Declining OG Hardcore Realm Populations -- Solution Needed

WoW Classic WoW Classic Hardcore
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I’ve been keeping track of server health on Defias Pillager for a couple of weeks now. By using the ‘/who’ function, I’ve been checking sporadically at different times of day, for different days of the week. As long as you cap your findings to 49 results or less, you can get an objective number of the amount of people who are online on that faction, on that server.

An example:
Defias Pillager 16:14 ST April 11th, Sunday – 1-6 (45 online) 7-11 (47 online) 12-15 (44 online) 16-19 (43 online) 20-25 (46 online) 26-30 (45 online) 31-36 (45 online) 37-45 (43 online) 46-55 (49 online) 56-59 (12 online)
Level 60 50+ results, so separated by class:
60 Warrior (16 online)
60 Priest (3 online)
60 Rogue (4 online)
60 Paladin (8 online)
60 Hunter (8 online – (used to be much higher a few months ago before botwave ban))
60 Warlock (1 online)
60 Mage (9 online)
60 Druid (3 online)
[471 players online on Defias Pillager Alliance]

I have taken 18 samples following this methodology.

This number should be ~99% accurate. People will log on, log off, swap to an alt, or die in the time it takes me to get these numbers recorded. This results in people getting missed or getting double hit. There is also the chance for there to be multiboxers. But otherwise, the number is as accurate as possible.

I can’t post picture evidence of the my findings on this forum. But if you can take my word for it: since March 17th, to April 12th, Defias Pillager Alliance has averaged 145-170~ players from 1AM-9AM ST, picking up to around 357-472~ players in the afternoons from 3PM-9PM ST.

Despite these numbers, Skull Rock is doing significantly worse, with only 1 active raid guild on their Alliance side, and their Horde side is dead; essentially a single-player experience now. Defias Pillager I believe has at least one Horde raiding guild, as they sometimes drop world buffs, and 4 active raiding guilds as of the time of this post (HC Elite, petri on god, Fellowship of the Bling, and Wardens of Elune).

Defias Pillager was roughly impacted after SoD release last year but for the most part server population stabilized and recovered a bit. We still had 3 layers and pugging for dungeons was still easy. However, Doomhowl has done irreversible damage to the health of our server. Everyone moved to fresh, and now that streamers have left they remain there for the sake of the QoL updates which objectively is a huge incentive to not return to the OG Hardcore servers, even if their server pop has went from High to Medium, and trending downwards from what we can see.

I’m not asking ActivisionBlizzard for action, as the 43 Classic servers that are currently on the Era listing (including DP and SR) are all on life support. Every single one of them on Low population, and some of them you can’t even get 50 results if you ‘/who 1-60’ during peak hours. For the most part they can get by via sharding. It’s clear that Blizzard as of right now doesn’t care about letting servers die. If they did, they’d have merged Defias Pillager and Skull Rock when people were asking after SoD release. Or they’d have started sharding the two OG Hardcore servers by now, as they already do with the rest of normal Era realms. The best thing is to do is to inform players of the downwards trend, and making the best judgement to stay with servers with a downward population trend, jump to a different version of WoW, or unsubscribe altogether. It pains me to say it because I love the greater community on Defias Pillager, especially my guild. But there doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel as recovering from the downfall of server populations on either OG Hardcore realm.

If ActivisionBlizzard does care about Hardcore, then 100% they should either merge or shard Defias Pillager and Skull Rock, or allow server transfers between the realms. Eventually, this can include Doomhowl once their phases are in-line with the OG Hardcore realms. It’s already a niche population. Splitting it up the population further was a terrible idea in hindsight.

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there’s no need to do anything. let some realms be small. it’s not the end of the dang world :expressionless:

plus keep in mind that DP and SR don’t have the awful changes that doomhowl does. so any talk of merging with doomhowl is off the table.

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You seem to play on the larger server - where you have counted players - but you speak also on behalf of the smaller server, advocating for a merge. This seems rather selfish … we’re not big enough, come to us so that I have more players to play with.

If people from SR want to go to DP they will slowly do so upon dying and rerolling. If peeople re-roll on SR mostly it’s probably because they like it small.

PS: I play on the EU servers, where we have the exact same pattern, and I am one of those staying on the small realm. Exactly BECAUSE it is small and have no layers.

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It’s going to get worse now that blizz turned it into streamercore.

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we need combine SR and DF .

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There’s realms being small, then there’s realms being practically dead. Not having a healthy enough population means that you don’t get to experience the content that the game provides, as it is an MMO. The QoL changes that Doomhowl has isn’t awful evident by the higher playerbase. Either way, that wasn’t my point. And it’s always open to discussion. That’s what a forum is.

That’s what the point of a server merge would do. I don’t mind which server gets merged into the other, but having 43 near-dead servers is ridiculous. It’s simple management.

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We have only two HC servers, the PvP and PvE ones are clustered, so in reality there’s not 43, but way less. … only talking of Era here.

and no matter which of the two HC server are merged into the other one the result will be the same … layers.

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Solution is to create new servers that are actual hardcore and not streamercore

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Yes. A new Era HC server (probably an Anniversary too), only for those that were never restored … or make it so that the Soul of Iron buff is not restorable.

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The only solution would be to open a fresh server where there’s 100% no no rollbacks or rezzes, and no content creator events. Remove the appeals and streamers, and you’ll have a healthy dedicated server. Right now “hardcore” is dead.

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the truth is they can’t give us a real hardcore server because then the streamer audiences would expect the streamers to play there… and then the streamers would get rezzed again :expressionless:

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yeah people kept screaming that wow players “hAtE StReAmErS” for no reason. right… ruined an entire game mode.

the streamer communities are a plague on smaller gaming communities. they are like locusts.

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can’t wait until twitch audiences get bored of all things classic WoW. it’s gotta happen soon :expressionless: the game isn’t exactly tailor-made to be fun to watch as it is lol

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that already happened. thats why you see people saying servers are dead or dying. like no, they arent dead or dying, they are just going back to what they would be normally without parasocial viewers wanting to play with their best friend streamer

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This is sad news. Everyone knew the servers are not perfect and the DDOS attacks made them even less safe to play on HC. What Bliizard should have done is release a separate HC server, no rollbacks, but with perks that allow progression of newly rolled characters and better DC protection. For example of a perk, the xp gains would be normal for the highest level HC character, but there would be an option to increase XP gains on future characters until the highest level character on HC. If someone has a level 60 HC character, they can roll alts with the option of faster XP gains until they hit level 60. Another perk would be to make gold HC serverwide, shared across all the HC characters.

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Thanks for the post, I am glad this is gaining traction, I replied to that really old thread already as well.

There is no reason DP and SR should be left separate. Like you said MANY of these era servers have the same problem and it should all be addressed together, or at the very least, start to COMMUNICATE the longevity/plan of the servers.

Not to be a complete naysayer but it does feel like Blizzard explicitly wants Classic/Era to die sometimes, it feels like they always have really since the beginning. It is hard to imagine some server merges/mass character migrations being such an uphill task for them or even suspect to negative community feedback that they might worry about. So, if this is true, then I would hope they at least have the ability to come forth and communicate openly about their intentions/longevity, especially with what will happen to the HC servers, which is such a unique WoW experience to anything else they have to offer. Are they going to be dumped here? Or a new set of Anniversary realms will be made and Doomhowl to be left to its own, similar fate with everyone jumping for a new progression server? I think Hardcore TBC would be very bad unless you had some odd design that isn’t worth the squeeze (starting at level 60 for example) and is kind of against the whole purpose of the Hardcore experience being the JOURNEY and interacting with other players.

This is ALL completely “streamercore” discussion points aside. I don’t really care about the streamers, but I wanted the Classic experience, Hardcore, without the race of progression and flavor of the week experience. I can level multiple characters over a long period time and not worry about being behind, making raiding toons, etc., I enjoy the levelling process and the small community of individuals I meet along the way. Without clear direction about the future of Doomhowl, and management of Era Servers in general, I think a large portion of the similarly minded player base can feel alienated and forgotten to whatever is the latest trend.

Blizzard, please remind us that the (relatively, I am posting here after all) silent are not forgotten.

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They want it to die, so they can say “we told you so, you think you do; but you don’t!”

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@Kimahraein Thank you for being one of the only few good-faith replies in the thread. Everyone else is mind broken by the streamer rezzing and are hijacking threads that have nothing to do with it. I wish the doomsayers would stop trying to turn every non-relevant conversation into a struggle-session about the streamers. It’s honestly spam at this point and they’re not actually contributing to the point of the threads.

I won’t lie to you: not knowing what the roadmap is; or what the long term plans are; is shaking my confidence in investing more time into the game. I only came to WoW for the Hardcore mode, and I tried Doomhowl for about a couple hours but I don’t have it in me to start over again from scratch. To reiterate, I’ll remain on Defias Pillager until the community truly bottoms out. But the Auction House is a struggle to sell common things, and other necessary materials are sky-high. Getting pubs together for dungeons is magnitudes more frustrating than pulling teeth; worse than it used to be. What used to be at least one guild running 10-man LBRS/UBRS daily turned into maybe once every couple of weeks.

There’s a lot of worrying quality indicators for now. As I said in my original post, the long-term impact that Doomhowl has had on both OG Hardcore servers is worse than what the SoD release had. And there’s no telling if they’re going to keep releasing servers, especially if they’re not condensing the old ones. Playing solo is extremely easy to accommodate and I don’t see why people advocate for low populations in an MMO. Even on the most populated server you can pick a spot to farm boars to 60 all by your lonesome, only occasionally seeing the passing player. Unless they’re bot farmers who want to grind in absolute isolation in fear of a passing player targeting them and hitting them with a report, but that’s probably going too far into tin-foil territory there.

And what happens if they released a “totally brand new 100% cool no-rezzing hardcore server” like you’re pining for right now?

Server will get DDoS’ed, or hit with server outages. People with hundreds of hours on their characters, or hell maybe less than that but time that they can’t afford to lose at a whim anymore. They permaquit the game and slowly but surely the population gets whittled down again until ActivisionBlizzard releases gasp a FIFTH dead Hardcore server! :DDD

Making a new server would only compound the issue that I’m trying to bring to light in this thread, streamers or rezzes or whatever. One of three things is going to happen:

  1. ActivisionBlizzard somehow fixes their servers to have a 100% uptime
  2. The Hardcore policy is adjusted to give leeway to people who die from non-gameplay conditions
  3. The Hardcore playerbase will continue to permanently lose players, who get frustrated by random lottery deaths, and quit the game. (<you are here)

There’s no point in arguing for elitist hardcore at this point because unless things turn around, you might as well go back to Bloodsail Buccaneers, with their daily login population of like 30~ people, and just play the game solo with honor-rules again. No grouping, no AH, no dungeons…not because of the gamemode, but because you’re the only player there.

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HC DoomHowl got so low in Population I can no longer sell

  • lvl 20-45 BOE
  • Thick/Rugg/Runic Cloth
  • Mana Potions lvl 5-31
  • find fast que dungeons 31-40 (deadzone literally) for alts ((unless healer/MT))
  • dungeon runs for pre bis gear as a rogue (tried for 2 weeks to get something other than Thrash Blade while world farming for potential Krol Blade MH or enough gold to buy it ((at 240g atm))
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Solution, just shut those two dead realms down.