I like your gumption Sixx, not only taking on a large amount of player negativity responses, but also handling it in a fairly professional manner. For that I’ll apologize for my silly facetious response.
I will say if you’re active on these forums, and active playing the game as it is. You should be intimately familiar with the game’s issues that we’re facing. Be that as it may, I suppose it’s not unfair to ask for outside opinions.
Issue number one being glaringly obvious. Server balance and dead servers plaguing all around. This in my opinion should be the main preached problem and no further discussion on any other issues until this is solved.
With that there’s plenty of creative solutions and routes that can take place with this. I am completely speaking from observation, and I don’t claim to take ownership of this being an absolute fact by any means. I feel that most players don’t enjoy the aspect of “Mega-Servers”. With that being a notion we are taking into account how do we incentivize joining a low populated server when you’re on a “Mega-Server”. I think there’s plenty of options here, just would mean how generous would Blizzard be willing to be while also selecting a reasonable offer that wouldn’t be absolutely ridiculous breaking the game. After all we want to solve the server balance issue and not make another problem trying to fix the original. So what are things that can be offered to players?
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Player Services i.e. Name Change, Race Change, Faction Change, and then lastly a single WoW token possible account wide. (Logic for single possible is so that players can’t just get a ton of tokens and be super rich over night. However, offering that single token on a highly populated server can help circulate wealth in a different way.)
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In-game they could offer other Cosmetic like items for the character being transferred. Such as, “Transfer to {insert-realm-name-here} get the new hero transmog appearance set. Incentivizing something only possible by transferring. Anything cosmetic truly can be as far as creative as they want it to be. The appearance could even be a Toy item.
The above options of course would only be feasibly controlled under the contingency that the character transferred under these incentive actions would only be applicable if the character is then locked in that realm for 1-2 years. (Arbitrary time line just speculated off the top of my head.) Then of course this only being an actionable option for those on high to full population realms to a low-pop realms.
Also throttling the availability of these limited time offers while keeping control on the following variables:
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Once a realm reaches Medium to Full status while having a conscious effort into only allowing an “X” amount of horde & alliance in; you could set this number to something like 2,000 on each side. (Again another arbitrary number off the top of my head.)
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Limit the amount of players that can transfer away from the prospective realms offered this incentive. Shouldn’t enable a solution that creates a problem where the “Mega-Servers” consequentially become low population servers as well.
Other avenues/routes that could be taken would be realm merging along with realm layering. Only taking into consideration merging player community populations that wouldn’t exceed a a certain level of total population, essentially merge low to medium pop servers to create new balanced Full to High servers. And only with the mind set of merging servers that need it, not contributing to the existing “Mega-Servers”.
Lastly probably the least popular option at least in my opinion. Realm layering, this in my opinion would more than likely be the most feasible actionable route to be taken by Blizzard. I just feel that it’s a band-aid solution that somewhat ruins community connection a secluded realm environment can foster. However, I wouldn’t be opposed to it as any solution would be better than nothing I guess.
Between these options, or at least the options that Blizzard is even willing to consider. I think it would be best or rather most sensible of their team to only finalize an option based on mass player input taking a poll vote that is tied to a Blizzard Account with an active WoW subscription. This gives the powers to the players giving an impression they want the solution to be chosen by us to an extent.
Like I said this is the only main issue the game is challenged by right now so I wouldn’t personally be wanting to press any other agenda. As other problems can be solved after this, whereas this problem shouldn’t be ignored behind others. Players aren’t going to quit in masses because there aren’t certain desired features in the game. However, they certainly will if no one is on their realm to even play with.
Hope you can make some optimistic changes. In all honesty, Blizzard has had a long repeated track record of disappointment. So I can’t not express the fact that I doubt anything will happen through the Community Council. Regardless it never hurts to try or provide input I guess even if it’s just saying something into a void.
If you read everything - good on you for sticking it through, you’ve finally reached the end of the wall.