Kind of disappointed with how connected realms turned out.

[Zantos]

When I first heard about connected realms, I was excited. I thought that faction balance was inc and that they would do something like a way low pop realm with a high faction on x side with a med-high pop realm with a high faction on y side. However, it seems like faction balance is the furthest thing from their minds. Then you have the list of their next three planned connections, none of which include any of the realms I play on despite two of them being completely dead on the horde side. One you can do /who and see less then a 10m raid in the shrine. I also thought that they finally solved the issue of cross realm BoA's with this technology for combining realms seamlessly together being created. Needless to say, I am a bit disappointed. Nothing happened that I had hoped for and some of it seems like its fully their fault since they don't care about faction balance.

Sure, they said that "we cannot do it so easily since one faction prefers PvP and the other PvE", but I simply do not believe this to be true. Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want realms with queue times to all the suddenly get more people sitting in that queue, but it may have been beneficial to increase the realm capacity size when they started this undertaking. It just seems like you would see a higher and better impact if you can really get a healthy faction and population going by using some of the larger realms.

I do think it a mistake to just not do any faction balancing. My friends guild quit raiding because they cannot even fill their ranks due to so few horde players being around. I think being on a realm with a pretty much no one of the same faction is just as bad as a low population.

[Dnusha]

Less than 3% of all servers are connected.... "Kind of disappointed with how connected realms turned out."
/thread

[Zantos]

Less than 3% of all servers are connected.... "Kind of disappointed with how connected realms turned out."
/thread

My points remain. They still haven't solved BoA not being cross realm, they have stated they are not particularly working on faction balance, and two of the realms I play on with a pretty much dead faction are not seeing any love. Even if they have more plans, they do not know when beyond the next set they are doing.

[Rucati]

Doubt it's that important, fixing realms that are completely dead comes first. And so far, it's been okay on the realms I play on.

I'd love for BoAs to be mailable across realms, but that seems highly unlikely at this point. As for faction balance, that's significantly harder than overall population to balance. Since they're only sticking same type realms together, in particularly. Take a realm like Tichondrius, it's a massive Horde PvP realm, if they were to merge it with say Darkspear (a massive Alliance PvP realm) then the queue to get in would be thousands of people all the time. A lot of the realms that are High pop or full are mainly one faction over the other, which means to make them even you'd need another high/full pop realm, which would just be too many people.

[Alyxanna]

I'll wait until they're done before making any judgments. If you're on a PVP realm it would never be balanced anyway since PVP realms as a total group are heavily Horde to start with. It still has problems if Nesingwary is any measure so once they get the bugs worked out then it will be time to see how it went.

[Gimlix]

Hard to be dissapointed when you could say that they are still working on the feature.
Once it works good, they will start connecting alot of servers, and will make sure that a low pop realm will be as busy as a high pop realm.

And after that they told us that they are working on server balancing but that can take a bit longer.

Just be patient.

[Zantos]

Doubt it's that important, fixing realms that are completely dead comes first. And so far, it's been okay on the realms I play on.

I'd love for BoAs to be mailable across realms, but that seems highly unlikely at this point. As for faction balance, that's significantly harder than overall population to balance. Since they're only sticking same type realms together, in particularly. Take a realm like Tichondrius, it's a massive Horde PvP realm, if they were to merge it with say Darkspear (a massive Alliance PvP realm) then the queue to get in would be thousands of people all the time. A lot of the realms that are High pop or full are mainly one faction over the other, which means to make them even you'd need another high/full pop realm, which would just be too many people.

That's another thing that they should have done. They should have worked out a way to increase the server capabilities before this. One realm I play on is moonrunner. Horde side is dead. I can understand wanting to fix a population on the realms, but for who? The factions that have the higher population? What will that do to the faction with the lower population? 7 of my friends who were trying to get into raiding on moonrunner quit after seeing that they were not going to fix the factions.

I can understand they cant get them perfectly balanced. However, at least increasing the number of players for a faction, even by 1-2hundred would help. I also do not thing BoA cross realms are unlikely. They can now merge servers and get mail working among that group. They can have titles work on any realm, same with pets, mounts, and achievements. I don't think they couldn't do it.

My main point is, if they don't at least increase a dead faction on two servers they merge at all, those players will not feel much of an impact at all when being merged. If they don't feel the impact of something that was meant to fix their situation, they may quit.

- - - Updated - - -

Hard to be dissapointed when you could say that they are still working on the feature.
Once it works good, they will start connecting alot of servers, and will make sure that a low pop realm will be as busy as a high pop realm.

And after that they told us that they are working on server balancing but that can take a bit longer.

Just be patient.

Im not necessarily disappointed with what the feature is, but how they are taking it at this point.

- - - Updated - - -

I'll wait until they're done before making any judgments. If you're on a PVP realm it would never be balanced anyway since PVP realms as a total group are heavily Horde to start with. It still has problems if Nesingwary is any measure so once they get the bugs worked out then it will be time to see how it went.

Im not passing judgement on it as a whole, but rather, how they are going about using it and their current plans / goals.

[Dnusha]

My points remain. They still haven't solved BoA not being cross realm, they have stated they are not particularly working on faction balance, and two of the realms I play on with a pretty much dead faction are not seeing any love. Even if they have more plans, they do not know when beyond the next set they are doing.

You can level a char in one week even without any BoA items. Even low lvl char can buy piece or two. They never said they will solve this problem soon. How BoA items and Connected realms are "connected" anyway? You want faction balance or your realm is dead? Character Transfer will help you.

[Zantos]

You can level a char in one week even without any BoA items. Even low lvl char can buy piece or two. They never said they will solve this problem soon. How BoA items and Connected realms are "connected" anyway? You want faction balance or your realm is dead? Character Transfer will help you.

When they are implementing a feature that is supposed to fix this, it is ludicrous to expect someone to spend money to fix it themselves when blizz fails to. The guild of my friend agreed when the 7people they gathered so far quit. BoA items are connected since they can now mail within the realms in their group. That was no small feat. You can transfer items cross realm already by sending them in a toons bags. So thinking they can go a bit further with it is not farfetched at all.

[foxHeart]

You can level a char in one week even without any BoA items. Even low lvl char can buy piece or two. They never said they will solve this problem soon. How BoA items and Connected realms are "connected" anyway? You want faction balance or your realm is dead? Character Transfer will help you.

In 1 week. lol
Yeah, you if poopsock it and spend 13 hours a day playing. Then, sure! Yes! You can do it in just 1 week!

[Deleted]

I like my alliance server, balance doesn't interest me on PvE realms.

[Dnusha]

When they are implementing a feature that is supposed to fix this, it is ludicrous to expect someone to spend money to fix it themselves when blizz fails to. The guild of my friend agreed when the 7people they gathered so far quit. BoA items are connected since they can now mail within the realms in their group. That was no small feat. You can transfer items cross realm already by sending them in a toons bags. So thinking they can go a bit further with it is not farfetched at all.

Well you can wait a few more years for this to happen or to pay a few more bucks and never have these problems again. Time>25$ Imo.

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In 1 week. lol
Yeah, you if poopsock it and spend 13 hours a day playing. Then, sure! Yes! You can do it in just 1 week!

It's possible! If you are not a pretty kitty.

[Rucati]

I can understand they cant get them perfectly balanced. However, at least increasing the number of players for a faction, even by 1-2hundred would help. I also do not thing BoA cross realms are unlikely. They can now merge servers and get mail working among that group. They can have titles work on any realm, same with pets, mounts, and achievements. I don't think they couldn't do it.

If I had to guess I'd say they're more likely to add a BoA tab, kind of like the mount tab, and have BoA gear work that way instead of it being mailed from one realm to another. You can mail to other realms that are connected to yours, but not to realms that aren't connected, so unless they were to connect the mail on every single realm it wouldn't really be possible. Which is why I don't think it's particularly likely.

[Strafir]

My mind just can't comprehend the stupidity of threads like this.

There has probably never been a single "leaked" implementation to this game which hasn't disappointed someone because he has for some odd reason decided to start mixing some insane stuff up while napping so isn't it about time we stop doing this crap and just take it as it comes and start suggesting possible improvements afterwards?

And if you already have this vision about what kind of server you want, then how about you look up a similar server on wowprogress and either migrate or level a new toon there instead of being lazy and complaining how it isn't being served to you on a gold platter.

I would literally punch a person in the face if he sat infront of a door watching people go in and out feeling sorry about himself and muttering that "oh man, this door dude, why can't someone like do something about this?".

[Ellixen]

When I first heard about connected realms, I was excited. I thought that faction balance was inc

Sure, they said that "we cannot do it so easily since one faction prefers PvP and the other PvE", but I simply do not believe this to be true.

Your belief is not a fact. Blizz says it can't be done, and if you look to other mmos, they had to force faction balance (warhammer online for example locked out a particular faction from starting new toons if there was an imbalance.) and all it did was piss ppl off. Blizz pisses a lot of ppl off but it's not intentional and this would def. be construed as intentional.

Also, if they did go by balance they would have to constantly change what realms are merged once the balance is altered not to mention the people who will xfer servers/ abandon servers because they liked the imbalance.

Don't misunderstand though, I would like faction balance too, but the days of world pvp are over and that's the only thing balance would benefit.

[Alopex Major]

If people still have to say "well just reroll or transfer then!", it seems like OP is right and connected realms haven't fixed anything at all. It remains to be seen though, none of my realms have been connected yet. Hopefully things will balance out more in time.

[Nobleshield]

The only thing i don't get is why they are merging low/dead realms with other low/dead realms, instead of doing a "big brother" thing and merging the very low pop realms with the higher realms, especially if they don't care about balance. Obviously you wouldn't merge anything with the "Big Ten" megarealms, but you can take a reasonably close server (such as mine for example, Horde is only about 1k more than Alliance, it's like 2.5k Alliance to 3.4k Horde or thereabouts) and merge one of these realms where Horde is dead and Alliance is low, so Alliance would get more and the few Horde players now have more.

Merging a realm with let's say 500 Alliance and 20 Horde with another realm that has 300 Alliance and 50 Horde is still only giving you 800 Alliance and 70 Horde, which is barely noticeable, so I don't quite get why they are doing that. Even if they eventually merge several together like they did with Maiev/Bloodscalp/etc. you are still just merging tiny realms with tiny realms; take some of those small realms and place them with the larger realms so they benefit overall!

[LocNess]

The only thing i don't get is why they are merging low/dead realms with other low/dead realms, instead of doing a "big brother" thing and merging the very low pop realms with the higher realms, especially if they don't care about balance. Obviously you wouldn't merge anything with the "Big Ten" megarealms, but you can take a reasonably close server (such as mine for example, Horde is only about 1k more than Alliance, it's like 2.5k Alliance to 3.4k Horde or thereabouts) and merge one of these realms where Horde is dead and Alliance is low, so Alliance would get more and the few Horde players now have more.

Merging a realm with let's say 500 Alliance and 20 Horde with another realm that has 300 Alliance and 50 Horde is still only giving you 800 Alliance and 70 Horde, which is barely noticeable, so I don't quite get why they are doing that. Even if they eventually merge several together like they did with Maiev/Bloodscalp/etc. you are still just merging tiny realms with tiny realms; take some of those small realms and place them with the larger realms so they benefit overall!

It is better to be a gradual increase than just a giant change one day. I would change servers if my medium pop server got shoved with Illidan, however if it become that size over a large amount of time I would probably be more ok with the idea.

EDIT: Also it is better for communities. If a giant server merged with a small one, the small one will be treated like outsiders. If 2 small servers merge they can better form together player wise.

[Gnome]

The only thing i don't get is why they are merging low/dead realms with other low/dead realms, instead of doing a "big brother" thing and merging the very low pop realms with the higher realms, especially if they don't care about balance.

Because when the new expansion hits, those "low/dead realms" connected to each other will make a massive que to enter the realm.
These low/dead realms are at it's current state because it's the very end of this expansion.

If they would hook one low/dead realm to a higher populated realm, imagine how it would be when the new expansion hits. *BOOM*

[ocis]

It's easier to merge small servers together rather than large servers. They also eventually cluster a bunch of small servers together to form a medium/medium-high server in the end - but they do this in stages. Small merges leave smaller stains when shit hits the fan. If you haven't seen the forum posts, a lot of people have issues with their characters and guilds after a server merge. Just be patient with the whole faction balance thing, since Blizzard's approach is to take it slow. It's not like it can get any worse if it's already as bad as you describe to begin with.