Is it time to merge realms at last?

[Onikaroshi]

Honestly, unless they find a way to speed up the auction house... f*** high population realms.

No AH issues here, aside from the API still being down.

[TheVaryag]

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 It'd be good

But

Will they do It? I doubt It, If they do they'll be showing the same thing SWTOR has with their servers merging a few months ago. And that Is that their population Is getting smaller and smaller and they won't do that until the very last desparate second. It's clear to anyone now for years they haven't been big boss MMO among MMOs anymore. With Legion only having roughly 2 mil subs In my opinion.

[xpose]

It's a combination of too many servers for the population but also people migrating to specific servers because of the players that are on it. Think about how many people move to servers that asmongold, soda, towliee, top pvpers ect.. all play on just so they can see them and play with them. This also makes popular server more popular while draining communities from others.

[Onikaroshi]

It's clear to anyone now for years they haven't been big boss MMO among MMOs anymore. With Legion only having roughly 2 mil subs In my opinion.

Most of the free MMOs are basically dead, FFXIV is really WoWs only competition and it's not even close. WoW is still the king of a dying genre.

[Enkrypt]

Coming from the bussiest realm of EU (atleast was for 6-7 years) now it's a wasteland
I went to Argent dawn (RP) and it was just as alive as back in the wotlk days.
ALOT of people transfer daily to RP realms, would surprise you.

Realms are not fine and i know this site is full of wow fanboys who don't wanna see the bad side of WoW, but trust me, Realms are NOT in a good state. Not even close.

Cool story man.

Good thing it's all anecdotal and in no way, shape, or form even close to actual data to suggest one way or another. You just made this thread to rant because your favorite server is losing people. That's literally it. You don't know how other servers are, and you used the word "fanboy" which pretty much wraps up any valid point you were going to make.

Just another thread crying about the supposed death of WoW. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

[Trend]

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?

You should define what you think the problem is that makes your 'solution' relevant.

[WowIsDead64]

Both solutions are bad. Most games have megaservers now. This feature takes best of both CRZ and sever merging. It allows you to join guilds, use AH, etc., but allows players to keep their character and guild names.

[Erolian]

Connected realms are largely the same thing and it's frankly moronic to start closing realms now when there's always a temporary but substantially large rush back to the game with new expansions.

It amazes me that people never seem to be able to keep this in the back of their heads and I've seen some users during expansion rushes saying that Blizzard should do something about the queues and then discussing merging realms (reducing capacity) later on.

It's dumb.

I feel like you're really neglecting the only obvious approach that makes sense. You wouldn't be reducing capacity. That would be stupid. You would be using the sharding tech to make sure servers weren't over capacity but your character wouldn't be locked in like it is on live. Realms would cease to exist but the servers currently carrying the workload would still be there. Currently I can only use the A52 ah and raid mythic with A52 guilds. The healthy gameplay experience would be to allow me to raid and trade with everyone on NA realms and either associate my character names with my btag or leave the "-Area52" on the end. The servers would all exist to maintain capacity and ensure everyone can log on to play however nobody would be locked into playing on some trash realm with zero progression and like 4 whole people online in Dalaran. There are only three reasons this doesn't happen. The first is to maintain a sense of server identity that, frankly, hasn't existed in multiple expansions. The second is so they can keep farming the low pop realms for realm/faction transfers along with anyone trying to find a new guild anywhere. The third is that for some reason they're unable to accomplish this which I will never believe since currently they've proven they can make any raid they want cross realm as well as have cross realm guilds where they felt like linking the servers.

[vsb]

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 yes. And remove name uniqueness rule. I've yet to find a group with 2 people with identical names from different servers. If this situation happened, just rename those people to Illidan (1) and Illidan (2) while they are in the same party/raid. Guild rules might be tricky, but I think it's possible to imagine something. Also auction really needs rework.

[Gimlix]

I think yes. And remove name uniqueness rule. I've yet to find a group with 2 people with identical names from different servers. If this situation happened, just rename those people to Illidan (1) and Illidan (2) while they are in the same party/raid. Guild rules might be tricky, but I think it's possible to imagine something. Also auction really needs rework.

Do people really still care about their name nowadays. the (1)(2) idea seems fitting.

[Checkt]

no, crz already fucked everything up when it comes to hunting rares. it's bad enough as it is, leave it that way

IF I CAN'T GET HANDED A *RARE* THE GAME IS RUINED QQ, TBH EVERYONE IN THE ZONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO TAME?ACQUIRE RARES AFTER ONE PERSON DOES IT,
QQ.


OT:
There is no point in having a bunch of servers with low populations....

[Chloral]

Names should be already handled alongside the battletag tbh. Two people on the same realm wanting the name Argaroth? Add an invisible Julie#8932 and Robert#7430 at the end and voila two people on the same realm with the same character name.

Merging would be very good for the community as a whole. You could finally trade people you encounter, invite them to your guild ect... I'm all for it.

[Niwes]

merge will NEVER happen. cause of blizz is earning MILLIONS with paid transfers.

look at combined statistics from some clever ppl, by using stats from wowprogress, armory, etc. and you will be shocked HOW much blizz profits every quarter from paid transfers.

its also the solely reason why they brought halfassed connected realms. from a financial company perspective its very clever: they help customers a bit, to keep em, but do not offer a real solution to the problem, so they can earn money by services. its best of both worlds. and scalable.

so, no offense here. its what clever companies do, to profit well.


tl;dr: no merge ever happenz, cauze of $$$z.

[Taeldorian]

That is fair enough, we don't know the official ones though we do know some of them and the number of overall raiders in wow progress is lower than ever. But, of course, that isn't a whole story.
But we cannot deny that almost 70% of the people visiting this thread feel their realms are unpopulated. That is certainly a reality.

There’s always been complaints of low pop realms. WoW has had too many realms from the very start. Especially now that a ton more people can fit into each server there’s no reason to have as many as we do. There are still some realms I’ve never heard of and I’ve played this game for 10 years now. Even back in vanilla people said it felt like their realms were empty. Same as BC/Wrath and all of the others. Just way too many servers.

And I get your point with the overall raiders. I feel like the 7.1 AP grind+Tomb of Sargeras annihilated a lot of raiders especially the higher end ones (not world first, just mythic raiders in general). The 7.1 AP grind being an actual requirement and the most efficient way being spam 1 dungeon 500+x and then a few months later having a raid with almost every boss holding everyone separately accountable for either wiping or killing the boss (meaning if one guy fucks up it’s over and unrecoverable) really killed a lot of people. Nighthold had a ton of raiders but there was a sharp decline a month or so after ToS released because the raid was terrible. Not to mention AP being spec specific so you needed all 3 specs to be sufficient but had to farm AP seperately.

However I think those people will be back again next expac especially since the AP system is being completely improved, the raiding scene might be much more interesting with azerite gear (as long as it’s an interesting system), and split raiding will be a lot less necessary without tier gear and main gear pieces can’t TF as well as weapons. So hopefully overall retention will be better.

[Teri]

Merge it.

BUT they have to fix Auction houses on high pop single-realms first, example EU Draenor/Silvermoon.

Merge ALL Auction houses into 1 region, new dedicated servers for it, and new 2018 tech that doesn't rely on scanning pages....



CRZ doesn't allow guilds or regular trade so is not a FIX either, in fact , it decreases stuff like rare spawns etc.

[Azerate]

Yeah I would be in favor of a merge.

I'm playing on a fairly low pop realm, haters would call it a dead realm probably. Since I've come back in Legion, I found it is connected to another low pop realm. People from the connected realms can trade, join guilds, use the same AH etc.

Just connect more realms together in this way. Most of the low pop servers should be merged like that I think.

PS. It is a merge in some sense, but technically, they are 2 different realms, so we can have have 28 characters pretty much in the same ecosystem, which I think is a cool advantage over the high pop servers.

[MoanaLisa]

Names should be already handled alongside the battletag tbh. Two people on the same realm wanting the name Argaroth? Add an invisible Julie#8932 and Robert#7430 at the end and voila two people on the same realm with the same character name.

Wouldn't work for chat channels. Probably would cause problems with legacy code that expects a maximum number of characters to a name. Screwing around with the character name is even more fraught than the bag thing. I think they'll work it out in time but it's not as simple as people think.

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merge will NEVER happen. cause of blizz is earning MILLIONS with paid transfers.

You'll need to explain why they went through the exercise of connecting realms and plan to do more of it since that directly contradicts your theory.

[Azerate]

Wouldn't work for chat channels. Probably would cause problems with legacy code that expects a maximum number of characters to a name. Screwing around with the character name is even more fraught than the bag thing. I think they'll work it out in time but it's not as simple as people think.

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You'll need to explain why they went through the exercise of connecting realms and plan to do more of it since that directly contradicts your theory.

If there are characters named exactly the same on two connected realms, then one of them will have a "-ServerName" after their name. So it kind of does work already

[MoanaLisa]

If there are characters named exactly the same on two connected realms, then one of them will have a "-ServerName" after their name. So it kind of does work already

ToonID-Realm still guarantees that there can only be one character with that ID anywhere in the system. That would not necessarily be the case with ToonName and a four-digit number. Numbers are clunky in a toon ID in any case and assigning one to everyone's toon name wouldn't be sufficient to guarantee that region- or worldwide the same toon and four-digit ID wouldn't exist. Same goes for tying it to a battlenet id. There may only be one MoanaLisa#0000 in the system but if I have a couple of dozen character scattered around a bunch of realms on both factions there's no easy way to guarantee that out of my group of 10,000 players with the same four-digit extension to my battle.net ID (#0000-9999) that someone won't name a toon exactly the same way I have. That's a big problem.

Hope that wasn't too in the weeds for database management but the rock-solid foundation of how the game stores info is all about that ToonName-Realm ID within a region. No duplicates.

[IronWulf]

What I think would be really amazing but won't/can't happen is if it was possible to play together across regions and not just realms.