So according to a wowprogress (/realms/rank/us) and raider io (/realms/us) all population is accumulated on super clusters like Stormrage or Area 52 and the rest 120+ servers are literally dead without any activity on them.
May be it is time to do something with this situation that lasts for several years already? Blizzard took time to redo the leveling experience for new players but I’m afraid that half-dead servers without any guilds on them are part of this experience.
Why it is bad:
Players have to play on over-populated servers.
It removes an important social aspect from a game. As a Darkspear player and a tank it is almost impossible to find a raiding guild. And I don’t want to spend time playing with toxic people that I will never see again from group finder.
Moving to communities was a right direction but it evolved to a cross server lfg channel. You do not make social bonds with people.
How it can be solved (sorted from ok to bad solutions):
Make guilds cross-server.
Merge small/medium servers together to have several mega-servers. It was bad before but now all server identity was lost and nobody cares about it.
Merge all servers to a single mega-server like it is done in other games.
First off, keep in mind that wowprogress only tracks people with Heroic raid kills, and raider io has similar restrictions on who it keeps track of. So they’re not tracking people who don’t do much in the game.
Second, a lot of us have argued since Cata that Blizzard needs to be more aggressive with server clusters, so you’ll get few arguments there. So #2 is the right way to go.
Defeats the whole purpose of guilds. IMO if I joined a guild and it was made up of a bunch of people from all different servers, it wouldn’t really feel like a guild. You will always need to group to do anything. You can’t trade with them since they are on another server. Can’t mail them things as they are on another server. If you say, “Make guilds be able to do those things.” Well, you know how abused that system would be?
Ummmm a huge NO. And the only games that do “Mega servers” are mmos that are dead or very little population. WoW is the #1 most active players in mmos and has millions playing still whether you want to believe it or not. No I don’t have proof but pretty easy to tell. WIldstar went to mega servers. How are they doing?
Because having somebody in your guild that you can’t trade with is stupid. Can’t even give them potions or flasks, make crafted items for them, etc.
Guilds are also an anchor of community building, and communities are tied to servers. Also, moving to a server to be in a guild shows the guild that you’re actually interested in them. I can tell you one thing, we’re on a high-pop server and we’re quite reluctant to take applicants from our server, we prefer to only take trials from other servers. Moving to our server shows that they’re interested in US, not just in some-guild-any-guild-really.
thats fine why would you count the ones that dont even do heroic content ; they are not likely to help you, and you are not likely to group with them, they might as well be ignored in these census.
those are extremely casual solo players and abandoned alts probably. not likely to affect much of anything.
Blizzard has all the data so its hard to decide here but its important to put things into perspective. Bfa was a failure and 8.3 was not the best received patch. When Shlands comes in these numbers will grow across the board then we will have a new baseline for all servers. Then the numbers will go down a bit and another new baseline will be established. Blizzard cant act too hastily and end up causing more problems by having to split servers they connected due to lag issues. So well see.
But yea I do support the one big economy idea. Ffxiv did this by allowing players to zone themselves into another server by temporary server transfers and use their markets. It works amazingly well
Only viable option but maybe “mega” is totally subjective. I would not go larger than the most populated servers we currently have for the new “mega” server(s).
I’ve seen a couple of these threads (the one we’re in) popping up and I have to ask myself - do these ppl not see the pinned subjects on this/do they ignore them, and 2 - do they not see what’s on the launcher/character screen when you log in?!?!?! lmao
Trade restrictions can be flexible too (e.g. for consumables/craft items/etc). There are lots of ways how to solve it without destroying economy.
Server transfers are for mythic raiders only imho. As a casual player that just wants to do normals/heroics it really hurts me that small servers are dying.
Bliizard connect only dead servers without any players on them. I’m talking about dying servers that have ~10-15 raiding guilds - if you check links that I posted above it is clearly visible that it is a problem.
Are you saying WoW should ride on its laurels instead of recognising the issue now and preventing itself from ending up in a similar situation as those other games?
It’s absolutely the largest MMO - even now - but if they continue to ignore the sheer reality of how things are, it may end up as a relic of the past. Blizzard would be smart to consolidate realms as soon as possible - better to pull the bandaid while people still believe in the project, than do it later as a desperate attempt to keep a dying game afloat.
Wow is dying in NA/OCE. Just by going in terms of performance and investment in WoW, there is a genuine 2:1 ratio of characters having a 1932 (flat io score of all 15s timed) of EU vs NA/OCE. And this is including all regions and factions. China obviously has to have their scores purposely written since they have a different api than the rest of the world. And the total amount of characters having this type if score as now 451,506 characters, like 2-3 weeks ago it was less than 415k characters and the below % are based on that, I will correct tonight when not on mobile.
60% EU
30% NA/OCE
10% China, Taiwan, Korea.
Just from this metric alone and yes it doesn’t include all scores from China and is based on the extended scale of performance in WoW (like nothing in game really rewards you for going above a 15 for your weekly). I just take this information and judge that there is indeed a reduction in people in NA/OCE playing WoW.
That they likely need to way more aggressively condense servers in NA/OCE than they have been. Seriously people need to shed ego or they need surnames.
Yeah, Everquest at its peak had about as many players as the US WoW servers do now, I would guess. And Everquest had 20 servers while the US has over 200. It’s insane.
