Retail Server Merges?

[OokOok]

I just did a /who all on my server cluster and there's 13 people...

Like are they going to merge the dead servers or what? It's fucking annoying to think they'd rather just make people buy transfers.

Edit: I'm dumb, wasn't 13.

Yeah who'd a think a company would make people do something that makes them more money, you should open steam sometime and look at all the games that have 40 DLC required to actually play the full game.

[Uko]

As much as retail needs mergers it will never happen because you will have the classic people going "Hur dur see retail is dead they have to consildate servers while they keep adding ones for us!" and other game players going "Well looks like wow is finally dead."

[Polybius]

Fuck em, merge them anyway! At most a few special snowflakes will quit because they couldn't keep their lame copy-pasta name.

My character names are unique and are only on the two realms I play on. I take pride in that but would rather lose those for more populated servers.

Duplicates have an asterisk on their name. And it's very easy to have the same name as someone else. Just do a quick armory check of your character names and you'll see you're not so special nor unique from "snowflakes" after all. Players sometimes steal names or feel inspired by them so you see duplicates of your name. Identity has more meaning than you think.

[Elias01]

Would be nice. Classic could use some of those free realms.

[Kallisto]

There was a small amount of warranted backlash because blizzard gave no shits when it came to faction balance with merging. After my realm merged it went from 50/50 pop to 80/20.

Oh I wasn't mocking that part. That's under standable.

It was more "How dare you plan to merge." blah blah wanting to be on a server with about 10 people or too attached to Realm name.

[tmamass]

I just did a /who all on my server cluster and there's 13 people...

/who these days is pretty useless as it shows only people from your realm and not the people of the shard you are in atm.

[MoanaLisa]

The short answer is that it's unlikely that they'll merge servers. They didn't do it in Cataclysm. They didn't do in Warlords and I don't see them doing it now. For one thing they keep the capacity around for expansion launches.

Connected realms: I don't know how many people paid attention to the entire connected realms thing but I don't think that went the way they wanted. It was difficult and many of the connections were delayed again and again. I imagine they're looking at doing something else. Something that will undoubtedly enrage a lot of people. And perhaps that will be justified; perhaps not. We won't know until we know.

But merging realms seems to be something that is off the table.

As a snowflake myself, I have one character that has a slightly unusual name but it's a name I want to keep since I've had it since mid-BC. I once looked and there were 35 others with the same name scattered around. That's another reason why they won't merge realms.

[Akka]

That doesn't work the way you think it does. I just did the same command and got 26 people. Meanwhile I have more than that standing around me.

That's the magic of sharding illusion, making you believe there are tons of people playing with you while they are actually from different realms.

- - - Updated - - -

As for if they'll ever actually merge the servers; no, they won't, and frankly they can't as it stands now. Too many people are attached to the names they've spent upwards of 15 years playing on. Can you imagine the shit show if they went "Okay, we're merging these 10 servers. First one to log in with the respective name keeps it and the other 9 have to rename their characters before they can log in with that character." Can you imagine being one of those 15 year veterans of a name and suddenly Johnny Subbed Yesterday grabs up your name?

The only way a merger like that would work is if we were given last names, or a "family" name for our account that is a unique name to identify us as, not XxThrallxX #1,234

You realize they already can and do exactly that ? The "server groups" that act as a single server, and where every name is suffixed with the name of the server, allowing for the same name being used on every server of the group.

[Kumorii]

Considering these numbers we can conclude that there is only about 40k players playing the game left. Dead game.

[Cosmic Janitor]

There was a small amount of warranted backlash because blizzard gave no shits when it came to faction balance with merging. After my realm merged it went from 50/50 pop to 80/20.

For my realm cluster they also shoved a bunch of alliance dominated servers together, though I fear there is actually method to that madness, because at the end of the day alot of people picked servers precisely because of that imbalance, certainly true for PvP servers.

[Usagi Senshi]

Duplicates have an asterisk on their name. And it's very easy to have the same name as someone else. Just do a quick armory check of your character names and you'll see you're not so special nor unique from "snowflakes" after all. Players sometimes steal names or feel inspired by them so you see duplicates of your name. Identity has more meaning than you think.

Noppai
Nakaress
Opaisuki
Holifurri
Gnipsoft
Dykamunei
Escablowmei

/flex

Now saying that a few older alts did get copied :P

[This One Time At Bandcamp]

Imo servers have no real function on retail, except housing people who is not in groups.
It is so easy to server-hop and get groups, that people dont recognize other players names anymore.

In Classic realms mattered - Now they don't.

They should just try and merge 10 servers and see what happens

[gaymer77]

Legit /who all - entire Horde side

that's not even the correct command to see who is all online. /who 1-120 would yield upto 50 people online between level 1 and level 120. If it says 50 you'd have to break it down by level ranges until there is less than 50 showing up. Also keep in mind that if you are in a dungeon or battleground you won't show up on a /who for the realm since you are no longer technically on that server.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

that's not even the correct command to see who is all online. /who 1-120 would yield upto 50 people online between level 1 and level 120. If it says 50 you'd have to break it down by level ranges until there is less than 50 showing up. Also keep in mind that if you are in a dungeon or battleground you won't show up on a /who for the realm since you are no longer technically on that server.

Just opened the /who window without writing anything(just clicked "Refresh"), 50 people showed up and there are people in BGs listed and most people listed are in dungeons.
Aka: you couldn't be more wrong.

- - - Updated - - -

The short answer is that it's unlikely that they'll merge servers. They didn't do it in Cataclysm. They didn't do in Warlords and I don't see them doing it now. For one thing they keep the capacity around for expansion launches.

Connected realms: I don't know how many people paid attention to the entire connected realms thing but I don't think that went the way they wanted. It was difficult and many of the connections were delayed again and again. I imagine they're looking at doing something else. Something that will undoubtedly enrage a lot of people. And perhaps that will be justified; perhaps not. We won't know until we know.

But merging realms seems to be something that is off the table.

As a snowflake myself, I have one character that has a slightly unusual name but it's a name I want to keep since I've had it since mid-BC. I once looked and there were 35 others with the same name scattered around. That's another reason why they won't merge realms.

For me, connected realms are CRZ realms, while merged realms are what you called connected realms.
Connected = realms attached to each other. Merged = realms that are not really realms, but realm(singular). "Special snowflakes" with boring non-unique names get to keep their precious names.
So merged realms is already a thing, and it's working even if there were a lot of problems getting it to work.

Personally, for me, it's too late now. They had already waited way too long before merging the realms back when they finally did it, and they didn't do it enough so most realms were still suffering from low populations after merging. It is too late for me because so many people have already transfered to my realm that has always had a healthy population, and now the lag and stutter is super annoying.

[styil]

Not as long as paid character transfers are around.

[Amerissis]

Duplicates have an asterisk on their name. And it's very easy to have the same name as someone else. Just do a quick armory check of your character names and you'll see you're not so special nor unique from "snowflakes" after all. Players sometimes steal names or feel inspired by them so you see duplicates of your name. Identity has more meaning than you think.

My main's name is seen on 1 char in the US, a level 110. On the EU, it has me times 2 (2 different servers) and 2 others (a level 14 and 85). So 5 chars with that name in EU/US of which 2 are mine. I've had the name for 15 years. I'M A SNOWFLAKE WIIIIIEEEEEEE!


ps. No, it's nothing with weird characters or xxxNamexxx stuff

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

Again, here, I see people whining about Blizzing merging Alliance dominated realms with other Alliance dominated realms and the same for Horde.
This is a "... and this is why not all people should be able to vote" moment, because you don't understand the basics.

Blizzard had to do that because that was the only option. There were so few(almost none) Alliance dominated pvp realms(the only one in EU I can think of, Outland, already had a very healthy population, so it wasn't going to get merged anyway) and so few(almost none) Horde dominated pve realms(again; can only think of one realm in EU: Draenor that also wasn't going to get merged) that it was impossible for Blizzard to fix the faction imbalance, so it's so stupid to cry about it.

Now that pvp realms are gone, they could fix the faction imbalance on the realms, but it doesn't really matter since people in warmode are put in their own little world anyway.

[justandulas]

they have DESPERATELY needed to merge about 150 of the dead realms for years now.

They make too much off the paid transfers, i guess?

They are the only MMORPG i've ever seen utterly resistant to merging dead realms.

They've burned me 2x with that, and it's a major reason people like me aren't leaving Herod despite the Queues in classic wow. I've been down that road before

[beelgers]

People on my server were looking forward to becoming a connected realm in MoP. Everyone was pretty happy afterwards too. Really no whining at all. The faction balance actually improved slightly (not that that part matters much in today's sharding/crz).

Connected realms worked great as far as I can tell on the servers that were intelligently connected. Names aren't an issue that way either. Hoping we get connected with a lot more realms and soon.

[Kathranis]

If they need to they'll do more Connected Realms. They aren't going to merge realms because, among other issues, it forces character and guild name changes.

With communities, cross realm raiding, and the removal of character limits per realm, they are probably not overly concerned with individual realm populations. I think it's more likely that they'll just expand/improve/adjust the way communities/guilds function in the future.

But, we'll see.