I checked out some of the old era realms last night and, man, these realms pretty much dead now since anniversary launched. My guild on Mankrik had no online in almost two weeks… I went to deviate delight and there was literally NO ONE in Stromwind and Ironfoge, not 1 single player.
How many other servers are like this now? Why split up the player base like this between 2019 era servers 2023 hardcore servers, and now the new anniversary servers? They are literally the same game, so why split people like this? Time to shut down the old realms, or condense them all somehow.
If there’s no one, or very few people, playing on these servers, what benefit do you get by shutting them down or consolidating them?
They can’t merge them into Anniversary, but Anniversary might see an option to clone them into Era once TBC comes out.
Shutting down era would be a disaster. It’s all I play, so I’m biased, but I would quit the game if it weren’t for Era. I also personally enjoy playing on a low pop realm (Grobbulus) where our small town farm server has managed to grow from just a few people to a full raid who takes down KT, on our way to form our 5th Atiesh, and still raids all content in the game. Sure you might pop on and see no one online, but if you know where to look and join our guild it’s an amazing place to be.
We also have Free Character Moves available to take us to Whitemane which is more populated, but none of us want to join that realm and prefer our small town life here on Grobb. Merging us? You’d get maybe 70 unhappy players. It’s not going to move the needle for your cause of “player consolidation” and it’s just going to cause us on Grobb to be angry that we’re forced to move. No benefit for anyone.
I’d also say, Era has constantly ebbed and flowed with Population when other game types come out. Of course it’s low tide right now with Anniversary. In a year, it will be the only place to play vanilla again, and we’ll see the tides rise. We’ve been doing it this going on 4 years now on Grobbulus with Legacy.
It would have been an absolute shame if Blizzard shut down or merged the realms every time the tides were low. We’ve seen this with TBC, SoM, HC, Wrath, SoD, and now Anniversary. It’s no different, the players will return.
No thanks. I have all my memory-worthy players there.
Nope - they are literally NOT the same game.
Condense. Yup. all PvP into one, all PvE into one, keep the RP.
BUt like this: Make a NEW server and transfer everyone there. In that way the first to log on get to keep theit name.
Are they not basically like this already. They shut down transfers because all the same type realms are connected. And this would not work for people that have alliance and horde characters on different pvp servers.
For example my alliance chars are on ArcaniteReaper and my Horde chars are on Whitemane.
no, you wouldn’t. because you wouldnt spend 6 hours looking for people to join your group for an activity. No GDKP in a 5 year old server = dead server
Yep, you can make a level 1 HC toon and die right away. Once you do, you can move it to Whitemane without any faction restriction. From then on, you’re able to create both factions.
IIRC they formally announced this given HC toons routinely are moving to non HC realms and they had to get rid of the faction restriction otherwise you’d orphan your too. I believe that was when SoM toons had a chance to transfer. But I’m too lazy to look for the official blue text about it.
It’s certainly not a complete removal of the restriction, but in the context of merging servers, there’s already precedent for it!
Update: some blue post about it, regarding SoD though, but it’s more specifically talking about how FCMs remove this restriction. Which is why it works for HC → Era, or SoM to Era since it’s technically a FCM.
it’s a nice amount.