I totally understand that concern. I’d posit that these moves and consolidations are less aimed at you, and your very well established social circle, at least not at first. This is aimed more at those who are maybe less attached and are merely following the crowd when deciding where to play, or are returning after a long absence and have found their previous friend groups have moved on.
How many threads have we seen where someone says “Just returning to the game. what server is good for Alliance in NA?” and are told “Benediction”. That’s the group we’d like to take the moves first to help with the situation right now. Long term however, we do want to take much more deliberate steps to reduce the chances of this happening again, and we unfortunately need to be a bit heavy handed going forward to prevent any tailspins that inadvertently create other bigger problems down the road. It’s going to take us some time to realize the full scope of what we need to do to correct this, but for now, our best option is to continue with very tightly monitored and targeted FCMs (including potentially faction-locked FCMs, as Kaivax alluded to in another post here) to alleviate the immediate pressure.
I also just want to reiterate this point though; we’ve raised population caps to accommodate mega-realms to the absolute limit of current technology. I’ve seen a lot of armchair server engineers say things like “just add more hardware”, and I can’t stress it or put it any more plainly, the technology to allow more than we have on realms now does not exist. We’ve added the hardware, we’ve optimized as much as we can optimize, and the current demand on these few realms is just too much. Continuing to push our luck and find ways to reach ever higher realm caps has hit a point where we can’t go any further, and eventually something had to give. That something has given and we are going to be taking different approaches to this problem going forward.
The scenario that led us to the situation you described above was a by-product of past us spinning up tons of new realms rapidly to deal with a level of demand that was orders of magnitude beyond anyone’s wildest expectations when we first launched Classic in 2019. Now that we have consolidated down to a nominal amount of realms, we believe we have the right number of realms to support the number of players we expect and then some, without any realms feeling empty.
But again, I understand completely if you feel a pull towards your realm. The scenarios you describe with multiple raid groups full of folks who may raid in multiple teams or with multiple guilds is a very real situation and that’s hard to visualize breaking away from. If that isn’t you though, and if you aren’t completely tied down to these realms, take the FCMs. Please, take the FCMs. Sulfuras is a success story and we believe Eranikus will be as well.
We’ll be talking more about populations on Eranikus and how things are going as time goes by, so please stay tuned as that situation develops in the coming days.