Does anyone honestly like connected Realms?

[UpsideDownCoffee]

For the game health it’s great. Wow’s system is a relic of an earlier technological age.

For selfish reasons I hate it. It’s already hard enough to get rares without some botter trying to out camp you because someone is paying them half a million gold for it.

[Byleth]

I play on a connected realm. Aside from an annoyance every now and then when I can't click invite someone to party/raid, it's no big deal at all.

I don't see anything not to like about it?

[Depakote]

It always was a solo game with optional multiplayer content.

Oh really now.. You sure you want to claim that?

[thunderdragon2]

personally i don't care for it at all all tho i don't think silvermoon is on the list for that yet

[HateTrain]

Literally the ONLY thing I miss about having been on a low pop realm before connections was that there was a halfway decent chance to find rare mobs to tame as a hunter. It was me and maybe 5 or 6 other rare hunters I saw on occasion. Now every spawn point for every rare spirit beast has 7-20 hunters sitting around 24 hours a day basically.

I like pretty much every other aspect of connected realms.

[music49]

It all depends what your intentions are in game. I would prefer to be on a large server. However the people I enjoy playing with are on this small server. If i could convince them all to switch to a larger pop server that would be great, but not everyone wants that so I'm stuck here with friends for now. and with cross-realm play its not that big of a hassle. Making gold through the AH and recruiting for the guild may be a little tougher but everything else is pretty much the same.

[Alkizon]

Only if it means no CRZ/shards techs (I could add here phasing as disturbing factor, but it's about progression, not about servers, without looking on mostly same mistake: tearing one same world apart), otherwise it's mostly useless.

[Dax1983]

No I do not.

[dcphx]

They pretty much need to connect a lotttttt of the dead realms, like out of the 120 NA realms - only the top 20 really make sense.. the other 100 should be connected so that they could contend with just how much better the top 20 are compared

A few weeks ago I ran some numbers on the US realm populations based on the figures from wowrealmpopulation.com. That site used number of individual characters logged on in the past 30 days. I believe I excluded the RP servers and the Brazilian & Australian servers which left a total of 94 servers (rather than 118 total). Connected realms count as a single server in these calculations. The average server population was a hair under 10k. Only 30 servers had at least 10k population.

The top 30 servers had an average of 27,650 combined H/A population. The other servers had an average of 5150. Only 12 servers had more than the Top 30 server average. The Top 30 servers had 64% of the total WOW population. The Top 30 servers had 71% of Horde population and 53% of Alliance population. The Top 30 servers had 10 sets of connected realms (30 connected realms total). Of the non-Top 30 servers, maybe 5 were single servers with the remainder already connected to at least one server.

Now that was a snapshot in time at the end of an expansion but it gives a feel for how different the bulk of servers are.

If you combined the 64 servers/155 realms that were outside the Top 30 into 15-20 servers, they would approximate the average server size of the top 30 but then you would have 18 servers from that Top 30 who would suddenly become the smallest servers. I will take Blizzard at their word that they did long term data analysis of all the servers which I would hope they will use to balance server size into a tighter range so that the top/bottom of server population is within a couple standard deviations.

[ReleaseDay]

CRZ and realm connections killed server identity. Anyone that argues against this never played WoW before these things.

Even still. want dead realms? My server is connected with like 15 others, it still impossible to find an active guild.

[Lora]

nah man its clearly better to have a dead server that you run into 0 people while leveling and questing and have no socialization at all. thats how mmos are supposed to be played duh.

[Nerph-]

I used to play Alliance on Ravencrest EU, the trade chat spam for boosting services made it impossible to actually read anything normal in trade chat (and yes I know you can just turn off trade chat, but that's not the point). Started playing horde on a low pop realm that's connected and my god is it nice not to have the boosting services spam! Sure, there isn't as much activity in the chats as on high pop realms but I honestly find it refreshing.

[exsanguinate]

No it's like immigration. I don't want people from other "server culture" on my realm. There are specific realms with people that are absolutely disgusting. Also, I like my server empty, so I can farm my stuff and place my bets on bmah.

[Izzyfurious]

I only have 1 reason for liking it.

Group Finder.

Beside that one thing, it can go to the place where the sun dosen't shine. I despise it almost in general, besides that 1 thing.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Yes. What an inane question.

[Depakote]

And that is your opionion, does not make it a fact.

I played wow since Vanilla beta. Im on a very large realm and I still know all the important people on my realm, many of us do. I see many of them in Org on a regular basis, in .4 things like that. CRZ has just made questing and crap like that easier as there is almost always someone around to help out with stuff.

You're on a large realm by your admission What exactly makes you think that you know what someone on a low population realm is merged with another low population realm?

[Lei]

I like connected realms. I see people in zones that are commonly quite dead.

I mean that's probably just crz...

[Itisamuh]

CRZ and realm connections killed server identity. Anyone that argues against this never played WoW before these things.

I played before those things. I say otherwise. Blanket statements are fun.

[Krakan]

I find it a annoying half measure but it's the worst thing to happen.

[Itori]

I thought the whole deal with connectef realms was to lower queue times for content, server identity died when they implimented cross server.