Dead Servers and Raiding

[Gomelus]

Dead servers are a problem in general. Nobody likes to walk around in a ghost town. However, my biggest issue with Dead servers is the lack of raiding guilds.

Personally I would not pay 200+ dollars to move my characters from one server to another. Therefore, I would quit the game if there were no more raiding guilds on my server. I think it's a sad way to quit the game, but it is either pay a lot of money or quit.

I'm interested in hearing from you either:

1) Have you already moved multiple characters from a dead servers in order to join a raiding guild?

or

2) Would you be willing to pay a lot of money to move your characters from a dead server to join a raiding guild?


Of course I think Blizzard should find a solution to "fix" dead servers.

I would, and I have. I was from Ragnaros (latin player), but since I didn't find a raiding guild that was suited to my schedule, I started looking at other realms. Found a few I was interested in, and sent the application. With some I got to talk with the GM.
It was by the time cross-realm mythic Uldir opened, so I could actually trial before I even had to transfer. If the trial went well, I'd transfer. One of the GM I talked to told me I had to transfer first "to show commitment". I kindly told him I wouldn't risk spending money on something that may not work out, so I didn't apply. Found another guild that actually let me trial with them the first week cross-realm, everything went well and I transfered over.

TL;DR: find a guild that actually trials you cross-realm before making the transfer. IMO it's not worth to transfer on a promise.

[ceall]

Dead servers are a problem in general. Nobody likes to walk around in a ghost town. However, my biggest issue with Dead servers is the lack of raiding guilds.

Personally I would not pay 200+ dollars to move my characters from one server to another. Therefore, I would quit the game if there were no more raiding guilds on my server. I think it's a sad way to quit the game, but it is either pay a lot of money or quit.

I'm interested in hearing from you either:

1) Have you already moved multiple characters from a dead servers in order to join a raiding guild?

or

2) Would you be willing to pay a lot of money to move your characters from a dead server to join a raiding guild?


Of course I think Blizzard should find a solution to "fix" dead servers.

why would i want to move all of my character at the same time, when realistically i'd be raiding with 1-2 characters max?

and to answer your question: yes i have moved from 1 server to another in order to join a guild, multiple times. and to me it didnt matter how big/small the server i left or i went to was as long as the guild i joined would be successful.

[Tyrilion]

Not having a good notion of how to do this without wrecking realm economies is what devs have said is the main block to making 'mega servers.' IMO they should just allow xrealm guilds and xrealm mythic from day 1 and leave the realm barriers for the economy but maybe that would also have unintended effects. If WoW2 were remade now it'd probably just have a single big server like EVE or ESO.

Yeah but I imagine they've thought about it and are aware of ramifications, whether it's in-game or out, that we aren't aware of.

[GreenJesus]

Illidan has more guilds 8/9 or higher than my entire server does raiding period. We literally have 51 guilds TOTAL with any progress in BoD, and only 3 of them have killed more than the 1st boss on mythic. My guild is the highest at 8/9M and we've been on this server since Day 1 Vanilla so I don't think there's a chance of us ever transferring.

My realm used to show Medium in MoP after they connected 4 realms together and now it says "New Players" in the server list. I have no clue why they don't just cluster more realms together, there is basically 0 downside.

I feel bad for the low realms that were ignored when Blizzard did the realm mergers. Activision probably saw they were losing out on realm transfer money and made them stop doing it.

[KaPe]

I feel bad for the low realms that were ignored when Blizzard did the realm mergers. Activision probably saw they were losing out on realm transfer money and made them stop doing it.

That's debatable. I'm pretty sure that there were plenty of people who decided to cancel their subscription instead of transferring, which is not exactly making Blizzard any money. Couple months of lost subscription revenue is already equal to a transfer so you'd only need a few people doing that to cancel out profits from entire guild changing servers.

Well, unless they're really counting on whales moving all of their alts. I know that none of my guildies did that, but maybe it's actually a common occurence.

[Kaver]

why would i want to move all of my character at the same time, when realistically i'd be raiding with 1-2 characters max?

and to answer your question: yes i have moved from 1 server to another in order to join a guild, multiple times. and to me it didnt matter how big/small the server i left or i went to was as long as the guild i joined would be successful.

If the server i had played on since 2005 died (in relation to mythic raiding guilds), I would feel bad for leaving my characters behind. I would also find it somewhat unfair as we had no idea about this issue when we originally chose our servers in the start of the game. Imo Blizzard should try to find a better solution than paid transfers.

[bullseyed]

Sadly, there aren't many elegant "fixes" to the problem you present. Connected realms were collectively rejected by the community and failed to revitalize servers in a meaningful way. (In fact, one could argue it was detrimental to community building more than anything else.) Merging realms would be even more polarizing. Shutting down servers would be yet even more telling. (This solution would require Blizzard to acknowledge "dead realms" are even an issue to begin with.) Transferring is an option, albeit pricey... especially for those with multiple toons (though this can be offset by converting gold into a B.Net balance).

The idea I've floated is to allow players one free server transfer for every 12 months of recurring subscription. Not a perfect solution but at least gives players an "out" that doesn't require them to spend their own money to fix a problem that Blizzard can't easily fix themselves.

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Cross-realm guilds would defeat the purpose of realms. This isn't likely to happen any time soon.

Cross-realm guilds already exist, they're call communities.

[Jester Joe]

Mythic raiding is the single thing which WoW does that no other game can even hold a candle towards. If you think dismantling the single feature which sets the game apart is a good idea there isn't much of a point in having a discussion with you. You're delusional.

Nothing about allowing Mythic to be cross realm raided right off the bat "dismantles" that.

You can already do this after the artificial barrier of allowing the first 100 guilds of each faction to clear it, which is silly anyway because chances are if you're good enough to be breaking the top 100 you'd be in a guild together as a group, not cross realms.

To answer OP though, yes I've server changed and faction changed more than I should admit to raid. Even currently I'd still rather be in a guild with the people I raid with.

[Taeldorian]

Why couldn’t they just merge low pop servers? Keep the name of 1 of the servers and merge some of the low pop ones together. Can merge some medium pop ones as well. There’s much less downside to this than there is from CRZ or anything else at all really. If they merge servers they can remove CRZ and maybe fix up sharding so community can start to matter again.

[Jester Joe]

Why couldn’t they just merge low pop servers? Keep the name of 1 of the servers and merge some of the low pop ones together. Can merge some medium pop ones as well. There’s much less downside to this than there is from CRZ or anything else at all really. If they merge servers they can remove CRZ and maybe fix up sharding so community can start to matter again.

They've already basically did this with connected realms.

It didn't solve much of anything.

[Taeldorian]

They've already basically did this with connected realms.

It didn't solve much of anything.

CRZ is definitely not the same as merging servers and having everyone on the same server. I went to one of my older servers and it was CRZed, couldn’t find anyone at all that was even from my server due to how CRZed it was. Take 7-8 low pop realms, merge them into 1 server with everyone being from that 1 server. Once that’s done start dialing back sharding so people have more opportunity to see each other.

War mode phasing, sharding and CRZ have practically obliterated realms and any sense of community. Needs to be dialed back and fixed in ways that don’t further separate the community

[Jester Joe]

CRZ is definitely not the same as merging servers and having everyone on the same server. I went to one of my older servers and it was CRZed, couldn’t find anyone at all that was even from my server due to how CRZed it was. Take 7-8 low pop realms, merge them into 1 server with everyone being from that 1 server.

CRZ isn't Connected Realms.

CRZ = Cross Realm Zones. It's just a phase, you can see the people but you can't trade with them or anything that's restricted to realms.

Connected Realms are the two realms function as one realm, just with people who were originally on the other realm still labeled as such so names weren't taken up.

[Taeldorian]

CRZ isn't Connected Realms.

CRZ = Cross Realm Zones. It's just a phase, you can see the people but you can't trade with them or anything that's restricted to realms.

Connected Realms are the two realms function as one realm, just with people who were originally on the other realm still labeled as such so names weren't taken up.

Oh my bad misunderstood. Yeah I guess it’d potentially pose some issues with names as well that’s a good point.

The best I think they can do is probably remove sharding and maybe replace it with layering that they’re using in classic or just remove sharding after the first month or so of launch. I play on Stormrage which is very high pop but I’ll get thrown into a shard with no people, log back in a little later (or even earlier) and be thrown into a shard with a ton of people. It seems pretty bad for the game overall even if it’s good from a tech standpoint. We also have warmode now which is essentially another form of phasing, combine the two of these and it’s not likely you’ll see the same people all the time even with a high pop realm like SR.

[Mamercus]

Sharding already mixes people from multiple realms. It works well for creating the sense of a populated area for PvE WQ content -- very well. It works badly for the "Cheers" effect of seeing the same people all the time and for creating coherence in world PvP.

Xrealm grouping makes it really convenient to get a group for content at all different levels, but it has the downside of diminishing the sense of community and doing nothing to discourage chilly social behavior (no talking) or outright nastiness. There are costs and benefits to just about every change you could make here and subjectivity plays a big part into it. For example if you cared about world pvp integrity most of all the sharding system would have very different priorities than it does now. If you cared mostly about the "Cheers" effect you would also put more weight into matching the same players together all the time. If you cared mostly about keeping the playing field populated and faction balanced in PvP you would set different rules. If you cared about never phasing people in and out while they are visible you would change the rules accordingly.

[Arainie]

How would opening it up so you can do it with other realms sooner dismantle it..?

They let you do mythics cross-realm anyway, opening it up from the start would just make it easier

The biggest argument against one large "realm" when it comes to Mythic raiding is the fact that joining a guild should be a commitment from both sides. If there is a near infinite pool of guilds to join, players will (and this we have seen with every other activity) tend to think more about themselves since it's so easy to just join a new guild. If there's no penalty for guildhopping things will get ugly pretty fast. At least nowdays you have a finite amount of chances to be an asshole before you need to either pay for a transfer or make a new character.

[MidnyteTV]

Ive paid over $400 in server/faction changes since 2009. Its usually worth it. Dead servers cannot reasonbly accommodate an MMO. Hence why the larger servers are still offering competitive guilds to raid with.

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Secondly, if you want to raid co sistently, especially mythic, i have zero sympathy for people who refuse to pk jt themselves and their guild in a position to recruut more people.

[MrExcelion]

Merging should have started up again a couple of years ago

[Dakhath]

I "retired" from any sort of serious content a few years back and relocated to a low pop/low progression RP server just for a change of pace, shortly thereafter Blizzard purged a bunch of old names that had been saved and suddenly I have like 50-60 names that would never ever be available on a real server. I leveled a ton of alts in the last few years before taking my current break and was able to do a weekly +10 pug and early AOTC so that was enough for me, but anyone going on these servers for real progression is wasting their time and money. The only people that are on these servers and serious trying to progress are the people that have been there for years and don't care too much about how many bosses they kill, or real egomaniacs who are shit but try to be the big fish in a small pond.

[pinkz]

i made a player on Dalvengyr years back, was flagged as low pop. was told easier to get things than on a high pop server. that was wrong, it was hard getting anything done, finding Alch's, enchanters, etc. AH and economy was dismal to near non-existent. Blizzard years back merged it with 4 other dead servers, which only helped slightly and temporarily. before CRZ main cities were all dead, after CRZ depended how you shard in and out how many people you see.

5 servers merged are not close to what you will experience on illidan, area52, stormrage, moonguard and more. my Bnet friend farms epic proc staff twink/tmog item, sells on on AH on full/high server, gets 600K for it, so i head to westfall to farm, i get the item in 3 hours of farming, i try 120K on 5 merged server AH...no sell, 40K no sell, 30k no sell, 12K no sell, 4K no sell. i was hoping for 5 months worth of tokens.

when BFA launched, full/high pop servers, as you leveled players and got lucky 350/355 BOE epic drops with or without gem slot, they sold 1-4 mil per piece with easy sells. low pop server you would be lucky to get 100-300k to the point when most of the time when you sell a BOE it is swooped up by players $$ transferring in to swoop them up for a raider, raiding guild, or gold maker on a high pop server.

some say 900K on a dead server is as good as 3mil on a high pop server....no it is not. 5 mil mount is 5 mil on all servers, token price is same across all servers. i won't pay to move players on dead servers, also no longer play them

[GreenJesus]

i made a player on Dalvengyr years back, was flagged as low pop. was told easier to get things than on a high pop server. that was wrong, it was hard getting anything done, finding Alch's, enchanters, etc. AH and economy was dismal to near non-existent. Blizzard years back merged it with 4 other dead servers, which only helped slightly and temporarily. before CRZ main cities were all dead, after CRZ depended how you shard in and out how many people you see.

5 servers merged are not close to what you will experience on illidan, area52, stormrage, moonguard and more. my Bnet friend farms epic proc staff twink/tmog item, sells on on AH on full/high server, gets 600K for it, so i head to westfall to farm, i get the item in 3 hours of farming, i try 120K on 5 merged server AH...no sell, 40K no sell, 30k no sell, 12K no sell, 4K no sell. i was hoping for 5 months worth of tokens.

when BFA launched, full/high pop servers, as you leveled players and got lucky 350/355 BOE epic drops with or without gem slot, they sold 1-4 mil per piece with easy sells. low pop server you would be lucky to get 100-300k to the point when most of the time when you sell a BOE it is swooped up by players $$ transferring in to swoop them up for a raider, raiding guild, or gold maker on a high pop server.

some say 900K on a dead server is as good as 3mil on a high pop server....no it is not. 5 mil mount is 5 mil on all servers, token price is same across all servers. i won't pay to move players on dead servers, also no longer play them

That was when it would be easier to find mining nodes, Time lost proto drake, rares, etc. Now you just get put on cross realm and forced to compete with other servers even though they don't contribute to your economy/community. CRZ needs to get the fuck out. Either merge the realms or do nothing.