As people might have noticed, I’ve been pushing Connected Realms as a the solution for dead servers for a while now, and with the change to LFD this has become more important than ever.
But it’s also clear that people don’t understand the differentiation between Connected Realms and “Retail”, so I wanted to clarify a few things for people’s understanding, based on how Blizzard implemented stuff.
Connected Realms are not Cross Realm Zones or Sharding
This seems to be the biggest misconception. In Retail, players are on multiple shards within given zones, and all players in a zone are on the same set of shards regardless of server. The transition for ‘a player’ is seamless, but if someone follows another player across a zone boundary, they often see that player disappear, as the two players are separated into different shards as they cross. It’s somewhat jarring and grouping is used to ‘force’ people into the same shard. These Cross Realm Zones are ubiquitous and all servers except a few of the RP ones like Moonguard are affected by it.
Connected Realms are different in that they’re basically a server merge of multiple low population servers, and the connection is fixed and permanent. All players on any of the ‘home realms’ of a Connected Realm are always visible to each other all the time, no matter where they go (instances notwithstanding).
Connected Realms are a Server Merge by another name.
Back in the ‘early days’ people were crying out for server merges for dead servers. Many years went by, but they eventually relented, and during MoP and WoD, they implemented Connected Realms. The reason why they’d been avoiding ‘true merges’ is “Name Collision”. The issue being that if two people on the servers had the same name, there’d be a requirement to have one lose the name in favour of the other. The solution was to append the server name e.g. Elorael-Caelestrasz to the names of all people on the Connected Realm and keep the names ‘server unique’ only.
That’s why when you type a name into the mailbox, or shift click someone in chat on TBC Classic, it has their full name plus server, even though we’re all on the same server. It’s inherent in the system now for all players, even though they’ve concealed it a bit in Classic.
What’s the use?
This is where the connection to LFD comes in. Cross-Realm LFD isn’t a solution for dead realms, because you still can’t raid cross-realm, and servers already have a massive faction imbalance. Megaservers have arisen because of the network effect of having a critical mass of raiders available for your guild. However not everyone wants to move, or can afford to.
Therefore the solution for ‘dead realms’ is to merge the smaller ones into medium or large population Connected Realms, where it’s essentially one Realm, where everyone on the realm is visible to each other all the time, and the only way you know it’s a Connected Realm, is you log in through Server X and I log in through Server Y, and we have different server names appended to the end of our Character names.
Otherwise, Connected Realms is no different from our existing servers.
Expanding on this, a Realm-Locked LFD would be used to allow all the players on a Connected Realm to group with each other, without needing to use “cross-realm”. Cross-Realm LFD groups people who cannot otherwise play together outside and therefore there’s a social degredation. Cross-Realm LFD doesn’t fix the issues of dead realms because they can’t play together other than randomly grouped, but Connnected Realms at least gives it a better shot.
Mega-servers wouldn’t need to be linked, and while their faction balance would still be off, over time as people move to realms where the balance is better because it was intentionally merged that way, there might even be a shift back to more balanced factions. That’s mostly hopes, but it could happen.