Classic WoW Era Realms - Playerbase from Fragmented realms need to be connected as a community

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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With Blizzard officially launching Classic Era servers on May 18th and its promise of maintaining higher realm population through merging servers, many diehard wow vanilla fans either paid to clone or send their character on a one way ticket to classic era realms anticipating to play Classic Era in the decades to come.

However, many people playing Classic now are separated into sparse population on different clusters making it extremely hard to find group for any major raid or open world content. Many have been posting on Reddit and the WoW Classic forums for Blizzard to fix this issue, but we have gained zero response and acknowledgement so far and player population on Era servers continue to dwindle at an alarming rate.

Attached below are some samples of the population size for all US pvp realms:

Jume 30, 2021 16:03 Horde Kromcrush 34
Alliance Herod 15
Horde Netherwind 24
Alliance Faerlina 23
TOTAL 96
July 1, 2021 16:26 Horde Kromcrush 25
Alliance Herod 10
Horde Netherwind 22
Alliance Faerlina 30
TOTAL 87
July 2, 2021 16:24 Horde Kromcrush 30
Alliance Herod 11
Horde Netherwind 34
Alliance Faerlina 43
TOTAL 118
July 2, 2021 18:34 Horde Kromcrush 35
Alliance Herod 14
Horde Netherwind 39
Alliance Faerlina 41
TOTAL 129
July 3, 2021` 20:00 Horde Kromcrush 36
Alliance Herod 20
Horde Netherwind 46
Alliance Faerlina 49
TOTAL 151
July 4, 2021 20:00 Horde Kromcrush 47
Alliance Herod 11
Horde Netherwind 29
Alliance Faerlina 46
TOTAL 133
July 5, 2021 19:13 Horde Kromcrush 37
Alliance Herod 18
Horde Netherwind 37
Alliance Faerlina 50
TOTAL 142
July 6, 2021 19:24 Horde Kromcrush 50
Alliance Herod 16
Horde Nethwerwind 32
Alliance Faerlina 50
TOTAL 148
July 7, 2021 20:10 Horde Kromcrush 50
Alliance Herod 15
Horde Nethwerwind 49
Alliance Faerlina 50
TOTAL 164
July 9, 2021 19:18 Horde Kromcrush 27
Alliance Herod 13
Horde Nethwerwind 33
Alliance Faerlina 50
TOTAL 123

This, lack of support coupled with the “TBC” Hype that players are spreading, creates a toxic, network effect driven by momentum - the negative momentum that Classic era “servers are dying” such that new players who come on Classic Era have a bad experience, and unsubscribe due to uneahlthy realm population. This has a few negative consequences:

-Further reductions to player base

-Lesser quality of life on all servers

-Blizzard suffering significant subscription loss that can potentially span years

-Players migrating to private server options where better direct, communication, and support is available.
etc

More importantly, the drastic decline in player population renders high tier raiding, world pvp, open world events and battlegrounds nigh impossible for certain clusters of a particular faction, and in worse cases, both faction of the entire server. An extreme case of this negative impact would be the RP-PVP realms who have not seen a single raid past MC since the launch of Classic Era and US Eastern Cluster 1 & 2, where one side of the faction had no raiding options due to limited population.

While lower levels of player engagement was expected, current levels are not sustainable for a healthy population and they preclude paying players from enjoying the game in the environment it was intended to be played in.

As diehard fans of the original WoW Classic, we understand that Blizzard cannot force players to play on Classic Era servers.

However, Blizzard has adequate capabilities to facilitate a healthy, vibrant community and maintain the original, authentic MMORPG experience that is World of Warcraft for many decades by implementing 2 significant realm settings:

Classic Era Server Realm Merge

  1. Merge all NA PVP East, West, and RP-PVP servers into one server or cluster.
  2. Merge all NA PVE and RP-PVE server into another cluster.
  3. Merge all EU PvP and RP-PvP servers into one cluster
  4. Merge all EU PvE and RP-PVE servers into one cluster

Temporary Global Cross Realm for all Regions

  1. Implement a temporary global non-layered cross realm on ALL Classic Era servers across the Americas, Europe, and Oceanic region

The above mentioned suggestions benefit the Classic Era Community in the following ways:

Benefits of Classic Era Realm Merge

By merging all NA PVP and RP-PVP realms into one respective cluster, factions will be balanced by the respective population and players on both factions will get an extremely high chance of experiencing high-end content which will lead to opportunities for better gear and will lead to a better quality of life experienced by the player for all future PVE, PVP, and Open-World events hosted on the server. This increased quality of life will lead to a recurring subscription for many of the die-hard classic era fan that can span for several decades until end-of-life, resulting in player delight, and high profits for Blizzard.

Benefits of temporary Global Cross Realm

The advantage of a temporary global cross realm will enable players from all over the world to experience the magic that is Azeroth 24/7, seven days a week across all time zones without experiencing any dip in population at any one point of time, and ensure players can always get into a PVE / PVP / Open world event without much trouble or hassle.

This can prove to be a more effective method than a realm merge on a specific region as the law of large numbers will effectively ensure that all players from anytime, anywhere across any time zones will be able to achieve their PVE/PVP/Open world end goals that require a form of social interaction. This method can potentially eliminate BG queues and the endless wait for dungeon group forming at all times of day for both factions.

The only decision that needs to be factored in for non-layered cross realm is how will Blizzard remove artificial agency and decide on how auction houses, resources, nodes and rare spawns will behave on cross realm server (aka - will it be cluster specific?), how internet ping behaves when a player from another geographical location invites someone from another geographical location. Both these are to reduce the lag drastically and prevent cross realm abuse. It is notable that Private servers are able to find a way to eliminate lag and latency from all geographical locations on one giant, mega server.

As it stands, Vanilla Classic is much loved by those outside of the Americas region, and this can be seen by the active international audience that play the original iteration of WoW on a server type that is different from the geographical location. Having a temporary global cross realm will increase the quality of life of all players and will result in much love and many players subscribed to classic era in the decades to come.

[TL;DR]

There is a healthy population of players for classic era wow, however the player base has been spread across several clusters and this has created quality of life issues when playing the game. If Blizzard could just merge all of the cluster and consolidate the populations regionally or globally we would have a robust and healthy community.

Please implement changes to how realms connect starting with the American Server Clusters, followed by the Oceanic and European clusters.

Step 1:

  1. Merge all NA PVP and RP-PVP (East and West) servers into one server or cluster.
  2. Merge all NA PVE and RP-PvE into one server or cluster.
  3. Merge all EU PvP and RP-PVP servers into one server or cluster
  4. Merge all EU PvE and RP-PvE servers into one server or cluster

We would also ask that character transfer restrictions be lifted from PvE/PvP transfers, to be allocated one free transfer per character, and all transfer restrictions, including gold cap to be removed.

Step 2: If we are still seeing unhealthy population levels

  1. Merge all NA clusters completely
  2. Merge all EU clusters completely

Step 3: If a healthy population is still not achieved by step 2 consider a Temporary Global Cross Realm

  1. Merge all classic era wow servers into one centralized global server

Signed Xerolol, Herod

107 Likes
2

I agree. I checked on my lonely Paladin on Deviate Delight earlier this week. 2 Alliance players were online (including myself). Please cluster more realms together.

26 Likes
3

I sign up as well, need to merge all US realms, keep just 1 PVP and 1 PVE, offer 1 free transfer to PVE players (without the realm type restriction) 
 if possible merge all realms outside US as well, make 1 global realm of each type.

This is the way, Classic Era playerbase is enough for a healthy realm but we are split in too many dead realms right now.

I dont have interest in any other WoW version, i believe most people on classic era dont either
 so if they dont fix it ill just drop my sub when it expire unfortunately
 Also i believe it is not fair with ppl who paid for a Clone, lot of ppl want to play Classic Era with us, but not in a dead realm, fixing this issue will save Classic Era and allow others who wants to play both version to have a stable and healthy Vanilla version to play when they want too

12 Likes
4

Amen!

Please blizzard, don’t drive loyal population back to private servers! Keep classic era servers alive through proper merges.

12 Likes
5

to the top this issue needs address asap

13 Likes
6

I still love this game. I hope blizzard gives me a chance to continue playing it for years. Otherwise there’s no point in me keeping my subscription.

13 Likes
7

You can do it Blizz! Just take out your blue marker and tell us you’re merging the realms/clusters.

(At the very least merge US PVP East Realms!! — Seriously at least do this
It’s kind of ridiculous it hasn’t already been done!!)

7 Likes
8

Can we please have an official response from Blizzard? This issue has been going for too long and the playerbase has been abandoned. Merges could really help build a community in which people want to invest time into, because right now people that want to come back log in to a low pop server and see the reality of things and then logs off. We need items in the auction house, battlegrounds, more than 50 people online at once etc. Having some sort of response or hint of things being done to fix this would be greatly appreciated by the classic era community!

10 Likes
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Hear, hear! We are not asking for new game modes like FRESH or nee systems like same faction battlegrounds. All we ask is further server consolidation as done at the start of Classic Era.

7 Likes
10

My guess is that they are analyzing the data obtained from the survey sent out recently so a bit more time for a response is warrented I’d say.

2 Likes
11

yeah lets leave it another few months so even more people quit under the pressure of farming all their consumes with out the use of the ah or gold, both of which are redundant game systems right now.

4 Likes
12

Lets make it happen.

5 Likes
13

Without Classic Era,

I will unsubscribe.

Merge the servers. Just do it.

9 Likes
14

I approve this message! Please connect and merge anything that you can. We’re still active at the Incendius cluster (one of the two pvp east) but could really use more people! We like Classic Era!

7 Likes
15

Yes! Would like to hear of any future plans and really hope to hear of east and west coast merge.

3 Likes
16

Cross-realm for instances needs to be put in place immediately.

I think for the open world there’s a few complications.

I think there’s two ways to go here:

  1. Don’t allow cross-realm for the open world OR
  2. Allow cross-realm, remove cross-realm trading restrictions, have a global auction house, and changing realm you “spawn” at your hearthstone location and your hearthstone timer increases by an hour, and you can’t cross-realm more than once an hour.

I was leaning towards just blocking cross realm for the open world, but I see that has some issues, for example world bosses and getting to dungeons like Ulderman and Maradon which are surrounded by open world elite mobs.

But once you do allow open world cross realm, you basically merge the economies. Even blocking node gathering doesn’t help because you can still farm from mobs and take them back to your own server.

Also, what you don’t want is people hopping between realms for farming purposes. Like “I’ve cleared out the nodes here, I’ll just jump to another realm”. We don’t need a repeat of layering nonsense. I think also going cross-realm should increase your hearthstone timer by an hour (so it’s not usable as a free hearth), but you don’t want to ban cross realm when you’re on hearthstone cooldown because that would be quite inconvenient. But limiting crossing realms to once per hour also should prevent serious abuse.

This is all very complicated though, and I think the simple first step is to allow cross-realm for instances/raids and see how it goes. It may be enough, avoiding the potential exploits that come with mixing cross-realm with Classic WoW.

2 Likes
17

Do it Blizz

A raid is so far on Deviate Delight, I didn’t even see a 5 man dungeon.

3 Likes
18

This needs to happen ASAP

battlegrounds are rare now and there hasn’t been a AV bg since prepatch

Another thing that should be addressed is auction house the market is dead combine all classic era auction houses into 1

3 Likes
19

Leave RP-PVE (Bloodsail) the hell alone! Too many people here demanding the RP servers be merged with every server in existance. Not everyone wants to be in massive crowds with people swarming like insects all over each other everywhere they look and attempting to turn it into retail/tbc, etc. Some of us actually prefer lower population and chose RP servers for their own reasons. This is not World of Raidcraft. Endgame is not THE game for everyone. If they do this to the rest of the servers to pacify the malcontents constantly pushing for their own way, fine, whatever. Although the RP-PVP folks might not agree either.

And I’d wager that 99% of the people on the forums are the malcontents. Those enjoying the game are playing and will never even know this crap is being schemed to ruin THEIR experience.

And what if they do all that and then there’s still not enough swarms for these people? They’ll all leave then anyway, and that’s after those of us against it already left when our own experience got yanked out from under us.

7 Likes
20

I hate to say Actiblizz doesn’t care but really what other conclusion can you draw at this point?

Also , we need more Xerolol in Orgrimmar.

3 Likes