Why is the low population server situation not solved?

[Relapses]

Couple things: 1.) It was mentioned at BlizzCon that they're aware of the problem and it was implied we may see more connected realms. And 2.) You can now essentially pay for a server transfer with in-game services via the WoW token so if you're not moving yourself off of your own dead server you have nobody to blame but yourself. This is not a Blizzard issue, it's a player issue.

That said, I've always been fond of the idea of allowing players who stay continuously subscribed to have a free server transfer with every 12-plus months of subscription. Either that or a one-time-use significant coupon code, or something to the effect.

[BetrayedOf52]

Couple things: 1.) It was mentioned at BlizzCon that they're aware of the problem and it was implied we may see more connected realms. And 2.) You can now essentially pay for a server transfer with in-game services via the WoW token so if you're not moving yourself off of your own dead server you have nobody to blame but yourself. This is not a Blizzard issue, it's a player issue.

That said, I've always been fond of the idea of allowing players who stay continuously subscribed to have a free server transfer with every 12-plus months of subscription. Either that or a one-time-use significant coupon code, or something to the effect.

Paying 18$ a month and 50$ for an expansion. I think that is enough already to warrant Blizzard doing something, why should the player then have then spend in game currency on banaid fixing blizzards issue instead of something fun... lol what a joke.

[Cosmic Janitor]

It's because a couple of screeching idiots go on and on about server community and shit like that and because server transfers make them too much money, since in WoW quadruple dipping into the pockets of your customers is the norm.

[Cosmic Janitor]

You're missing the point. The general feeling is that Blizzard would never do anything to harm their precious transfer income. So we have connected realms, a promise to look at it again, cross-realm dungeon groups, cross-realm raids, cross-realm just about everything except guilds and Auction Houses.

So explain how any of that is protective of their income from realm transfers and if they would never do anything, why in the hell would they do any of that?
.

Simple. Flat out not adressing the issue causes casual players or those with low investment to drop out of the game. This is just simple min-maxing, nothing more. If they actually cared to fix this shit we wouldn't have some of the key features like AH, guilds and mythic raids locked behind this arbitrary wall. Well the AH is something they couldn't technically handle until recently, so it's mostly social features for invested players. They can get away with charging invested players for creating the enviroment that is required to actuqally play the game properly on an invested level, since they are less likely to drop out for an overpriced basic service.

The idea of milking just parts of your playerbase is not excactly new, MTX and F2P have proven that more than enough.

[justandulas]

The only thing related to this issue is joining a guild. Literally every other piece of content is the game runs on cross realm and sharding. If the game seems empty when you're out in the world it's because sharding puts you in an empty shard or there's really no one playing around there (which is very possible in the mainlands of BfA since there's no reason to be there). No amount of "server population control" can fix this.

Mythic raids and guilds aren’t cross server til it’s irrelevant

Op is right, they should’ve done server crunches on a mass scale half a decade ago

Other mmos have mega servers that hold everyone. What’s wows excuse?

Nothing but greed for paid server xfers. If they didn’t make money off it they’d have crunched servers years back

[Relapses]

Paying 18$ a month and 50$ for an expansion. I think that is enough already to warrant Blizzard doing something, why should the player then have then spend in game currency on banaid fixing blizzards issue instead of something fun... lol what a joke.

If you're not having fun playing on your current realm... is that a Blizzard issue? Did Blizzard ask you to roll on the server you did? (They can suggest, but ultimately it's your choice which server you play on.) Realm population is one of the more tricky issues with MMOs but Blizzard has a firm stance against merges so you're left with two options: Deal with it or move. Do I think they could make the latter option more approachable? Yes. But do I think it's their fault realm populations have died out and there are stubborn players unwilling to fix their own problems using the tools they have at their own disposable? Not so much.

- - - Updated - - -

Server connections are good enough, they are just not doing anything about it. Moreover there is no point in connecting several low pop servers together. They should connect low pop servers with a high pop server so the low pop ones can profit from the functional server. Sure they will likely stay low pop but people there will now have access to recruits and a better market which is what is needed.

They don't connect low-pop with high-pop due to the number of duplicate characters/guilds it can potentially create.

[Unlimited Power]

When most of my friends stopped playing WoW towards the end of WotLK, I faction changed my main character from the vastly outnumbered alliance to horde. Then with the release of Cataclysm, I moved my main from the relatively dead Dragonmaw (EU) pvp server to the very active Draenor pve server and my god what a difference. I never regretted paying for that transfer.

I do believe Blizzard mentioned they were going to start merging realms again. They had taken a hiatus because of (IIRC) new file structures complicating matters, but that had concluded when they were lasted asked about it, which I believe was Blizzcon 2019. They're probably focused on getting the alpha up and running at the moment, but who know's if they'll start merging dead servers once things have settled down.

In any case I hope for the sake of the people playing on dead servers that Blizzard will take action before the release of Shadowlands, because some servers are in a truly dire state.

[Smallfruitbat]

How can they fix it? Let me present to you the people you have to simultaneously keep happy:

1. The guy who wants his low pop server merged, so there's more people to group/trade/etc with
2. The guy who doesn't want his server merged and is happy in a low population environment


Guy 1 doesn't pose an issue, any possible solution will please him but guy 2 will likely be upset at any of those solutions lol.

- - - Updated - - -




https://theunderminejournal.com/#eu/...gory/herbalism

I chose a random category

The 'easy' solution would be to merge say 4 servers but keep two of the 3 going. Offer free transfers to one of the servers, making it clear that this is intended to be a 'micro' server to cater for those who want to play on unpopulated realms.

Our guild is on a low pop realm and has all but deceased. We raided during Legion, unfortunately with the low population we found our roster decreasing and no fresh blood to replace them. Our raids were specifically targeted to normal progressing on to heroic eventually. We had a large proportion of players with limited ability and advertised as that, often we would have players join, learn to play in a group and then move on to a guild progressing a bit quicker once they had realised guild raiding is nothing like LFR and it can actually be enjoyable.

We have a 'community' which we use to keep in touch however, that doesn't help much when we struggle to get enough herbs to make flasks and some players can't contribute if they aren't on the same realm.

Those who play on low pop servers and can't afford to transfer off know how much of a problem this is. I'm sure some of those on full realms would prefer not to queue to login either.

[Djuntas]

Stupid of Blizzard, but smart for money. I caved and migrated to Ravencrest EU some years ago - Best decision I ever made...Went from dead classic realm, to high/medium that died out, then got pissed and thought "okay...lets go to the big daddy of EU alliance"...And never regretted...Boost are cheap to pay, I make sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more gold on the AH, and I can find people always.

[Luxeley]

Gee I wonder why Blizzard hasn't addressed Low pop. servers and faction imbalance. Oh yeah I remember why its because Blizzard offers a microtransaction solution for both.

[Schizoide]

Fixing the auction house and guild populations is easy enough, just connect more servers together. Right now most servers are connected to 1 or 2 others, and it probably should be more like 6 for all but the highest population ones. Faction imbalance is much more difficult to address, but with every zone CRZ'd and war mode optional it shouldn't really matter for most players.

[Jimson]

Gee I wonder why Blizzard hasn't addressed Low pop. servers and faction imbalance. Oh yeah I remember why its because Blizzard offers a microtransaction solution for both.

I could have sworn they've made realm clusters several times, I must be mistaken. As for faction imbalance..... where?

[Schizoide]

They haven't connected any new servers in a very, very long time. Wowpedia says 2014.

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Connected_Realms

They should really do this again. Most clusters are only 2 servers now and most should probably be like 8, quadrupling population on the auction house and helping guilds recruit.

[Kathranis]

I seriously doubt that server transfers are a significant source of revenue for Blizzard. Might not even offset the associated cost of customer support, and almost certainly doesn't offset the cost of people cancelling subscriptions rather than playing on desolate servers or paying to transfer.


My honest guess is that their engineers are probably working on a more effective long term solution than virtual mergers and connected realms.


At this point, between communities and all the cross-realm functionality they've implemented, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they just decouple characters from servers entirely.

Give characters surnames to handle naming conflicts.

Make all guild, community, auction house, and grouping features function region-wide.

Instead of having players login to the existing realms, have them pick a character and choose one of perhaps a dozen timezone-based megaservers.

Maybe keep player's home servers as a unique identifier.

It honestly wouldn't even be that different from how it works already.

[Tradu]

Because idiots whine about their "server identity" or how their name will no longer be unique if they connect more servers. They could connect every low lop server and it's still be smaller than your Draenors or Twisting Nethers of the world. It's absurd and should've been fixed ages ago.

- - - Updated - - -

Couple things: 1.) It was mentioned at BlizzCon that they're aware of the problem and it was implied we may see more connected realms. And 2.) You can now essentially pay for a server transfer with in-game services via the WoW token so if you're not moving yourself off of your own dead server you have nobody to blame but yourself. This is not a Blizzard issue, it's a player issue.

That said, I've always been fond of the idea of allowing players who stay continuously subscribed to have a free server transfer with every 12-plus months of subscription. Either that or a one-time-use significant coupon code, or something to the effect.

Honestly the main thing we need is a bulk transfer option that doesn't cost obscene amounts of money.

[Skildar]

I don't know what the best solution is but according to wowprogress' data, the french servers are in dire need of attention from Blizzard
https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/eu/lang.fr

2/3rd of those servers are heavily imbalanced between factions and more than 2/3rd have less than 8k raiders...
I complain but we're still in a better shape than german servers. They have way more players than us but also way more servers and unfortunately a lot of them are empty. And everytime a new player comes to the game he's thrown into one of those pit of despair.

I don't know if they can engineer a solution for this issue and I'm less and less optimistic it will ever be adressed.

[unbound]

I know that they do have the expertise to fix this situation, I know that deep down they're still competent.

I'm just puzzled as to why they haven't done it yet.

Low population servers are now basically desolate hellscapes devoid of any and all life. It is hard for most people to enjoy an MMO under such circumstances.

And yet they can't escape the situation. They have invested a lot of time and effort into their characters on this realm.

Why isn't the situation fixed? I know Blizzard aren't that greedy to let this be a problem just so they can get more money from realm transfers. Are they just too lazy or not willing to invest the development time for it right now?

Because:

- Blizzard would like more people to pay the "micro" transaction to transfer
- Blizzard would like to maintain the illusion of an excessively successful MMO by showing lots and lots of realms with not *too* many cross-realm connections

[Djuntas]

I ALSO JUST WANNA POINT THIS OUT; Most games, such as Rift when it was still a thing (...good enough MMO when it launched imo) offers free migration with few restrictions.

I get that some people (I would) would maybe abuse systems like clearing out the AH on a realm where shit is cheap, and then sell it on another realm for profit...But all these things that can be cooked up with a heavy dose of tinfoil hat should not stop people from having shitty game experience...For YEEEEEAAARS i suffered under this, especially bad in Cata before I migrated where my guild was 1# ally guild on realm....wait for it...with a world rank of 4000, not able to kill Heroic Ragnaros (Left after 350 wipes....). Was sad to leave my vanilla realm, where I was the shit...Or used to be, a lot of people knew me even if 50-90% or more had quit and left.

[Master Factician]

Question: Why do we think Blizzard would ever fix it, when leaving it results in more transfer fees?

Because it's the right thing to do and virtually everyone who was going to transfer off those dead realms has already done so. The rest of us are stubbornly refusing to pay Blizzard for something they can and should fix.

How much do you think they make off of transfers from those dead realms? If even three people transferred off a day, those servers would be completely empty in a year. They probably make $1,000 a day off of dead server transfers (nothing).

[Tradu]

I ALSO JUST WANNA POINT THIS OUT; Most games, such as Rift when it was still a thing (...good enough MMO when it launched imo) offers free migration with few restrictions. I get that some people (I would) would maybe abuse systems like clearing out the AH on a realm where shit is cheap, and then sell it on another realm for profit...But all these things that can be cooked up with a heavy dose of tinfoil hat should not stop people from having shitty game exsperience...Year YEEEARS i suffered under this, especially bad in Cata before I migrated where my guild was 1# ally guild on realm....wait for it...with a world rank of 4000, not able to kill Heroic Ragnaros (Left after 350 wipes....)

That's basically my old server( Auchindoun/Dunemaul/Jaedenar EU). Used to have my guild(world 150-250) and another guild around the 1k mark. Now their best guild is like 3k stuck on 1/12M and there's not even a full page of guilds with boss kills in any difficulty. It's fucking absurd that they won't do anything about it.