Wait, you mean the guy that created an unauthorized discord that was specifically against the CC rules?
Cuz if you look at the threads, 100% of the them are disagreeing with what blizzard is doing right now and want changes. The difference is you don’t have trolls and nonsense filling the threads like you do here or in GD.
Are you REALLY defending Blizzard here? Well that pretty much discounts anything else you’ve said but sure… Lets dive into all the reasons you’re wrong…
For starters: You have exclusive access to CC rules no one else saw? Because no one else seems to have seen where creating a discord was “specifically against the CC rules.” I mean really… Talk about pulling stuff entirely out of your 
The discord made perfect sense… The community council is allegedly supposed to be an avenue for Blizzard to communicate with a few representatives without having to take the time to actually read the forums (you know… like they did when they werent a 
company.) But if the council doesn’t also have a way to communicate with the community then you’ve really just got a handful of people expressing their own individual opinions…
The discord was made to allow people to bring prospective issues to the council that they could then bring to Blizzard… but they of course didn’t like what that led to so they used a screenshot of one idiots comment to justify banning the guys who disagreed with them and scaring anyone else from dissenting in the future.
Yea great. They created a circle jerk forum. That’ll fix the game for sure… 
You also have a ton of input missing on discussions since 99.9% of people can’t contribute. Yes there will be trolls and nonsense but that’s part of having an open discussion and letting the issues out to dry. The solution as I see it isn’t to filter the entire community to get a very narrow set of perspectives and have almost no discussion whatsoever so their community managers don’t have to read mean forum posts.
Mankirk is 9k players and atiesh is 7k so they are relatively the same size, according to ironforge which I don’t 100% trust but it’s the best info we can get. But it’s not just the over all size. I don’t care about the faction imbalance but it does affect a players experience. Mankirk is 97% horde and Atiesh is 80% Alliance so the experience for a horde player is very different on the servers. I get that playing on a very low pop server at some point becomes impossible. That’s why I transfered to Atiesh from BB. My guild left BB to Mankirk but I didn’t go with them because for the horde on Mankirk it was almost a mega server. For the alliance Mankirk is low pop and likely close to or already too low pop to find groups most of the time. For me Mankirk isn’t the server I’d want for either my horde or alli alts for different reasons.
For me there is no right and wrong server. Each person tries to find a balance between community and finding guilds and groups. The less someone cares about the community and favors ease in finding groups the better the mega server is for them. For me the community aspect of the game makes me look for medium pop servers. I don’t really want to play on a mega server because the community experience is degraded but I’m also less attracted to the low pop servers due to the trouble finding groups. Atiesh is on the high pop side for alliance but not a mega server. It’s on the low side for the horde but not so low as it’s overly difficult to find a group. That’s my balance but that balance is subjective.
Blizzard “reasoning” was almost all about pvp servers and faction imbalance and that’s a much trickier problem to deal with than low pop pve servers.
I think this part is what some people got wrong. I may be wrong tho. Here is my take on the CC program. From what I read, the CCs are chosen to give feedbacks because they are deemed the more invested players. The feedback/posts they put to the dev should be their views only, like expert opinions we often see on TV.
What you describe is the job of a BA in Software development talking to clients to generate requirements/comments to be pass to dev team. Aggregating ideas and comments from the community to present to the devs is like a CM in the context of WOW (I can be wrong about this, but I read that in the CM job description).
Making CC members as Voluteered CMs would not work because the CCs are just players like us with their own views and biases. They are also not trained and do not own the responsibility in the corporate. While CMs should be hired, trained, and paid, CCs are completely self-governed; there could be conflicts of interest between CCs. I don’t think CCs have deep knowledge in game design, software development, corporate governance, and policymaking to actually work as CM.
Assume that a CC wants to work for the community as a volunteer. If there were a place to discuss with that CC, then the discussion is forwarded to Blizzard, that would be nice. However, this creates a problem. What kind of comments get forwarded? It is likely that the CM with his own biases would filter things that he supports. So the mini-forums would quickly become an echo chamber.
In short, I think a separate discord is not needed, we already have this GD forum. Sixfury and Basil posted to the CC forum and got conversations going. That’s great, I see that how it works.
I think that’s actually kind of the opposite of the stated purpose.
One of the key goals with this program is to encourage discussion with players from a wide variety of different playstyles.
If they’re only selecting “experts” or “the most invested players” then by definition they’re not getting players from a “wide variety of playstyles…” They’re getting a niche and not at all representative perspective…
I assure you you don’t need a BA in Software development to collect the opinions/concerns of a group of people and communicate them to a developer. In fact… I’m pretty sure the children of most software developers could handle that…
You’re right. And we don’t have CM’s anymore so…
As opposed to actual CM’s who are what…? Mindless autonomonomotons who passionately take inputs and regurgitate data to their developer minders? Tseric might disagree…
You don’t need training… You don’t need to “own the responsibility in the corporate.” You just need to listen to what people are saying, collect those ideas, and present them in a more concise form than 999 people with 999 rambling threads.
You VASTLY VASTLY VASTLY overestimate what it takes to be a CM 
(no offense to Blizzards CM’s, may yall rest in peace.
I appreciate your reply 
I’ve been on Atiesh since the release of classic (vanilla) and have witnessed the population (which has always been alliance heavy) dwindle from 60/40ish to 80/20.
It wasn’t difficult to find groups in the first couple months of TBC, but every week it gets worse. Trying to get rep for specific factions is a struggle (especially on fresh 70s, as the dungeon grind is no longer possible).
Raid logging is absolutely contributing to this, and there is no way to force people to log in outside of raid time to play alts or carry people through normal/heroic dungeons for rep.
The only solution to this is to broaden the pool of available players. Connecting realms is the best solution, but I think that should be done after people have been given a stop gap, the freedom to choose what type of server they want to be on, while providing live population statistics, and giving the community time to plan out where they want to go, what type of server they want to be on.
PVE megaserver Alliance
PVE megaserver Horde
PVE Balanced Server
PVP Megaserver Alliance
PVP Megaserver Horde
PVP Balanced server
Blizzard could provide statistics, players could designate realms with these intentions, and then have a window to move to the type of server they want to go to with live #s to maintain the balance if that’s what they want. Once that window is complete, implement protections against tipping the balance past a certain percentage.
The ‘community’ aspect will heal itself as it always does during exoduses from servers.
People who don’t want to change their names have the right to do nothing, and stay on their servers and wait for realm connections.
Because the bots control the gathering nodes and they don’t have to gather themselves.
Heres the actual play.
Allow people 1 week to leave and join guilds.
At the end of that week, assign every guild to a random server within their current region such that numbers and factions balance out.
Peoples unguilded alts on the same server go wherever their character with their highest played time goes.
Players with all unguilded characters just end up on random servers (together)
Disable all transfer services indefinitely.
Ez fixed
Addendum: if 2 players with the same name end up on the same server, whoever logs in first within a time limit gets the name. If both players log in within the same hour, they’re transported to a special zone where they duel each other to the death for the name. No holds barred; whatever gear buffs and levels they had when they logged out is what they’re duelling with.
So people play on megaservers so they don’t have to farm consumables? This is literally the first time I’ve ever seen someone say this (not being facetious).
Merge all servers into 2-4… enable cross realm… and layering…
No thanks.
Nothing else will work.
Free transfers.
Let the player’s form mega communities.
Still not cross realm filth.
They’ve already tried that. It made things worse.
Blizzard had a chance to save medium pop realms by only allowing low → medium when they gave free transfers. Instead they allowed low → high/full, which is, of course, the safest and smartest option. If they merged all the medium pops into one that could also be a solution, but they won’t.
As someone who recently transferred to Whitemane from a Medium pop I have absolutely no regrets. Insanely easy to find groups, always something going on, a huge and healthy economy, and it’s still easy to farm due to layering. There are no drawbacks at all - except that I had to pay. The fact that I have to pay for something that was/is entirely out of my control (server pop/a server dying) is inherently unfair. You chose a healthy active server 6 months+ ago and now it’s dead. How is that any individual player’s fault? Why should they be punished?
Sure, but it’s terminal now. They cannot fix it.
So don’t squeeze us for some pocket money.
Let us complete the process.
Honestly communities aren’t getting split up at this point, entire communities are leaving to the same server adding community to a larger community.
Maybe PVE is different, but all of PVP East is going to faerlina unless you live on the west coast and maybe want better ping