WoW Retail - New Realm Connections for Low-Population Servers

[Ragnarohk]

Mate, if you haven't played on low pop you don't know how shitty it is.

I think you skipped my first post... so i'll recap

My realm is at the 119/120 position in raiding: Only 2 guilds doing mythic. At 3/12 and 4/12

And 118/120 position in population

[BarosanuNr1]

I must be the only one who enjoys low pop realms, and not having a thousand other people crowding the same zones.

I like low pop realms too, but I can see how it might suck for people who enjoy mythic raiding.

The good thing that comes out of this for me is that I'll get more character slots for the same "realm".

[Unholyground]

They also killed it by spreading an aging game across retail and classic and they insist on keeping factions.

I like to think of classic more as an escape from retail when it's garbage. I know a ton of people who went and played classic who just wanted to get away from BFA so there's that aspect of it too and I'm not sure how many people take that into consideration. People love wow so much they're willing to play an older version of the same game so they don't have to get invested into something else that alone should inspire the devs to be better, but money always rears its face and generally wins unfortunately so the publishers usually get their way.

[Exkrementor]

I must be the only one who enjoys low pop realms, and not having a thousand other people crowding the same zones.

Comes with positives and negatives. Low pop realms are nice to farm mounts and rares and so on but they are hell for raiding guilds because nobody wants to transfer to a realm with only one guild on it.

[TheVaryag]

WoW Retail - New Realm Connections for Low-Population Servers

World of Warcraft is best when you have a community of other players around you, and while numerous ways to participate in cross-realm play have been added to the game over the years, there are still many aspects of the experience that are realm-based. From your history with your guild to your interactions with the economy around you, a realm with a healthy population provides more opportunities, and it’s been several years since we last connected some realms.

We’ve now completed a comprehensive study of realm populations for every realm in the world. Over the next 2-3 months, we’re going to connect the low-population realms to other existing realms. This process will take place during scheduled maintenance, connecting a few realms each week, until we’ve connected every low-population realm in every region to a substantially larger population of players.

As this project unfolds, we will post notices in advance of each week’s connections in the appropriate regions and languages. During each maintenance period, everything will be automatically combined for the affected realms. When maintenance is complete, players on affected realms will log into Battle for Azeroth and find that they’re now part of a larger connected-realm community. At the same time, we’ll merge the appropriate realm discussion forums.

Please keep an eye out for notifications here as we proceed through this project. Again, we’ll let you know here in advance when realms in this region are about to be connected.

Thank you very much!

I don't know how, but people are going to be salty and bitch about this. Still nice to see some of the dead realms get some attention.

Only a matter of time until Blizzard started to buckle under the weight of low-pop realms and start merging realms this way, but not really cause everyone can server hop and Realms nowadays are just huge shards ontop of shards.

At this point we've all seen that there's many many many dead realms with super low pop it's not even funny and the moment blizzard start to DELETE and merge those realms with other medium-highpop servers is when Blizzard admits there's not that many players they lead us to believe there are. And this is what they're trying to do to not "Merge" servers yet and make it look seamless and unrealistic how all the realms still have many people, while If you just use your eyes, you notice half the people standing around you at any given time are from different realms, different shards, seemlessly just there.

[Dziubla]

I like low pop realms too, but I can see how it might suck for people who enjoy mythic raiding.

The good thing that comes out of this for me is that I'll get more character slots for the same "realm".

They removed the restriction a while ago, you can have all 50 characters on the same realm.

[enigma77]

I really dislike the way servers work nowadays.

On the one hand everywhere you go you see strangers from other servers that you'll likely never see again, you do all forms of content with people from different servers, that you'll never see again. But then Mythic raiding and the auction house are specific to your server.

Either go all the way with the mega-server concept or just give us back actual realm identity, by completely getting rid of crossrealm. It's not like Mythic being server only until 100 guilds have cleared it and the Auction house are able to preserve server identity/community anyway.

Playing Classic for several months has taught me one thing: On a busy server most people will be strangers to you anyway, but there is a greater feeling of a realm community nonetheless. I think this feeling is completely gone on Retail.

[justandulas]

This was long overdue. Expansions overdue

Better late than never I suppose

[Cavox]

Free migrations on a CD would solve the problem as well.

[Radiobiology]

Just do proper server merges already, if people are so attached to their name that they cant live without it, they can transfer to another realm. But probably they wont lose their name either way, chances are that name is taken by an abandoned character on the other realm.

Also, there would most likely be more people who would welcome a free name change than people who would lose the meaning of their life over it. And hey, if your name is so popular and shared by a lot of people, then you might want to consider stimulating your imagination a bit more.

[Laqweeta]

I don't have high hopes considering that they left realms to languish after the first set of connections.

This lol.

Low + low + low = low.

Medium + low + low = medium.

High + low + low = high.

[Djuntas]

I think you skipped my first post... so i'll recap

My realm is at the 119/120 position in raiding: Only 2 guilds doing mythic. At 3/12 and 4/12

And 118/120 position in population

Well you quoted only 1 part.

[Drusin]

I don't know how, but people are going to be salty and bitch about this. Still nice to see some of the dead realms get some attention.

I just made characters on new realms, some of which are low pop.
I like to spread my characters out over as many realms as possible to maximize the amount of cheap BoE's I can buy off the AH. So now I'll have to realm transfer characters to once again be on as many unique realms/clusters as possible so yeah, I'm bitching ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Blizzard admits there's not that many players they lead us to believe there are

Who cares?

Also I haven't been lead to believe anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Kralljin]

Okay, honest question, what's the technical purpose of actual servers on Retail anymore?

The only thing i can think off right now is the Mythic Raid restriction, but besides that everything should be CRZ, shouldn't it?
Shouldn't people from a lowpop automatically get thrown into a shard alongside people from a whole bunch of servers?

Like, isn't Retail for all intents and purposes operating on a "one mega server" approach (due to CRZ) with just a ton of different shards?

[Beet]

They also killed it by spreading an aging game across retail and classic and they insist on keeping factions.

Wait you think the people who went to classic were people who were playing BFA every day and just quit due to classic? Almost everyone I play with came back for classic only. we got a handful of raid loggers who play retail six days a week and log on classic for raid day only, but they’re not the majority.

If blizzard didn’t add classic, these people wouldn’t be playing BFA lol. Like my current GM hasn’t played the main version of WoW since MoP came out and he’d just be back to inactivity if he wasn’t playing classic.

I agree though factions should go already.

[Stacie]

With phasing/sharding and the ability to add numbers to names and hide them, (Hugh#123456) you could just dump everyone on the same server these days.

Sure it has some downsides like the realm first achievements, money from transfers vanishing, everyone running around with the same name, money lost from name changes perhaps? and a wait to login maybe with a new patch (could be seen as ether good or bad most of these things)

But there would never be a need for future merges. Or any dead realms with people struggling to find guilds/other players and just quitting. And ofc all that other goodness that comes with high pop servers.

[Marrilaife]

It still don’t fixes the imbalance between Horde and Alliance. I was looking for a new mythic raiding guild recently and on Wowprogress.com I was looking through the 12/12 guilds on EU Ravencrest (as this is the biggest EU server in relation to Alliance mythic raiding). To my disappointment I saw that a good amount of the guilds had already transferred to Horde (mainly EU Kazzak) to have better recruitment possibilities in Shadowlands. This make me wonder if it’s even worth it to invest in Alliance characters anymore... I just hate playing Horde..

They're not gonna fix it. Competitive Alliance died with Legion and m+. Everyone transfered to horde to push keys together, that's when realm stopped mattering and only thing that mattered was faction.

Don't know what level of raiding interests you, atm 12/12 could be world top 100 or could be world rank 1000. Anything above world rank 200-300 on alliance EU is a barren wasteland. There's a very small handful of guilds that are very prone to disband, swap to horde or having very weird mentality and it's extremely hard to get into their "core". If you're not playing an extreme fotm class and swap to it every time fotm swaps because something got nerfed, it's mega hard to find anything reasonable. I had many friends who ended up perma benched just because they didn't play a fotm class and they were new to a guild so old members always had prio. Especially if you're yet another melee, don't expect to find guilds welcoming you with open arms.

Low amount of guilds raiding mythic at a good level is not only a factor of alliance dying, but also mythic raiding being on a decline. Back in the days raiding was a prestigious thing to do in wow, especially at the top difficulty levels. Now everyone is obsessed about r.io, I'd swear half the apps my guild gets is person with blue or lower parses in raids but extremely proud of their 3-4k r.io. I mean if r.io was some display of skill then they should be able to get at least 75%+ parse, even counting the unlucky corruption procs and whatnot.

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Sure it has some downsides like the realm first achievements,

These are gone since WOD...

[unbound]

Took them long enough.

It usually does take a long time for executives in denial to accept the truth.

[Coffeh]

I’m curious on what is actually a low pop realm these days. I’m on Shadow Council-US and it feels really empty. We were merged with Blackwater Raiders several years ago now but I don’t think that’s enough anymore. I do see other RP realm players thanks to CRZ but Shadow Council itself feels pretty empty.

This is the proper solution. For some weird reason they refuse to do it. WoW has WAAAAY too many servers. They could probably get rid of 50-75% of them. And actually, truly merge servers. Connected-realms are just a half-assed measure.

Also, CRZ should be removed from the game. It doesn't create communities, it doesn't forge friendships. It is just an illusion of community. It's strangers that you'll never see or interact with ever again.

[Alayea]

These are gone since WOD...

Incorrect. Very late in patch 8.1, my realm had a Horde guild get the realm first for mythic Kil'jaeden (and eventually mythic Argus just prior to 8.2's launch).