigger audience now for their epeen flexing.
Something they would not do if other players did not support them in it.
So, again it is a player problem not blizzard's.

[rhorle]

The rate of the connecting realms is pretty piss poor as well to say the least.

Slow and Steady wins the race. Would you rather they rush and connect everyone and make mistakes? Mistakes that could be hard to recover from? Or do you want them to take their time, analyze which realms fit best with each other, and make sure every kink is ironed out with the ones they are working on?

People will always gravitate to the high population realms if given the choice. It is inevitable and it is why those realms are high population in the first place when other realms are dying. Because people don't want to transfer off to low population or medium population realms even with free transfers. Yes you will always get some people that are tired of crowding but you won't get enough even if you disable incoming transfers.

Blizzard is doing the only thing you can do to keep every server healthy, merging them.

[Huehuecoyotl]

People throw around the same suggestions with no consideration for the consequences.
Free transfers only make a problem worse, when there are players who have reasons for not moving.
Because YOU want to move, does not mean everyone does.
Do you really want to go down the route of forced transfers ?

The community killed the population on a realm, not blizzard.
The players chose to leave it.

Blizzard have listened, and dismissed the same stuff over and over again.

Stupid people are stupid, and blizzard combining the realms did not make them what they weren't already.
They just have a bigger audience now for their epeen flexing.
Something they would not do if other players did not support them in it.
So, again it is a player problem not blizzard's.

Blizzard put in paid transfers. Lots of people used paid transfers, resulting in servers with low populations or imbalances. Because of the problems with low/imbalanced servers, more people ended up having to pay for transfers to get the gameplay that their subscription SHOULD provide for them. Servers get worse, resulting in more people using the paid service. And so on.

Lets go back to the start of that little sequence shall we? Blizzard put in paid transfers. Blizzard. Everything else followed from there.

Yet according to you people are "stupid" for blaming Blizzard for this problem. This is a "player problem". I would suggest you rethink this point of view, since the facts don't appear to support it.

[wych]

It really sucks, and Blizzard can cry all they want about how it "takes time" but it's been a problem for years and it's still horrifically slow for EU players.

I got sick of waiting for Blizzard to move off their arses and eventually just paid it through gritted teeth.

- - - Updated - - -

Slow and Steady wins the race. Would you rather they rush and connect everyone and make mistakes? Mistakes that could be hard to recover from? Or do you want them to take their time, analyze which realms fit best with each other, and make sure every kink is ironed out with the ones they are working on?

People will always gravitate to the high population realms if given the choice. It is inevitable and it is why those realms are high population in the first place when other realms are dying. Because people don't want to transfer off to low population or medium population realms even with free transfers. Yes you will always get some people that are tired of crowding but you won't get enough even if you disable incoming transfers.

Blizzard is doing the only thing you can do to keep every server healthy, merging them.

I'm sorry but unless they have 1 intern sat there I highly doubt it takes weeks and weeks to decide which connected realm should go with which, it's better for the US, but for Europe it is disagraceful.

[Toiran]

This is a very complicated issue, there are FAR more variables in it than people think.

All I can say is, at least Blizzard are trying something, it's better than nothing.

Is it enough? Possibly not, but we are slowly getting somewhere at least.

Honestly it's a pretty complex issue that has no real answer, no saving grace anyway, there are several solutions that may cause more problems and so on.

I'm on Outland EU, I don't think we have ever NOT had FCM, it's up pretty much 24-7, and it's done zero to the server apart from allow the last dieing Horde to move on for free whilst they can, near enough the same thing was happening when I was on Silvermoon EU years ago as well.

[judgementofantonidas]

So it got me thinking... Am I really cheap for not paying the realm change fee ?
Or am I correct to assume that Blizzard should provide a healthy player number on every server they got running? and if they can't they should give people on dead places FCM to ''High'' realms or speed up the connection process of dead realms with medium ones so I can finally look for a guild and secure my WoD raiding experience.

What irks me the most is there is no way as EU player to get heard by Blizzard , the EU sticky about connected realms gets 1 blue post a day ( if that ) and it just says '' its all i got guys , more info when i know more '' and that's all i had to to read for the past 5 months.

I've been playing this game for over 7 years and my realm was fine until midway Dragon Soul when guilds started dropping to wait on MoP, but 70% never returned or went off the realm and I'm getting more and more compelled to just stop paying after this month and wait on WoD and make that free instant lvl 90 on a healty realm.

I do not feel that Blizzard should be responsible for providing "balanced" servers. Recruit. Roll a heal get good at it and pug that one recurrent healer spot.

We intentionally moved to a dead realm. We brought 5 players. We are now raiding 25 man.

A lot can be said about the effort one is willing to put into achieving their desired end state.

Are you any good at what you do?
If so drop us a line. Maybe we can scrape 15$ around for you.

[Masoner]

So we all know by now they got this connected realm thing going ( although very slowly ), I've been following it since they announced it in September with 5.4 and looking at the most recent EU batch and the one for the near future one thing always pops up :

It's 80% pvp servers and then 1 PvE realm gets connected with 1-2 others ( atleast on EU side )... and that's it for another 2-3 weeks.
Now before you scream '' I'm off as bad as you are '' hear me out :

Ever since MoP launched there has been 1 guild shouting in Alliance trade chat for raiders in my realm ( and even then only for 1 healer ) and that's been it...
We got 3 raiding guilds on Alliance and barely 10k AH listings ( and most of them are just levelling greens...
On Horde we got 1 decent raiding guild and 1 average one and barely 6k AH listings and things like the str+mastery gems cost 600g cause there is 1 guy making them.

You can log onto Alliance here at 8pm and at midnight you can still scroll to the top of your chat window and see the 1st thing that was said in trade when you logged on 4 hours earlier....

So I took this to the official forums , and without much surprise, I got called a cheap c*nt for not paying the realm change fee and move to a better place.

So it got me thinking... Am I really cheap for not paying the realm change fee ?
Or am I correct to assume that Blizzard should provide a healthy player number on every server they got running? and if they can't they should give people on dead places FCM to ''High'' realms or speed up the connection process of dead realms with medium ones so I can finally look for a guild and secure my WoD raiding experience.

What irks me the most is there is no way as EU player to get heard by Blizzard , the EU sticky about connected realms gets 1 blue post a day ( if that ) and it just says '' its all i got guys , more info when i know more '' and that's all i had to to read for the past 5 months.

I've been playing this game for over 7 years and my realm was fine until midway Dragon Soul when guilds started dropping to wait on MoP, but 70% never returned or went off the realm and I'm getting more and more compelled to just stop paying after this month and wait on WoD and make that free instant lvl 90 on a healty realm.

It's not blizzard fault your realm is dead, it's 100% yours.

You did nothing when it was active, you sit back and just watched everyone else play and interact with people.

You did nothing to get invovled and form a community.

Now everyone has left to other realms where there is more people doing what they want to do and you now complain it's "dead".

The issue is you.. not blizzard.

[MerinPally]

It's not blizzard fault your realm is dead, it's 100% yours.

You did nothing when it was active, you sit back and just watched everyone else play and interact with people.

You did nothing to get invovled and form a community.

Now everyone has left to other realms where there is more people doing what they want to do and you now complain it's "dead".

The issue is you.. not blizzard.

I can't disagree with this enough. If you do something when your realm was active and want to continue that, but the rest of your server slowly dwindles because they stop playing or transfer off but you maintain your efforts, that is definitely NOT your fault.

My realm has never been populated. Ever really. Not since it was made at TBC launch as part of the Vindication battlegroup, we were always one of the worse in the battlegroup. But not quite the worse. Late WOTLK I did a lot of stuff and people knew who I was (for a large variety of reasons). Fast forward to Cataclysm and after a rather weak first tier we began doing well in Firelands and climbed server ranks. I was organising massive pug groups on the weekends, usually both days, sometimes during the week as well. A mix of the realm forums and trade chat and everything. We were always over subscribed. Not only was I doing old raids but we were doing 25man Heroic Firelands and achieving 3/7hc I think it was... I can't remember. May only have been 1. Either way we cleared the instance. Never used anything like Openraid, it was word of mouth and realm forums and IRL friends.

So, I personally organised realm wide efforts, every weekend, for many months. I included huge amounts of people and it brought loads of us together. The realm then dwindled and getting a full group was no longer possible when I came back after my break. I did my part to form a community as did others. Is that MY fault that my already low pop server died? Of course it isn't. Is it the other people on the server for not stepping up? Equally not.

[wych]

It's not blizzard fault your realm is dead, it's 100% yours.

You did nothing when it was active, you sit back and just watched everyone else play and interact with people.

You did nothing to get invovled and form a community.

Now everyone has left to other realms where there is more people doing what they want to do and you now complain it's "dead".

The issue is you.. not blizzard.

wow.... just wow.

I'm actually struggling to add anything more than that as a rebuttal to this post.

[Deleted]

So it got me thinking... Am I really cheap for not paying the realm change fee ?
Or am I correct to assume that Blizzard should provide a healthy player number on every server they got running?

Its 100% the responsibility for Blizzard to provide an environment for every subscriber to have equal chance/opportunity to play the game and all of its features.

I started threads back in around 2010 on this very same subject when dead and unbalanced realms were so bad the game was almost unplayable unless u paid xfer. Basically this is an issue Blizzard will NEVER fix because they are good at sucking cash from frustrated players who always give in and dip into their pockets in the end...

Anyone with more than 1 braincell could see that the connected realms feature was nothing more than a PR exercise and wouldnt go anywhere close to fixing the problem. Which by that time was epidemic.

Blizzard will not close realms for one very good reason, the negative PR would be catastrophic. MMOs that close servers is the beginning of the end, everyone knows that. The gaming press would have a field day ripping Wow apart the day they started closing servers down. And consequently that would have a negative impact on their share prices...

So... dead realms are the way to go, itll never change.

[Deleted]

There are such few things that will match playing Twisting Nether (EU) Alliance-side in Cata... ugh. I don't know how I did it for an entire year. When I moved from there to Dun Modr having people around me again was scary.

Faction change and migration should have never been allowed. People would have thought twice about switching server if they had to reroll. People knew of the best realms for their activities before migration even came out - they knew what would happen and took advantage of it as a quick buck, with slower bucks to follow.

[Masoner]

There are such few things that will match playing Twisting Nether (EU) Alliance-side in Cata... ugh. I don't know how I did it for an entire year. When I moved from there to Dun Modr having people around me again was scary.

Faction change and migration should have never been allowed. People would have thought twice about switching server if they had to reroll. People knew of the best realms for their activities before migration even came out - they knew what would happen and took advantage of it as a quick buck, with slower bucks to follow.

and who is at fault? blizzard some how made "blah blah" realm "best for pvp" or "best for pve" ?


of course not, people wanted a way to move their character to those "blah blah" realms so they gave it to them @ a cost cause other wise people would do it all the time.

[Fang7986]

Blizzard put in paid transfers. Lots of people used paid transfers, resulting in servers with low populations or imbalances. Because of the problems with low/imbalanced servers, more people ended up having to pay for transfers to get the gameplay that their subscription SHOULD provide for them. Servers get worse, resulting in more people using the paid service. And so on.

Lets go back to the start of that little sequence shall we? Blizzard put in paid transfers. Blizzard. Everything else followed from there.

Yet according to you people are "stupid" for blaming Blizzard for this problem. This is a "player problem". I would suggest you rethink this point of view, since the facts don't appear to support it.

Except that people constantly whined, complained, and screamed that they wanted paid transfers until Blizzard finally agreed to it. It's all the players fault. It's the grass is greener syndrome. Players always think that's whatever problem they are having with the game will be magically solved by moving to a new realm. The raid team here won't take me, it's because they suck not me better find a new realm. Everybody on the realm thinks I'm a trade troll, It's the idiots on this realm not me better find a new realm. Nobody wants to join the new guild I just made, better find a new realm. I've gotten bored after playing a game for 10years, Hey bet if I transfer to a new realm I will magically not be bored anymore. Whining about people moving to larger realms is like whining about people moving from rural areas to the city. Some will find a better time, but most get there, realize it's just a different kind of suck and just live with it secretly wishing they had never moved.

[MoanaLisa]

Blizzard will not close realms for one very good reason, the negative PR would be catastrophic. MMOs that close servers is the beginning of the end, everyone knows that. The gaming press would have a field day ripping Wow apart the day they started closing servers down. And consequently that would have a negative impact on their share prices...

I realize this might be letting the cat out of the bag and that you haven't been around for a while but it's not really a secret that the game once had 12 million subscribers and now has considerably fewer. It's been common knowledge for some time. You can believe all you want about negative PR but it's BS. Whatever bad news there is about subscriber losses are out there and closing realms wouldn't be some giant wake-up call surprise. The bad news has happened and continued to happen. Everyone in 'the gaming press' understands that connected realms are realm mergers just done differently.

And guess what? Nothing much.

And a shout-out to all my homies that always show up in threads like this to say exactly the same silly stuff they say in all threads like this.

If you don't want to pay the $15, re-roll and level. Or create a toon where you want to be and raise it to 90 once the expansion comes along. There's not that much going on now in any case. Blizzard will continue to connect realms together taking their own sweet time about it.

[KaPe]

I think the issue is more about US vs EU. Whenever I see news about US connected realms, it seems to progress at much smoother pace, with multiple connections happening at once. With Europe... it's like one server of each type, done, wait a month for next one. My server might not be "dead", but it was always rather low population - right now it's worse than ever. At this rate, it might get connected to something around 2016.

Although, I don't know - maybe European servers are just so much better populated than US ones? Hard to believe, but eh...