Server merge at KR realm

[Deleted]

rofl go read the Blizzard posts from 2011 to now. All the exact same statement.

Oh well...

We are currently not in a situation where we are ready to provide specific details though, but rest assured that we are taking this topic quite seriously. [...] , we want you guys to know that we are aware of the situation and that we are looking into ways that we may be able to help in the future

Just as an FYI, we monitor realm population balance and and make decisions based on the data we receive on a regular basis. We are aware of the situation on Sunstrider and other realms, and are looking into ways that we may be able to help. Thanks for the patience so far

Yesterday we discussed low-population and faction-imbalanced realms with our developers. They have some pretty bold and spectacular plans for addressing this in anticipation of implementing some of the features we plan to in Mists . I just don't have a lot of information to share with you at this stage of programming and development.

We have already mentioned in previous posts that there is no easy and simple solution to this issue, and this is no lie, neither is it an attempt to ignore the issue... even though that many of the suggestions provided by people in this thread sound simple enough and straightforward, I can assure you that they are not.

Blizzard conducted free mass transfers at the same time and merged Korean server two months after this post. Twice in Korea and Taiwan until today.

Then CRZ was revealed..

We do realise that this system does not address all of the issues affecting low population and faction imbalanced realms, but we do feel that it will improve things quite a bit.

Lastly, as was stated by Andrai: we have extended the posting limit on this thread to allow you to channel your feedback and comments on this topic. The other threads made on this topic are also not locked because we want them ignored, but to ensure that all of your feelings are posted here so that none them are missed and it can be sent to those it is pertinent to.

That was post number #2518. It is now at #5143
#5038 first blue response after almost an entire year

In case anyone missed it this was in the Q&A from yeday !

Genada5: Do you plan on addressing the server population issues soon or you just planing on keeping exploiting it to make further revenue off of server transfers?
Ghostcrawler: We do have plans and we are actively (as in I was in a meeting on it yesterday) working on a plan. We don't want to share that plan until we are reasonably confident that it is going to work. We want to be clear that we don't think the experience for players on very low pop realms (which includes very imbalanced factions on otherwise active realms) is a good one. We want to solve it.

Just blue-tagging this to make sure that more people will take note of this.

I know you guys would have liked something more specific about what we are planning to address this issue, but we do not yet have information on this we can share with you. We will of course let you know as soon as we can.

Underlined my favourite parts.
Progress feels like yesterday 3 years ago.

[Xilurm]

I would quit if I lose the name I've used since Vanilla, don't know how they will manage it. Like Maelle said already "If they don't merge servers here, people will bitch
If they merge servers, people will bitch"

You played since Vanilla and survived all of WoW's doomsdays. I really doubt you would quit because of that.

[Volitar]

I don't think we need to merge servers, some people like to play on low pop servers and they can stay there and enjoy their time. Some people want a higher pop server and that's fine too you can just xfer to an already established high pop server.

I have several toons on low pop servers that I enjoy and I have my main on Arthas, a pretty good size server. I get the best of both worlds, well that is until they added cross realm zones >.>

[Xilurm]

I don't think we need to merge servers, some people like to play on low pop servers and they can stay there and enjoy their time. Some people want a higher pop server and that's fine too you can just xfer to an already established high pop server.

I have several toons on low pop servers that I enjoy and I have my main on Arthas, a pretty good size server. I get the best of both worlds, well that is until they added cross realm zones >.>

If it was that easy people wouldn't be making threads about it. Not to mention it costs money.

[Volitar]

If it was that easy people wouldn't be making threads about it. Not to mention it costs money.

Well obviously no on is going to like paying to ditch their old server but I'd rather pay money to find a new server than destroy the atmosphere of low pop servers forever.

[Xilurm]

Well obviously no on is going to like paying to ditch their old server but I'd rather pay money to find a new server than destroy the atmosphere of low pop servers forever.

Well they kinda already did that with CRZ.

[Deleted]

Well obviously no on is going to like paying to ditch their old server but I'd rather pay money to find a new server than destroy the atmosphere of low pop servers forever.

How about we rather not reward them any money to solve the problem and not destroy the players atmosphere either.

It not like they have to make us pay to move our characters from a dead realm to a populated one.

[Auxora]

Hit the nail on the head about paying. In Korea players would scoff at paying $25+ per character to switch realms so the merges are needed there. In the US/EU Blizzard is effectively forcing reverse-merges, by leaving low-pop realms so unplayable that players break down and shell out the money to move themselves. If you browse around different realms it's very clear that has been happening on a large scale little by little. Realms that were low to mid pop realms seem like ghost towns in a lot of cases, and larger realms are now completely packed. That's because CRZ may help slightly, but it doesn't help for many important things forming/recruiting guilds, maintaining realm economies, or progression raiding. So players and entire guilds get tired of those things and either quit wow or shell out tons of money to move their characters to higher pop servers. That's lead to an indirect consolidation to high pop realms. I'm guessing that eventually when Blizzard thinks they've squeezed all they can out of the desolate lowest pop realms they will start to merge those, but that will be a last resort.

[Kuja]

While translating the player comments in that post, I noticed almost no one had a negative comment about it. Seems like 95% of people commenting approved of the merge. Don't see why it would be different in US or EU realms.

I also noticed that on a KR realm you can have spaces in your name!!!!!!!111 :O WTB. (Or then it was just google translate playing tricks) Would solve a lot of naming issues though, especially if you have to rename your toon after a merge.

By the way, is there CRZ on KR realms?

[M00]

I wonder how this would work if you were character capped on two of the realms that were being merged. For example, I have 11 level 90s on 2 different Oceanic servers. If a merge like this happened here it is likely that all 12 Oceanic servers would be put into 1 or 2 servers. Would they allow more than 11 toons per server?

[Ragashii]

It's great that they are merging servers on KR realms. They need to do the same in the US/EU. There's an actual simple reason why:There are too many servers from when the game was still growing. It happened with blizzard and it happens to all companies. You grow and grow, hire people left and right to keep up with the growth. But once the growth stops you end up with way more people than you actually need. So you have to prune the excess to stay efficient and reduce bloat. It's the same story with the servers, there's too much bloat and it needs to be pruned.

[majesta]

I don't think we need to merge servers, some people like to play on low pop servers and they can stay there and enjoy their time. Some people want a higher pop server and that's fine too you can just xfer to an already established high pop server.

I have several toons on low pop servers that I enjoy and I have my main on Arthas, a pretty good size server. I get the best of both worlds, well that is until they added cross realm zones >.>

I have two accounts from the PvP restriction back in the day. I am not going to spend 11 alliance + 11 horde characters * $25 to transfer to realm so I can see other players and have the benefits and being able to play an MMORPG with other players.

[Mad_Murdock]

I would quit if I lose the name I've used since Vanilla, don't know how they will manage it. Like Maelle said already "If they don't merge servers here, people will bitch
If they merge servers, people will bitch"

Well you are correct and Ghostcrawler even said that it would be a problem in a tweet or post about 2 months back.

At the same time, if a long time, well known, player like Landsoul can deal with having to rename his toon to LandsoulX, because a level 1 has that name on Illidan, surely you can suffer a extra character as well.

[Conscious]

Why isn't this happening in the west yet?

Server merges are the hallmark of a dying game.

Merge servers in the West, and the game will most likely start hemorrhaging subs, out of either player panic or anger.

[blackblade]

Well you are correct and Ghostcrawler even said that it would be a problem in a tweet or post about 2 months back.

At the same time, if a long time, well known, player like Landsoul can deal with having to rename his toon to LandsoulX, because a level 1 has that name on Illidan, surely you can suffer a extra character as well.

I would imagine that some names will be given preference over lower level, unplayed and banked names

[Orly]

It's great that they are merging servers on KR realms. They need to do the same in the US/EU. There's an actual simple reason why:There are too many servers from when the game was still growing. It happened with blizzard and it happens to all companies. You grow and grow, hire people left and right to keep up with the growth. But once the growth stops you end up with way more people than you actually need. So you have to prune the excess to stay efficient and reduce bloat. It's the same story with the servers, there's too much bloat and it needs to be pruned.

I'd say that's a misconception. The real reason, I think, is that with the addition of dungeon/raid finder and cross-realm grouping and zones, the social aspect of wow took a huge hit. Faction imbalance too started when they allowed both factions on pvp realms, so people switched to the more populated one for the obvious advantage by simply rerolling. Because of these, realms became quieter/unbalanced and most players, thinking their realms were dying, transferred to a more popular one.

In short, people started flocking to high populated realms when before they were more evenly spread. That left more realms empty.


I'm not against realm merging, but I don't think it's badly needed either. Some hardcore free realm transfers should do the trick. I don't know if it's just me or not, but the last time I've seen an available free realm transfer at the login screen was 3 years ago. Is it just me or anyone else noticed this?

[Tharkkun]

It's possible they are beta testing this so to speak in Korea since it's one of the smaller regions. They have double raid resets and things that haven't hit the US/EU servers yet.

[TheSerialSniper]

rofl go read the Blizzard posts from 2011 to now. All the exact same statement.

Reading that thread just made me realize that people do NOT research servers before transferring to them or rerolling on them. Server forums are a great way to get an idea of how a server is.

[Pann]

Reading that thread just made me realize that people do NOT research servers before transferring to them or rerolling on them. Server forums are a great way to get an idea of how a server is.

Most people that are now faced with these problems created their characters when they first started playing the game and would have rolled on recommended or new player realm.

[Canderous1]

i would happily rename every one of my characters for a free realm transfer to a server with a steady/sustainable population.