All medium pop servers are dying

This wave of free transfers may have “helped” already dead servers, but it has effectively ran a stake through medium pop servers and now they are all bleeding out with nothing being done to save them.

Is Blizzard so blinded by the Xfer money from medium to overpopulated servers that they can’t notice all the players outright quitting their game over this?

I can’t speak for other servers, but from the ironforge website trends, what I’m reading everywhere and just from looking back at history of server balance, I can only assume other medium pop servers are in the same boat as Netherwind.
We’re seeing guilds collapse or transfer every single week with no one to replace them. We’ve lost half of the Raiders on the server in less than a month. We had 4k raiders a few weeks ago and now we are sub 2k.

This wave of free transfers is quickly moving classic into a state of server balance you can no longer salvage and will be forced to only have one mega server per type of play (PvP, PvE, RP-PvP, RP-PvE) and faction.

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Blizzard knows exactly how many people play their games. They know how many are “retail tourists” who are still paying a wow sub but no longer playing classic and how many subs are canceled. We’re the ones who are just guessing at those numbers.

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This is why the transfers needed to be LOW → MEDIUM, not high/full. They may have helped the players on low (dead) realms, but they screwed over everyone on struggling medium realms. If they want everyone on a handful of cherry picked mega realms, then they should have just opened transfers from ALL OTHER REALMS.

So now realms that are already over crowded will guzzle up all the people that medium realms actually needed to survive. Whatever chance we had of getting transfers to keep our realms above water has been nuked. You’d have to PAY to come to my realm. Why would anyone do that if you can transfer to a realm that has 5x the people FOR FREE??? This is the situation Blizzard has put us in.

I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to do what’s so obvious. A monkey could have told you where to put these transfers, and people like myself (zug zug) said it for a month on the forum. But here comes Blizzard, apparently clueless, to decide all our fates.

I tell you now that if my realm dies, I’m unsubbing. I’m not paying to follow the bandwagon over to Mankrik or some other fat realm. I don’t think I’ll even want to move if it’s free. I like my character names too. I’ll have to lose every single one of em if I move. They should just merge realms up and let whoever has more hours into a character keep the names. I’m willing to settle for that if anyone has more hours on a character than mine (REALLY DOUBT IT).

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This is a new and exciting problem I wonder what Blizzard’s going to do about it?

I know they haven’t done anything in the last 15 years to help server balance or faction balance but there’s no way they leave these temporary servers like this

:thinking::thinking::thinking::joy::joy::joy:

Even on high population servers every raiding guild is recruiting due to more and more people are quitting raiding and/or the game.

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Blizzard doesn’t care anymore so we might as well get over it. These free transfer were the last hope of medium realms. Hope the transfers were to their realms. They weren’t they were to the mega realms.

Blizzard is just going to do a cycle of killing off the lower pop realms for transfer money and will only open the gates to the mega realm when they notice more people quitting over transferring.

At this point my guild is done. We are in talks to go to benediction and if that is chosen I have to go retail to earn gold just to afford the damn transfer of my characters. Which at that point I might just quit instead because I’m sure my guild isn’t going to wait for me to earn 420k to transfer one character over.

23 Guilds have transferred off. 14 remain.

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This is how retail has always been not sure why everyone is shocked that it plays out in classic.

Blizzard has been on record for years saying faction and server balance is a player made issues, not sure why anyone thought these temporary servers were going to be different.

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Except server balance doesn’t much matter is retail since everything is cross realm if I am not mistaken. That was blizzard doing something. It was essentially merging realms. Even if players don’t consider it that.

Neither does faction balance because war mode more or less solved the issue that could come about from faction imbalance outside of recruiting.

If they make the last step to strip factions from the game in the next expansion like rumors claim… retail would be good.

Those players are essentially imaginary because they can’t actually raid with you you can’t actually recruit them.

I guess if you need help on open World quest they would be there maybe.

Sharding doesn’t actually fix the issues at hand

Retail literally has mega servers like we do that’s how the game goes no matter what.

Look at area 52 and Illidian.

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They can raid with you. Even Mythic raids are opened up to cross-realm once the threshold of horde and alliance clears has been met.

You are right though, you cannot recruit cross-realm. But there are communities you can form for more consistent cross realm raiding.

I wouldn’t know considering I haven’t stepped into retail since MoP.

I know the realm I played on Ner’Zhul is supposed to be still full or high pop or something… but I’m not sure.

Yes I understand that’s but there is very little chance that blizzard allows cross realm raiding which is why I didn’t mention it.

The solutions are done in retail because we can look at retail as our future, all the issues people cry about now were fixed in retail.

Can’t find dungeons? LFD was added.

Getting killed on your pvp server cuz it’s 90vs1 in open world? War mode was added.

Dead server in the open world?? Sharding was added.

Raid too hard?? They added different difficulties for you.

I agree will all but that last one honestly lol

LFR is pretty easy

My gripe is is that we already knew the problems we were going to have because we had them in retail in every version of this game the problems were the same so now all of a sudden people are shocked when they’re occurring again in the same point in time that they occurred back then.

The solutions to all the issues were added later so to expect blizzard to care about stuff or reinvent a new solution is just silly

I know LFR is easy, what I meant is that easy raiding shouldn’t be a thing, but that is just my old school gamer saying you should have to overcome challenges. Not have those challenges made easier for you.

I think it’s fine to have easier raiding simply because they also added harder raiding

The automated queue systems aren’t being and are never going to be put in place because the demographic that would have the power to exact that kind of change, the same demographic that cried enough to get H v H bgs implemented, is fervently against them for the variety of reasons I’ve listed in many posts prior.
They’re deciding what’s best for us coupled with the conflict of interest from the company side that is using the situation to its advantage, such as server transfer fees.

My point exactly.

Let’s just say LFR were in place right now and I could use it to enter Tempest Keep with all the difficulty options available. I assure you this poster will still be against it.

The issue has nothing to do with difficulty at all. They just don’t want me to use an automated queue system at all to find my groups.

I don’t care if you use an automated system. Go ahead and use one, but have it through you into a normal difficulty. My issue with LFR is that it is an easier difficulty and raids in general have been made to be easy to complete over time.

We started with one difficulty, then in wrath, they made hard modes and heroics for those seeking more of a challenge while making normal a bit easier. Then they introduced LFR which was an easier difficulty. Then introduced flex which was a lower difficulty than normal. Then rebranded everything in an attempt to hide that.

If LFR threw a person into heroic which is actually normal I’d have no issue with it.

If HvH didn’t show people that blizzard didn’t care about faction or server balance idk what they would need to believe blizzard leaves that to us.

LFD I believe was good for the games a lot of the automated stuff is exactly what people hate but it’s also what fixes the majority of their issues.

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Doesn’t mean they know how to use that data.
I’ve seen analytics departments in the video game industry and let me tell you, they don’t usually hire the sharpest tools in the shed.