Right now, all of the Wow Classic (vanilla) realms have extremely low populations. It seems as though there’s hardly anyone playing vanilla classic any more, at least in the North American non-SoM realms. Logging in is like walking into a ghost town.
Does Blizzard have any plans to shrink the number of realms (e.g. “Realm X is going away, all characters on Realm X can now be found on Realm Y instaed”)? Or, worse, do they have plans to discontinue vanilla classic entirely? (I hope not. I still want to get my shaman to level 60 so I can solo my way to the Master Enchanting trainer in Uldaman!)
I have not seen anything from Blizzard about that. I have seen plenty of people ask for it, though. I would like to see it too. I can’t imagine a realm ever maxing out again, even if all of them were consolidated to one realm. I think it would be reasonable to have one PVE and one PVP realm, and a standalone RP realm as well. I do think one drawback is the 10 character limit. I can see that being a valid reason to have more realms. I don’t think anyone would be upset if they expanded the number of toons per realm. I wouldn’t.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the following are already connected to the main realm above. If you aren’t on one of these realms then you won’t be seeing the main classic era population.
Additional realm connections would be good for Classic Era. The initial cluster configuration was questionably made but all 5 of the NA clusters are in the same battlegroup. This begs the question why aren’t they connected further.
I just made a dwarf on Pagel. Does that mean I can see and group with everyone in the connected realm list, or would it be better to make my dwarf on Mankrik?
Yes, you are correct. Players within realms of the same cluster can group/guild/trade/raid as if they were all in the same world. Reposting the Blue’s list of realm connections for visibility:
Additionally, ALL of the NA clusters are in the same battlegroup. So no matter where/how you play Classic Era, East/Westcoast PvE or PvP, the queues for instanced battlegrounds will be identical.
Is there a group finding channel for endgame stuff? I’ve been leveling and haven’t seen anyone looking for instance groups much at all. I figure instance groups, especially while leveling will be rare, but curious what 60 is like.
Most guilds have their own Discord for organizing end game raids. Some active Alliance guilds on US East Coast cluster (Ashkandi, Mankrik, Pagle, Westfall, and Windseeker) currently include: Encore, The Unyielding, The Misfits, Phoenix Rising and C ERA. Of course, you can talk to players in-game, who were pretty friendly, IMO.
Encore https://discord.gg/psuuS5e8gn
The Misfits https://discord.gg/h9avMaTYq5
The Unyielding https://discord.gg/Vm6rwSTYpr
Phoenix Rising https://discord.gg/rJHKR43ytS
C ERA https://discord.gg/4q5ABRE6vD
There are also cross-realm Discords as well:
Checkout this Discord’s raid-schedules Channel, which lists most active raiding guilds.
WoW Classic Era (NA PvE East Coast) https://discord.gg/NChc3Z4Bxs
Vanilla Classic Era https://discord.gg/Nnv8qgJpC3
PUGLORD’S R US https://discord.gg/VqvnBwCvBd
WoW Classic Era [PvP] https://discord.gg/WQ7ZfcbRP4
