Hello, I returned to Wow when classic came out but lately I have started to play retail as well. I quit back in Mop, and the sole reason for that was how dead my once active server had become. They were talking about connecting servers to alleviate this issue, but they took too long in implementing it in my opinion.
I find this very strange, but my server, Shattered Hand, which was originally an East Coast Server, somehow is now listed as a Pacific realm and the realm time in-game reflects that. See here for instance- (Just realized I can’t include links in this post. A quick google search however will show that shattered hand goes by pacfic time now though.)
It originally was east coast, as the wowwiki page on it will confirm. Again, shame I can’t include links but google can confirm.
Why would they change it from East to West? I’m on East coast and I have ten characters on this realm, but it’s important to me that realm time and my time are the same. So my point is, does being on a lower pop realm still negatively affect me, or do connected realms make up for this completely? I really don’t want to have to pay for several character transfers, but I don’t want to play on a different time zone or a dead realm either. Please advise, thanks.
Also, is there any way to transfer resources or gold from my alliance characters to my horde ones on Shattered Hand? I’ve been away for 6 years and there have been a lot of changes so who knows…are mounts shared between factions as well?
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Your server doesn’t really matter outside of social and economic play - things like joining guilds and prices of various items on the Auction House, or if you’re interested in Mythic raiding before the server locks are removed. Also for world PvP sorts of things.
Other than that, there is no reason that you might need to play on a different server. The reason for the change was likely due to your server being linked to a West Coast timezone server when they started linking servers for crossrealm in WoD. The same thing happened to my original server (Drak’thul), but it didn’t impact anything in any meaningful way.
Short of faction changing your Alliance toons to Horde, no. There is no way to transfer non-BoA items between factions. There are certain items which are Bind on Account which can be mailed between factions, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
Mounts, aside from faction-based mounts, are entirely account-wide, as are transmog appearances obtained, pets, toys, and heirlooms. As long as you have acquired the mount/pet/etc. on a single character, it will be available on all characters. In order to ensure that all of your items populate correctly, you’ll need to log in to each of your characters for at least a couple of minutes to allow the game to “read” what you have available.
You can use battle pets to effectively move gold between factions and servers. Go to the AH and buy and learn pets on a character with gold. Then log into the character you need gold on and cage the pet and put it on the AH. It’s best if you do some research to know which pets move well and what they should be priced at. This method can be a bit of a pain, especially on smaller servers where you’ll have to be patient to get sales. I’d say it’s mostly useful for some seed gold for bags and such on a new faction/server.
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Thanks guys. I didn’t want to transfer, given the amount of investment I made on my current realm already. I’m a little confused about connected realms- can guilds be crossrealm as well? The social aspect of the game does matter to me, I don’t want to be on an empty server with no populated guilds. Currently I have no plans to do serious raiding, but that could change when I get to max level.
Connected realms act as one server. They share one Auction House. (They’ve also made all auction houses cross-faction, so now all auction houses — alliance, horde, and goblin — are all the same auction house.) You can can trade freely with players from other realms connected to yours as well as join guilds on those realms.
Shattered Hand is connected to Deathwing, Executus, and Kalegos. So, you can treat players on those realms the same as those on Shattered Hand. Just use their realm as a “last name” when trying to send mail or invite to guilds. (So, your character would be Roundnproud-Shattered Hand.)
It can be a bit confusing, because there are some other technologies in play as well. Cross realm zones (also called sharding) allows them to pull from a pool of all players from a datacenter and given realm type to populate zones to a target population. (They can also use this to break players up into smaller shards when a zone is too populated.) There are also cross-realm groups, where you can group with anyone from any server in the region. (So even across datacenter and RP/non-RP realms.) In these cases, you can group with them, but you can’t trade non-conjured items or join their guilds. (So, basically, just like LFD, LFR, and random battleground groups.)
That’s all i wanted to know, thank you. Though I think the realms you listed are actually connected to a very similarly named but different server, Shattered Halls. According to the source I have, Shattered Hand is connected to Dark Iron, Dalvengyr, Demon Soul and Coilfang. Thanks again.
You’re right, I didn’t look too closely beyond the “shattered” part. Glad the rest of the info helped!
Just to clarify this part as there is always a lot of confusion surrounding this feature, while CRZ and Sharding are two sides of the same coin, they are polar opposites of the system. Not one and the same.
Sharding occurs when a zone is over-populated. Simply put, the system will create a new “shard” of the zone, and populate it with people from the over-populated instance of that zone.
CRZ (cross realm zoning) occurs when the opposite metric is triggered. When this side of the system is triggered, it will phase people into a more populated shard of the zone, or transfer people who are subject to being sharded into the less populated zone. But does not create a new shard.
The overall goal of the system is that nobody ever feels that they are alone in the world, or that there is too much competition. How well this works however is a completely different topic. 