It’s looking really bad for both of the AUS realms, Lionheart PvE & Swamp of Sorrows PvP.
I just did a /who 1-60 on Lionheart realm on both faction and these are the results I got a couple of mins ago…
Horde side /who 1-60 was only 18 people online in total.
Alliance side /who 1-60 was 65 online in total.
Swamp of Sorrows used to be “medium” pop status but now is considered “low” as well.
I gather they’re about the same numbers on each faction if not a bit higher.
I guess the only option now for Aussies is to re-roll on US realms and deal with the lag. 
They should just have 1 oceanic realm for SOM to ensure the population is focused in 1 place
Would be nice but I guess that’s too late now, unless they somehow merge the PvE realm and PvP realm together, I wonder that that would work haha
It’s early, however, I expect this to be the least surprising thing I read all day.
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But this is not Blizzard’s fault. There simply isnt enough interest from Oceanic players to sustain a realm. Same with the rppvp community.
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Lionheart is my main server. The population is low (which doesn’t bother me), but there are still enough people that several times last night resources that I was fighting to get to were ninja’d.
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I’m pretty sure that the fact Blizzard made zero effort to promote SoM is Blizzard’s fault.
Yeah they should have spent a couple million dollars on a commercial.
“I’m Bill Cosby and this is my Gnome Escape Artist”
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A lot of Australians are actually playing on Jom right now for some reason. I don’t understand why they aren’t opening free server transfers to unpopular realms like they did in classic.
I’m guessing Blizzard had a lot more metrics than you on the clearly limited audience for this version of the game. They released bare minimum number of servers in case there was a larger than expected number of players interested. Smallest release in Blizzard history, maybe enough players will stick it out for 3-4 viable servers (if mega server was broken up).
No amount of promotion was going to improve numbers long term, might have gotten a bump that forced too many servers to be open at start. With the minor changes they made it was a no go for too many. No update to class viability, too low of xp bonus. Peeps they got are here for “Muh Phresh!”, not a true seasonal setup. That would require much bigger nerf to leveling.
lol
Realm population issues are a player created issue, don’tcha know?
Aye, I’m on of them.
Started on Swamp of Sorrows. Got to Undercity and was shocked at how dead (lol) it was. Started /who’ing all the capitals and levelling zones, and only counted a handful of players.
Re-rolled on Jom and Dun Morough had as many players as I’d seen on all of the Eastern Kingdoms. And it’s bopping at all hours, even at 3.30am on a weekday server time. No regrets.
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Terry should star in it.
He deserves it. Always getting the run around so it would be nice for him.
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All they’d have to do is introduce the Warmode feature that’s in retail and allow people to toggle on or off pvp.
You an do this now in PVE servers in Classic. But if they combined the two that’s how I see it working.
Warmode is simply removing PVP servers, and rebranding normal.
But yeah, that in combination with the myriad changes that allow for cross-realm almost everything, and server clusters seems to be how they have solved these issues such that everybody is happy with Retail.
SoS is far from dead. There’s multiple guilds raiding or planning to in the new year, there’s a very healthy LFG chat except in the early morning, AH is active enough but not overstocked with every possible material so certain professions are actually sought after. The biggest downside is the ranking pool isn’t massive so the high brackets are very competitive, but that’s how it should be, IMO.
To me it’s the perfect size for a Classic server. It feels way more like OG Vanilla on Jubei’thos now than Arugal in Classic ever did.
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SoS is 73% Alliance last I checked, not ideal if you like Horde more like myself. (prob even more Alliance sided now)
I’m thinking of starting up on Mutanus PvP realm instead, at least it’s more balanced faction vs faction than SoS is. I only get 173ms ping average on Mutanus realm so not too bad.
We have a bunch of Aussies on our NA realm.
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