Blizzard's Inaction on Server Populations is Unacceptable

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Layers has nothing to do with it.

The root cause of faction imbalance is player choice. People chose to go Horde, despite warnings about queue times. People chose to roll or reroll on high population servers, or servers where Horde dominated. People chose to ignore the warnings that PvP servers were not going to be fun, and so of course they left them and never looked back. Back when Classic had only been out a couple months, and the population issues were beginning to show, there were threads asking other Horde to reroll Alliance.

That’s it. Alpha and Omega. Anything else is an excuse.

Brack was right:, and telling the truth isn’t being mean, or a Blizzard simp, or a jerk. It’s better than pretending people are too fragile to hear it.

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At this point I believe the only solution is to remove all non-cosmetic racial bonuses.
There is a reason that everyone believes horde to be superior to alliance, and that boils down to the racials.
Yeah, its another thing slicing at “no-changes” but for the good of the game, nuke the racials completely, then no one will have any actual gameplay reason for preferring one faction over the other. Only social and aesthetic reasons.

The second thing that should be looked at as a solution is globally unique character names. If everyone on every-realm had a unique name that would dramatically cut down on issues with forced server merges. Yeah there would still be community integrity issues, but if the community is dying anyways you gotta do something.

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Theres nothing they can do idiot. Its a player made problem

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And removing consequences based on said player made problems (30 min - 1 hour queues for horde players) is helping the situation or what?

Stop smoking weed.

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I already paid for the game and a sub. This money covers the cost for Blizz to provide me a functional game.

I will not PAY more $ for a server transfer away from my broken realm.

I will however unsub. Which I have.

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my guild put alts in another guild unrested now some of them are transfering/yes its the players fault but bliz needs to help and merge because some are even quiting whats left of the guild im in are gonna stik it out like i said before their going to whitemane its becoming unbalanced i read an alliance post and their starting to trans off now

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You’re 1000% wrong that layers have “nothing to do with it”. Without layers 20k+ raiding pop Classic/TBCC servers could not exist (due to queues) and this exodus to only a few servers could not have happened. Some of the stuff I post is opinion. This is a fact and I’ve further explained why before in longer ways.

I’ve said in other threads before - I blame the (selfish) players and I blame Blizzard.

I know you’re Retail player mostly so I doubt you care in any way, shape or form about MMO community. Since server communities in Retail haven’t existed for years and years (so server is totally irrelevant to you) and the overal Retail “communiy” has long since been mostly absent and otherwise complete garbage where you are only a number. So that’s probably why you don’t really care about any of this.

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Can confirm Kromcrush is almost unplayable. Not allowing a free transfer or merging servers at this point is Blizzard just spitting in our face.

They just don’t care.

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Arguing about whether it is a player made problem or Blizzard made problem is irrelevant.

Blizzard should try to resolve the issue by connecting some of these low pop servers.

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Netherwind total population as per ironforge.pro.

3641 total
3344 Alliance

Good times…

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This is one of the most shocking shifts I’ve seen yet because it happened in just two weeks.
31% horde down to 7%

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99% ally and horde realms should be merged first.

Then the realms that are more 50/50 should be merged to bring realms back to a healthy population.

I hope it happens sooner than later because i dont want to spend $200 to move all my charcters

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But eventually you will and blizzard knows that. Why would they merge realms for free with they can make $200 off people?

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Agree with op

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nah I’m calling it now, all horde and ally moved off my server and we have like 46 Horde online max most the time and about same for ally. just done with the game since blizzard didn’t step in and help. other games out there that are better than boost/server transfers to pay blizzard money they don’t deserve

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Playing Retail doesn’t preclude me from seeing what’s going on.

There would have been an exodus to a few servers regardless of layers because that’s what happened in Retail before CRZ and later cross-realm linking. Whether it was for raiding, or pvp, or RP, people moved to a few servers.

Classic players are not a unique subset of WoW’s population with special sensibilities about community and server identity. They’re gamers with predictable habits. If they weren’t, no one would lamenting the dead servers.

The only way for Blizzard to ensure server population, faction balance – and yes, server community – is to remove player choice all but entirely. Perhaps a new MMO should go that route. Because, in the end, all the “Blizzard should do this/should have done that” is asking for the company to remove temptation from the players.

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more blizzard fan boys

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There would have been an exodus from some servers but we would have drastically more healthy servers instead of the vast majority the TBCC servers having serious issues. We’d also have more choice for players who do not like mega servers. Believe it or not some people do not like them or want to play on them.

Do you think 50% of servers dying or 85% of servers dying is better for the player base? Do you think people should have only the choices of play on a mega server (even if they hate it), not do content or quit?

On the community sfuff, yes Classic players are absolutely different from Retail players with that. I tried to come back to Retail for the latest expansions: Legion, BFA, Shadowlands. Legion I liked but as hard as I tried I couldn’t find a community so I quit. BFA was more of the same. Shadowlands I tried really hard again even going to the RP server you’re on, finding a guild and all of it but I quit because a quality community just does not exist in Retail, although it is jam-packed full of service selling and really toxic players, so I quit cold turkey again. I do really think we’re looking at this from different perspectives. The players in Retail are there to collect stuff, do challenging raids and dungeons and things like that. They are absolutely not playing for the community.

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[quote=“Mootwo-earthfury, post:78, topic:1109164, full:true”]
There would have been an exodus from some servers but we would have drastically more healthy servers instead of the vast majority the TBCC servers having serious issues. We’d also have more choice for players who do not like mega servers. Believe it or not some people do not like them or want to play on them. [/quote]

No, there still would have been the exodus. Gamers and gaming habits have changed since the original launch of TBC. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Many people who enjoyed playing on low-pop servers complained about CRZ. It’s not a new thing.

[quote=“Mootwo-earthfury, post:78, topic:1109164, full:true”]
Do you think 50% of servers dying or 85% of servers dying is better for the player base? Do you think people should have only the choices of play on a mega server (even if they hate it), not do content or quit? [/quote]

As I said before, the only way Blizzard can fix this is to take away player choice almost entirely. Congratulations, you’re now a night elf. What, you don’t want to play Alliance? Too bad. It’s all for the good of the server and community.

Remember what I said about removing temptation? No more transfers. No, you can’t play the other faction: you chose H/A and that’s what you’ll stay for as long as you play the game. Unless the population on your server needs to be adjusted. Then you might be faction changed if Blizzard decides to.

Players make choices to leave or stay: in a faction, on a server. And looking at the long-term consequences of their actions is not something players are good at. If Blizzard took these suggestions being made about server transfers and merging servers, the people who made those suggestions would be howling. Blizzard’s decisions should only affect other people.

No, they are not. It only feels that way because Classic’s population is smaller. The grouping up and buffing, as well as overall friendliness, out in the world died down as soon as people started hitting 60 back in Classic. Some guilds are social and will help out; some are not. Same as in Retail.

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A lot of people have not found a community for years in Retail. I’ll give you that some communities have formed in Retail, mostly long-time guild connections, but it’s certainly not welcoming to new people or anything like that. For the most part server communities just do not exist on Retail. Whereas they are still a thing on the TBCC servers, as much as I am not a fan of Benediction for example it does still have a community with a hugely active discord and all of that. The majority of Retail servers don’t even have Discords.

So many have left Retail (well WoW in general) for FF14 lately and have talked about how great the community is in FF. They have specifically said they have found that in WoW for a while.

Anyway, this is a side conversation and not really relevant.

I’ve always blamed the players as well and have said so on these forums many times. I still firmly know there are things Blizzard could have done to make this not as bad, and that would have made WAY fewer people upset. You mentioned a bunch of extreme stuff of forced faction transfer etc. ALL they need to do was remove layers and restrict character transfers and new character creations for a few months like they did in Classic and a lot of the extreme servers problems we are having today would not exist. There would be some problems but it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.

It’s great that you find it fun to see servers have problems and very much enjoy watching people quit the game.

I just don’t agree with you on this stuff and probably won’t so there’s no point in going in circles. Thanks for the conversation though.

Like I said I’ll continue to reply to these especially brand new posters with empathy. You can continue to “hurt” them “with the truth” “because they can handle it” while you act like Blizzard is some amazing stand-out company. Realize though that this stuff you’re saying to frustrated posters doesn’t help anyone in any way, it just drives people away from the game and it makes you and the playerbase look bad.

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