@Blizz - PLEASE MERGE LOW POP REALMS. We are dying everyday and NEED your help

There are numerous low population realms in TBC Classic that are almost akin to a single player experience, that have been abandoned by Blizzard for far too long. The fact we play $15 a month for this experience without any developer support is quite disappointing, although we love this game and our tight-knit communities nonetheless. We have previously found these types of servers are appealing to those that want something similar to the old days of WoW, free of the issues that plague some of the mega servers. However, there’s a point where our player bases get frustrated due to the ability to do ANY content, and either fully quit, or shell out a transfer and abandon us here behind.

For example, my realm, Arcanite Reaper is doing everything we can to keep our server alive. From helping each other out with any dungeon and quest we can, to giving away almost any material out for free - our server means a lot to us and we have been stubborn enough to see it through for as long as possible. However, we don’t have a pool of players to recruit from as our raid roster is thinning out due to attrition and will struggle in a few weeks to start progression raiding in SSC/TK. I’m sure this is a similar issue for other realms such as Thalnos, Anathema, Deviate Delight, etc. We are the ONLY guild on our realm that raids, and have done everything possible to stay afloat since forming in March.

Prime time hours on our server don’t usually exceed 40-50 players. Players find it very hard to reroll here / boost, etc. I cannot expect players to transfer here unless they are very keen on a small, close group of community oriented raiders that love the game as much as we do. Simply put, this type of WoW TBC experience is extremely frustrating most times - we are not able to do much content in all level ranges due to lack of players. While we enjoy the challenge in making things happen at times, this isn’t feasible for us any longer.

Players continue to burn out and quit, and most of our player base cannot afford to transfer 3-6 main characters and alts to a new realm as an option, on top of our monthly subscription.

Blizzard, we’ve been holding our breaths for a server merge / transfer assistance for so long. We know other things are higher on the totem pole of priority for your team. If our realms continue to be ignored, you will continue to lose monthly subscriptions from players that love WoW and TBC and may never return due to the lack of attention and care for realms that have less than 100 players a day.

Please help us. We cannot afford to leave.

68 Likes

We need free transfers, and keep them open this time. From anywhere.

Radical solution.

Would also not hurt to designate small realms for new players like in retail.

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They should have NEVER let servers become like this.

Too busy counting transfer money to hear reason.

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Didn’t you folks gets thousands of rerolls a few months ago?

What did you do with them?

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I agree with this. If Blizzard is going to let the mega servers keep their layers, small servers like the OP is talking about have no chance. Blizzard should merge them.

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Most couldn’t get past level 30.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, queues were the biggest thing driving people to lower pop servers, especially back when Classic first started. No need for queues and unlimited layers means small servers die out, as there are only downsides.

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Keeping the conversation and visibility alive. Any other people on other low pop realms with their stories to share?

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I encourage you to check out Fairbanks although not yet as severe as your server, the rate at which it has died is impressive. A few months ago, we were a healthy server with decent balance. Now there are about 100 active players with 400 raid loggers - 2/3 of our remaining guilds left this week. There will likely be no 25 man raids on our server after this week. Scraping a Kara pug together took 2 hours yesterday with taking anyone who was attuned.

The truth is that I don’t really even care about balance. I don’t mind being the under dog, I just don’t want to wait 2 hours to do a 1 hour dungeon and then have to get off. This game is not meant to be single player and we shouldn’t be forced to play it like such because of Blizzard being greedy and incompetent. This is not the experience I want. Chat doesn’t move. Guilds are dead. There are, single digit dungeon runs per hour on the entire server. There is no economy, no mats, no other professions, etc.

Too bad all of us on dead servers can’t just join together. Tbh, I wouldn’t been kind if they just let us faction transfer to the dominant faction and let the server be one faction only.

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There are so many realms to choose from, why not just choose a more populated realm if that’s the what you want to play on?

Some of us like playing on low pop realms.

My realm had an AH and people wanting to do groups in the past. It wasn’t as abysmal as it is today, and now it’s preventing us from achieving our goals. The reality is, we have some members who could probably eat the transfer fees, but then we also have a large amount of players who can’t afford to transfer their characters on top of the sub fee (which really is mind boggling in 2021, we don’t really receive any level of support as a player)

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Get Blizzard to give me a free transfer and fix the problem they caused and I will happily take my pick of servers. If you don’t mind content taking 10x as longer, that is awesome. I only wish I had that time.

Imagine they just add cross realm everything to normalize out population desparity. Oof

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I just took a look at the Thalnos Alliance AH and there is zero items on the AH.

0 items, I’ve never even seen this before.

5 people online too. Level 1-70, 5 people.

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The issue shouldn’t be if they are able to eat the cost or not. The issue is that there is a cost. Player actions did not create this problem, and especially not the players who are still on dead realms.

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They didn’t cause the problem. They can’t force people to play on realms that they don’t want to play on.

It’s a player made problem.

They can’t force them, no. But they can not put in same faction bgs, not remove queue times, and not add layering. They removed the natural checks and balances that would have prevented this issue and are now conviently calling it a player made issue.

Do you really think those 10k+ ally on bene would have ever gone there if they had to wait 2 hours to log in? All players did was fix (for themselves) a problem that blizzard caused and is too stupid and unwilling to fix.

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I rolled on my server 2+ years ago, right after classic launched. Today, it is one of the smallest servers out there, and getting smaller everyday. I know folks have quit because they couldn’t find an arena partner, or a dungeon groups in a timely manner for their schedules. And for what reason? That we rolled on a server that wasn’t experiencing 4+ hour queues in the early phases of classic.

I’m quite tired of the victim blaming that goes on here that says its a player made problem, that it’s the players fault, which washes away all of Blizzards wrongdoing that led up to this point.

Blizzard could have done many things at the start of classic that could have alleviated many problems. Such as lower population caps, no layers, faction balancing so servers don’t go below 45% for a faction, transfers only to low pop servers instead of any server, which really just means larger servers keep getting larger, and more things I’m not able to list.

But that could only be done at the launch, or in the past, and today is today.

The reality is, there are too many lower pop servers that are struggling right now, and they are in a critical situation and need help. And Blizzard could help them.

The easiest solution would be to connect the realms, which they did for the forever classic realms. They could easily start connecting the lower 10-15 realms with either each other, or similar type of realms.

I’m afraid that even in today’s environment, free transfers won’t do much, unless they are coupled with actionable changes like connecting some of the smaller realms, lower populations capacities, no layers, longer queues.

It’s crazy how during phase 6 on my server we had more folks and more activity then we do here at the end of phase 1 tbc.

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Great perspective and shares here. Thank you. I think in the long run, if Blizzard continues to ignore us (hell, even higher pop realms are having their own faction issues) they will continue to lose subscribers, and the playerbase will continue to fall off.

What does Blizzard have to lose by helping lower population realms?

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This is why they say you bargain with your wallet. If all these servers literally died something would happen. Most are paying to xfer and it outweighs those left behind. Entire guilds are xfering or already have. If something was to be done it would have already.
Now if all these dead servers just up and quit I guarantee that within 24 hours it would get addressed by multiple angles.