Yikes! I keep seeing this kind of “suggestion,” and it always gives me the shudders. The very last thing I want to see for Classic is for us to all be crammed together on some big ol’ mega server. I like people but I don’t like them that bleeping much. I like the smaller, medium-to-low pop servers, preferably RP servers. I’d honestly rather chew sand than be subjected to playing on a mega server.
I understand some people like being jammed together, and that’s ok. To each his/her own. Server transfers are a great remedy for those folks. But it’s not only premature to start talking about trying to force everyone to play WoW Metropolis now before TBC is even released, it’s also heavy-handed thinking to want to force it at any time, in my opinion. Not everyone wants that.
After the dust settles with the release of TBC and everyone sorts themselves into/onto their respective servers and/or versions of the game, is more than soon enough to start looking at which servers, if any, might benefit from a merge. (or whatever Blizz is calling what they said they might do eventually).
Also, I’m not crazy about the idea of having some stupid tag added to my name with a server name but from what they said it looks like that’s what they’re planning. But at least that’s something I could live with as long as the resulting server size is still what I would consider reasonable.
Edit: And also, as someone else mentioned, there’s the issue of how many combined characters we have on the different servers and how many we’d be allowed to have on the Mega Utopia
They kinda shot themselves in the foot by allowing people to clone their toons but they dont do anything without finding a way to drive people to the cash shop.
They shoulda just stuck with progressing all the realms to TBC and then having a few server options for classic only players (west coast pve, east coast pvp, etc etc) and then opening more classic servers if necessary.
Now its just gonna be a giant mess for classic players for god knows how long.
Don’t worry. I’m sure instead of doing the common sense thing and making just one or two Classic servers, Blizz will just take a wrecking ball to the community and CRZ them.
They still after 16 years, have not figured out how to accommodate multiple same-names. Your gmail account can do it, but Blizzard, a small indie company, can’t.
Please read the actual sentences of the official blizzard post slowly. The post clearly states the following… Once the pre-expansion patch has gone live, players will see a choice of WoW Classic or Burning Crusade Classic within the Battle.net desktop app. WoW Classic will direct you to the new Classic Era realms which will have the latest phase of WoW Classic content in it and will not progress into any WoW expansion content.
THE KEY WORD IS NEW CLASSIC ERA REALMS…NEW, NEW, NEW. that means meadows will no longer be on the server it is currently on, but it will be transferred TO A NEW CLASSIC ERA SERVER. The logical path would be a few servers per region.
That is your opinion, which might be correct or might be wrong.
The Blizzard Classic team stated (at Blizzcon) that they don’t know. They refuse to ASSUME one thing (as you suggest) which might be totally wrong.
If you are right, and 3 months after TBC goes live we learn that only 5% of players stayed on Classic, THEN is the time to combine servers. Not now. Ion gave some examples (during the Q&A) of when Blizzard guessed wrong, and ended up with over-populated servers and queues to play.
When they released classic, they had too few servers and had to make more and encourage folks to use or move to the new ones. It’s my understanding that the classic era servers are new ‘vanilla’ servers. I anticipate that there will be few of them at start so Blizz can see how they get populated. If they underestimate the number of folks who want to stay in (vanilla) classic, I expect they will do what they did before and make more classic era realms and encourage transfers from existing classic era realms to lessen overpopulated realms.
So you can stay with friends, as long as you and your friends (or your guild) makes the same choice.
This thread is about the worry that very few players will choose Classic Era, so those servers will be under-played (“dead”). That is why I suggest that Blizzard can combine those servers later, IF that happens.
Consolidation of classic era servers at some point is inevitable and im guessing they will keep your original server name as part of your name when the consolidation happens just so to avoid any name overlaps as in retail when they shard. I heard this from the wow classic dev Brian Birmingham on a podcast as a possible/likely solution. So for example if there is a stevas on remulos and stevas on pagle and they consolidate the pve realms into one realm called foreverclassic (for example), there will be stevas-remulos and stevas-pagle on that server foreverclassic.
It is my perception that ‘a classic era server for every current server’ does not preclude a many to one relationship between the existing (progression) servers and the new classic era servers. When classic started, there were a few many to one relationships between existing, overcrowded servers and new servers for purposes of character transfers from the crowded realms. If a many to one relationship is created, it will concentrate those folks who want to stay classic era on fewer realms and hopefully alleviate the worry you mention.
Classic new era servers are green mile walkers. You can only have a “consistent” pop if its like 1- 2 servers for all NA or EU. But Ph6 servers, for the most part, are already dead. Srsly, you can count the servers that are alive on one hand. Everything else is a raid log meta, where only bots and china farmers farm the world. Why would any fresh player or new player roll on a server that has no more life in it or where everyone is already done with their journey.
I could not believe blizz would be so short sighted as to make perma ph 6 servers. Like any pserver history alone shows you what happens to perma naxx servers and they still made the same idiotic mistake. It just goes to show how little they actually research on the topic. Or maybe they are aware and just figured the “transfer your character for cash” option was too juicy to pass up
You are delusional to think that there will be a mega Classic server. Not even enough people for that. Not everyone is willing to pay to transfer to Whitemane. I highly doubt that we have like 500 active players each high-pop realm. Even if a large portion wants to stay Classic. After 1-3 months of permanent Naxx, the realms will bleed players.
As of now, the game is half-dead. After 3 months of Naxx, I would say 30% of the players already quit. Guilds are dying every month on Fairbanks.
I believe Blizzard will monitor the population of the Classic Era servers and they will have solution ready for this. Don’t worry too much about an uncertain future. Enjoy Naxx while it lasts.
Maybe have 2-3 large classic servers era but promote cross realm for better community engagement without making the economy, nodes, rares spawns cross realm.
That is a great idea. We have that in the current SDL WOW. The servers keep the identity, AH, guilds…, only the open world and auto-group tool are interconnected to improve interactions.
It seems Blizzard adds features over time out of need. The player base demands those. It’s also healthy for the game.