Why does Blizz still Ignore realm Imbalancement, and other server issues ?

[Deleted]

What is blizzard supposed to do? Force people to transfer to factions/servers they don't want to? They already give free server transfers off the highest populated servers to the lowest. So I cant think of anyway for them to fix the problem other than giving an incentive for transferring off high pop servers.

well in MoP beta i had my chars flagged for a faction/race change. and it happend instanly. with no1 helping me with it but my self. so they could start out be making certian server faction flagged for this option. they don't need to do anyting for it.

[Deleted]

I still fail to see what the PROBLEM is with high pop and low pop servers. What are the Negative effects of having high pop and low pop servers?

The problem with low pop servers is that you cannot find guilds that suit you, and guilds don't get enough recruits of high enough quality, especially for 25 man raiding.

If you don't like where you are, move. You already pay $12-15 a month depending on your subscription, so If you can't afford the one time fee of $25 but can afford monthly subscription, then you need to re-evaluate your priorities/budge, either quit wow or get a job that actually requires a few brain cells to perform and you might be getting a regular wage.

I refuse to pay extra to fix a problem that should not be a problem. Server transfers should be free, but on a long cooldown. One of the reasons I quit when 25 man raiding collapsed on my low pop realm was that it would've cost me at least $100 to relocate to a non-dead realm. So instead I took my $100 (+my monthly fees and xpac fees) and spend them on Steam, which gives me much, much more value for money.

[Deleted]

Actually it is entirely player caused. When you create a new character with a new account it will recommend a low server in your time zone. To join a High pop server, you the player have to go search for the realm you want and join that specific one.

Then you've got all the player and guilds who leave the low pop realms to transfer to the high pop ones because there are more "quality" players who have done the same thing on that realm.

Frankly I disagree here, the problem is entirely blizzard created because the old realms were not full the moment they created a ton of new realms in TBC.

My server has been around since classic and it has always been classed as low/medium pop, then blizzard creates a load of new realms people transfer off to.
We also have the issue in the EU of other language realms being added (Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) which bled people off the exisiting realms.

Now there are not enough people to go around and the highest pop servers are being crammed full of refugees fleeing multiple low pop realms who are sick of guilds imploding due to lack of people.

Nobody wants to be on a low pop server but not everyone wants to pay to leave, especially if they have multiple toons they need to move.

[Halicia]

Actually it is entirely player caused. When you create a new character with a new account it will recommend a low server in your time zone.

Highlighted the part that Blizzard created to cause less then stellar experiences at endgame.

I also remember (quite humorously) at the height of ICC, on Darrowmere-US, when Blizzard offered free server xfers off when they chose to change the PvE/PvP flag on the server.

You could log in during peak times and not find a single person in Dalaran. If you did a /who 80-80 you'd be lucky to see one or two people.

People try to say "oh things arent that bad, why don't you just... blahblahblah"... when you can't raid on a server because there arent even 10 levelcapped players, yeah... it IS that bad. there's really no reason for Blizzard to try to keep these servers up.

Rift dealt with these issues nicely. Free transfers off every server to *any* server (except overpopulateds). If a server "just doesn't catch on" and is mired in Low Pop. Flag it as a Trial server and funnel the actual newbies there until they're hooked and decide to look for a real server/guild.

Paid Guild transfers actually got used a decent amount, as guilds would transfer to a medium-ish server with progression issues and headhunt for new talent.

[Deleted]

When you create a new character with a new account it will recommend a low server in your time zone. To join a High pop server, you the player have to go search for the realm you want and join that specific one.

It recommends one server, one PvE and one PvP, and usually they are med/low pop to try and encourage people to roll on those. It doesn't hide the rest of the servers from you, you can even sort by population. As of today, as far as I am aware, they still tell you when you create your very first character to pick a server closest to where you live for less lag, they also tell you that you cannot interact with people from other servers - they just fail to mention CRZ negates both of those or that it even exists. I consider that to be misleading.

As for people leaving servers, again had they monitored population balances sure people might leave but they wouldn't have all flocked to the same handful of servers if they hadn't been allowed to. If Blizz had said "we have enough unique accounts here of X faction we aren't accepting any more" then the population would be more spread out than it currently is. Although I have to confess their system probably wasn't built to do that just like it isn't built for the world to remain seamless with CRZ tagged on.

The problem with low pop servers is that you cannot find guilds that suit you, and guilds don't get enough recruits of high enough quality, especially for 25 man raiding.

That's only a problem is that is what you are looking for in your game play.

I know of people who have paid to move to low pop servers because they enjoy farming mats and making things for their community, getting things on their desperately sparse AH's, helping people is something they enjoy it's how they enjoy their game time. As they pay the same as everyone else they too should be able to do what makes it fun for them and CRZ has killed their gaming experience.

Rift dealt with these issues nicely. Free transfers off every server to *any* server (except overpopulateds). If a server "just doesn't catch on" and is mired in Low Pop. Flag it as a Trial server and funnel the actual newbies there until they're hooked and decide to look for a real server/guild.

Yup Rift got it spot on plus if you have CRZ in every zone up to 20 then people can actually move to servers with people they have friended as they have levelled. Seems to make so much more sense, to me at least.

[Drakesong]

It's all about marketing. We all know that WoW is slowly losing subs, even tho players come back after the release of an expansion, at the end of each expansion, you see less players compared to the end of the previous expansion, which means that even tho players come and go, the numbers are decreasing.

This explains, for example, why the devs plan on releasing new patchs and expansions faster than before, because the do know that at those moments players tend to come back, even tho they come back in smaller numbers as years passes.

But, the trick is, you don't feel it. WoW had it's peak, and now is slowly decreasing, but it's so slow that you don't feel like something is going wrong. But, imagine if, out of sudden, Blizzard says: "We are forcing the migration of low population servers in order to make Medium population servers, this was, we will shut down X servers".

Of course forced migrations would solve the problem, with forced migrations, for example, you could manipulate the Horde : Alliance ratio and make balanced servers. With forced migrations, you could merge dead servers in one, and make medium (and balanced) population servers.

But, by doing so, you would have to shut down servers. Shutting down a server is a strong indicative that a MMO is not doing so good. Imagine how players and the media (related to games) would react if they knew that servers were going down because of the lack of players to use them.

So, basically, you see other "solutions", like CRZ and the payed server transfer, that in the end solve nothing.

[Deleted]

Blizzard is probably slowly going towards a mega server idea,starting with CRZ to see how it works. The Elder Scrolls online will do it, and probably more mmo's will do it as well.

Terrible, horrible idea. A mega server requires a mega world. Yes the world in WoW is huge, but not enough for so many people. Especially when the endgame focuses on one or two zones.

[axell]

Terrible, horrible idea. A mega server requires a mega world. Yes the world in WoW is huge, but not enough for so many people. Especially when the endgame focuses on one or two zones.

A mega server does not mean all the players have to be in the same instance of a zone. There are many ways to do a mega server ,while keeping the number of people in a zone not go out of hand.

[MasterHamster]

CRZ is not really meant to fix dead realms.

[Yumisara]

I absolutely hate the idea of cross realm zones. Granted I'm used to population on my server, with the fact of the same faction. But these days, I'm getting ganked by 5 different people from other realms, making it literally impossible to quest on a low alt. I've pretty much given up on leveling alts, because I don't have the motivation to "try" and level when I know there rogue waiting for me. And, I'll be damned to transfer my characters on a normal server.

Really should be an option if you want to be a part of Cross Realm or not.

[Justignoreme]

A mega server does not mean all the players have to be in the same instance of a zone. There are many ways to do a mega server ,while keeping the number of people in a zone not go out of hand.

That can possibly work for thousands of players, not millions. It will never happen and would probably kill the game if it were ever considered.

[Deleted]

CRZ is not really meant to fix dead realms.

Sure they say that now, anybody remember the blue post answering the questions about mergers that said "cross realm technology with prevent the need for server mergers"

[Deleted]

CRZ is not really meant to fix dead realms.

It might not be meant to fix dead realms but Tom Chilton, Game Director did say at the Reddit AMA

Cross-realm zones are definitely our first move toward improving the play experience for low-pop servers (or even medium population).

Yet it does pretty much nothing for them apart from giving them more people to look at and it implies high/full servers don't need an improved play experience and yet they still have it too.

It's really not acceptable to be used as decoration to make someone else's realm look busy.

[Galaddriel]

Sure they say that now, anybody remember the blue post answering the questions about mergers that said "cross realm technology with prevent the need for server mergers"

It was when they first talked about cross-realm zones on the official forums.

Zarhym
Having said all that, yesterday we discussed low-population and faction-imbalanced realms with our developers. They have some pretty bold and spectacular plans for addressing this in anticipation of implementing some of the features we plan to in Mists. I just don't have a lot of information to share with you at this stage of programming and development.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...920?page=6#103

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 02:06 PM ----------

From the Gamescon Interview:

•There won't be any server merges, as cross-realm zone technology will be applied to the problem.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...t+Pet+Released

[xanzul]

This is not a player created problem. Blizz could, and should, have monitored faction balances right from the off and it's their lack of monitoring which has caused the situation we are now in where there is almost no population of one faction on a server.

FCM's are great apart from you get a specific server to move to, usually one people would never move to in a month of Sundays. Why not give people a selection of servers to move to, even different types like PvP and PvE? Better still allow low pop realms a selection of servers to move to and different types of servers. Turn servers they want to close into ones for trial accounts, sure people can stay there if they wish but advise them it against it. Allow people to reach level 20 and then get a free one off server transfer to a selected list of non trial servers of varying types.

There are a bunch of ways they could have dealt with this, more palatable ways for the community as a whole even. Instead we get CRZ because 40 odd PvP servers are low population when if people were that bothered about seeing others when they were out levelling in the world, if it affected their gameplay that much, they could have stumped up the cash and moved to a busier server like many did.

How is it not a player created problem? Did Blizzard tell people to play on certain realms and not on others? No? Ok. Thought so.

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 04:08 PM ----------

Sure they say that now, anybody remember the blue post answering the questions about mergers that said "cross realm technology with prevent the need for server mergers"

Again for the eternally stupid cross realm zones were never intended to be the end all be all solution to low pop realms. It is step ONE of a multistep plan to address that issue among others. Maybe if you people could stop crapping all over the concept and actually use your heads for once you might be able to see that.

[Xeraxis]

I was wondering why you even asked this question when your sig seems to be answering yourself for you.

[Alilei32]

I dont understand why they dont merge the dead servers. I get it they dont want people to think the game is dying. But if they dont want us to think the game is dying then why release numbers saying 3 million people quit during Cata? The cat is already out of the bag just go ahead and merge the servers already. Or close them down and give people/guilds the choice to move to any server they want with no restrictions.

[Crowey]

I find there are more dead factions than dead servers, and imbalance on PvP servers isn't exactly a new concept. I believe that issue exists on any two faction PvP oriented game.

I've thought about this a few times, and a small imbalance isn't a large issue, but some of the 5:1 ratio servers it can get a little excessive. If they could somehow impose a player cap based off of how many players are logged on, I think it could force a bit of a faction balance. Example: Alliance on server X have 2000 people logged in, Have around 3000 logged in, around that 1000 deficit, no more Horde players can log in until more Alliance players log on, or some Horde players log off. I know this is done on full servers, but I'm not sure if it's ever been imposed by faction.

Of course, this should of never become the issue that it has. It's more a result of poor planning than anything else, but if anyone recalls the pre-WoW era of MMOs there weren't really factions like we have in WoW, and we didn't have the enormous player base. If we were only worrying about a peaked player base of 300k subs, more than likely you wouldn't be seeing the gross imbalances that we do now.

We'll see how they handle it, I'm not sure CRZ can fix it at this point, or anything, outside of paying to transfer to a realm better suited to your needs, and despite the conspiracies out there, we're lucky we have that option. I'm sure anyone who played MMO's prior to wow can recount their horror stories of having to re-roll because of reason X or Y.

[Beartastic]

The only thing Blizzard could do to address realm populations is to start penalizing people on high-pop servers/high-pop factions. Which I would be okay with, but on the other hand, it wouldn't affect me at all.

Things like:

* Only allow 3 log-ins per week for each account on Horde Illidan
* Charge $25 per toon created on a high-pop faction
* Charge an $10 the first time a toon logs in on a high pop faction, each month

You get the idea.

That's how the problem gets solved. It doesn't get solved with free transfers.

^^ that made me giggle. Bad idea to "penalize" people for playing on a server... you'd lose them as subscribers.

OT: I guess I'm not seeing the issue here. The fact that 1: higher pop servers (usually) have lower AH prices because there are more competitors for mats; 2: There are always players looking for specific raids/PvP situations that you wouldn't find elsewhere; 3: unless it's a PvP realm, there's really no issue here.

The only thing bad about a dead server that I can see is that nothing happens on it... and that's not blizzard's fault. If players want to move to higher population servers, it's because more things are happening on them.