This is- from Blizzard’s perspective, I am sure- a ‘player made’ issue. But can you blame them?
- Free xfers were not a thing for a while, leaving people to pay to get off of their server (which was sometimes not quite dead, but yes, usually actually dead.)
- This felt terrible, to pay for a game we already pay monthly for, to then pay our sub for that month + $25 per character to get off of a realm.
- Destination realms pre free-xfer were deterministic mostly on population size; not only were people probably leaving realms because of them being low(er) pop, but where people wanted to xfer to needed to be large in pop as to not necessitate a second (third…fourth…) paid xfer when or if that larger-but-not-large-enough server died off.
Why would people take the free xfers offered now? To have point #3 happen, to have to pay again when those servers decline in population enough to make recruiting impossible? To be clear, realms with ~1500 pop or higher aren’t dead. They’re just low pop.
Following that logic, the only remotely acceptable server (of only two options) is Sulfuras (~1k pop), which is nearly entirely Horde. If you’re Alliance, all you’ve got is Old Blanchy with ~350 pop, half of which are Alliance. Good luck convincing anyone to move to either of those realms, unless you’re feeling very brazen as Horde and also manage to convince your entire guild to come with you.
WoWProgress and IronforgePro both use the same data-trawling method of skimming through WCL to see how many characters have a log in a raid or PvP on that server, that week. Keep in mind that even though this will count alts as different unique players, it’s also, of course, only a portion of a server’s active players.
Area 52 is the largest retail server with nearly 25k pop. Benediction has just over 18k. There are four, nearly five, servers on retail that match or beat Benediction’s population. I have a character on A52 and cannot remember the last time I had a queue. Maybe a 30 minute one the day of an expansion release?
What gives? Why is Blizzard so insistent on not having the first ‘M’ in ‘MMO’ in Classic? Punishing players when they moved to these servers- when in most cases, they felt they had little to no choice to- is absolute insanity to me.
The players have shown over and over that they want to play on large servers because of the security it provides when it comes to our wallets. This mostly stems from an established lack of trust for population and faction balancing and moderation. It’s why we continue to wait in queues. I got in the queue today at 3:30pm for my 9pm raid, and I won’t make it into raid in time. But I still wait. We’re still waiting. People will be logged in for however long they need to to avoid the, probably no joke, days long queue for Wrath.
(It’s also wild to me that there isn’t a way to play retail if we wanted to, while being in six hour queues.)
Can you blame us?