Is it time to merge realms at last?

[Chickat]

I think they should merege all servers together.
Pve, RP into one. Pvp servers are gone now.

Have like 40 different phases to join with diff populations. Though idk how the ah would do with all servers ah merged.

[tangers58]

Completely pointless. You already share zones with other servers, no need to go any farther than that.

[Zyky]

I'm not voting at all because what I want isn't an option, outside of playing on RP servers. I specifically play on low pop servers for a reason, always have since Vanilla. Now with the garbage sharding/crz system I'm forced to share gathering, mobs, and rares with players who aren't even on the same server with none of the benefits of playing on a larger server, IE cheaper mats and boes on the AH. I want them to trash the system and leave servers alone so that mobs like Houlon and Sha of Anger aren't just camped by 100 players per zone and die in a literal second. Whereas if I /who Timeless Isle right now there's 1 person there on my server and for Kun-Lai, there's only 1 player aswell...so yea, go back to the way it was or fix the problem.

[Caerule]

I live on a tiny EU RP server. The time to merge was 2 years ago. By now it's kind of outrageous it's not happened yet.

Ion said it was ready to go and they were just deciding which servers to merge, several Q&A's ago.

[Caerule]

Wait, all RP realms other than AD are connected to each other, no?

They aren't. Earthen Ring/Darkmoon Faire is still separate from Moonglade/The Sha'tar/Steamwheedle/Cartel.

[Caerule]

Oh . . . well they should connect all six of them to AD, I need more character slots!

Honestly at this point, I wouldn't mind being merged to AD.

Don't get me wrong, my guild is managing to do well, but there are a dwindling number of other RP guilds still alive. Even worse on Alliance. ER/DMF isn't going to solve that alone. AD's climate can be rough, but like I said, my guild does well. Has done so for 7 years. So we'll adapt. And I'll be able to give my guildies a lot more ability to find spontaneous RP out in the world again, which is the one thing we're currently missing.

[willtron]

With the changes to PvP realms and how that all works, we 're just a step away from them doing it anyway.

[xiolableu]

Yeah I can tell you that AD has a lot of RP going around the world. Getting more RPers at the same place will imo help rather than hinder.

I'm on an RP realm that is totally dead (Earthen Ring-US). We need to be connected or merged badly. We are dying alone in the darkness. Even doubling our population would not disrupt the RP community but would allow more interaction as well as functionality.

CRZ does not help our raid progression and will not allow the warfront interaction bfa is supposed to bring (because we are removed from CRZ as an RP server) in addition to our 2:1 faction imbalance.

[Adrenalz]

Blizzard would probably end up losing a lot of Xfer money if they implemented a massive merge.

[cuafpr]

wont happen for a long time, would be a PR nightmare. At some point all realms will just be connected and sharding tech will do the rest.

[Deleted]

The only real issue with low pop realms is, lets be honest, the auction house. The rest... we have crz, we have group finder, so its was like there were no realms.

[Kikazz]

Most realms in WoW are more dead then dead. CRZ is a nice solution but we are on a point where merging realms would be doing WoW a much more benefit then CRZ does.

So what is your opinion? Is it time to merge realms togheter and build a community again?

i Think they should, but if they do, being an Australian, i dont want to be lumped back onto an American server with 800ms.

if they do they should have:

Europre - Megaserver
Russia - Megaserver
America - Megaserver
South America - Mega Server
Oceanic - Mega Server

[psiko74]

how are duplicate names handled if realms are merged?

[Tomana]

how are duplicate names handled if realms are merged?

By implementing surnames you can choose from. And giving larger name fields. WoW names are ridiculously short anyways.

[Cedon]

Don't connected realms already fill this role?

Yes, they did. It was Blizzard's way to merge servers without going through the pain and backlash of determining who gets to keep their name and such in the event there was a collision between two active players.

[Tomana]

The only real issue with low pop realms is, lets be honest, the auction house. The rest... we have crz, we have group finder, so its was like there were no realms.

And it's a huge issue, tbh. Economy is a joke on a lot of servers, and making a cross-realm AH should be a prereq to meaningful professions.
But Blizzard is prolly gonna do neither, so meh

[prizminferno]

This is an easy yes. Dead servers are absolutely abysmal to be on, especially the AH. I spent two weeks on a dead one and quickly ran back to Sargeras. Couldn't imagine ever spending another minute off the Big 3.

[Caerule]

how are duplicate names handled if realms are merged?

This isn't a problem. When realms are merged, the other realm just has their realm name behind them in your friend's list and mail and such. There can be a Caerule-Moonglade and a Caerule-SteamwheedleCartel on the same merged realm. Functionally nothing changes.

[Deleted]

how are duplicate names handled if realms are merged?

The same way they are now. You don't see it, but people from other realms see you as "Name-Server".

[Deleted]

My current realm, Proudmoore, has had 23949 players do something in Tier 21 content. My old realm, Connected Icecrown, has only had 3636. The difference between both realms is glaring. Icecrown used to be the top 20 of realms in progression back in WoTLK, lately it has been bleeding guilds to other more progressed realms and is now ranked 72nd. It was very hard to find a guild that my Wife and I could raid with on Icecrown, so that is why we moved. Icecrown's top guild has not defeated Mythic Argus yet. Meanwhile, we have a guild on Proudmoore who has downed him and two more that are getting close.

Merging more of the low pop realms so they approach the population of the top realms would help to slow down how unbalanced realm populations are getting.

Definitely true, but unfortunatly the longer they wait the more permenant damage is done.
Not only by playersquiting but by having the higher avarage skilled players keep moving to the current populated servers.

So even if low poped servers merged to the point of being twice the size, their raid progression might still be behind.
But it would still be 100 times better than the curren situation.