There’s quite a few issues with realm consolidations. First off, the list of available servers to transfer to shouldn’t be limited by server population, and/or if you have characters on a realm, you should be allowed to swap them to that other realm free. Having the free option to move a character to a server you don’t want to be at is not beneficial.
Secondly, this does nothing to address the faction imbalance of some servers that are 99.6% of one faction, which IMO is the biggest issue in the game right now. Servers in their current state that have that type of faction imbalance might as well just be PvE servers, because the only PvP that’s going to be had is by the minority faction (speaking as someone who rerolled from benediction alliance, to benediction horde just to be able to enjoy the game again).
I was optimistic about what blizzard was going to do to try to balance out the servers for wrath… but if this is all they’re doing, this is pretty much them doing nothing about the issue at hand. There is zero benefit of consolidating realms if the current realms aren’t going to have an attempt at being balanced. Mostly it just means people’s alts are going to get shipped to a random server that’s likely just to die off as well, instead of the ones they actually play on, because the free transfers are limited to realms they don’t already play on.
Faction balance for those 99% servers is never going to be fixed. You cant forcibly remove players and no body wants to play on a realm with no one to play with.
Best thing they can do is make them PvE realms so that alliance characters can still level on those realms if they choose to and move on.
They COULD have avoided this by closely monitoring severs and locking character creation/transfers as needed to maintain healthy servers… but instead they did nothing and this is the price of their negligence.
If I were them, I would lock charcter cration for severs with a 20k+ playerbase and faction lock character creation on PvP realms for a couple months before and after WotLK launch. That way you can hopefully funnel some of the new players/toursits to fill up those medium pop realms and make then nice places to play. Rather than watch all the people coming back for wotlk roll on the same mega servers just adding to the problem. Servers with 20k+ active players (especially if single faction) are self sufficient and we always have group/guild/pvp communities. If the medium realms dont reach that critical population threshhold, they will just eventually vanish.
It’s actually insane for blizzard to be sending them to some of these realms. Us on Grobb already have a VERY healthy population and a a pretty balanced (still horde favored) population. I’d rather them not send ppl here and screw up the balance.
As ammusing as that would be, i dont think having 60k players locked up to a single realm is healthy.
But if you were to smash half of each server to make 2 balanced realms you face a whole series of problems. Who chooses who stays and who goes? What about all the players who paid money to get to these realms only to be forced off them?
Unfortunately not. I wasn’t aware of server limitations until they mentioned the mega, mega server that EU has that can’t sustain that many people regardless of how many layers they have. Just kind of disheartening though.
I have nothing against Kaivax, my criticisms are never aimed at the blue messengers. I just see a lot of people hyped about this announcement on my faction (bene horde), but the reality is what they’ve announced so far will fix absolutely nothing.
I’m sorry if they should have announced their plans sooner, and/or should have either asked for suggestions, or given options as to what they can do and go from there. They allowed this problem to happen deliberately as a quick money grab; I’m sorry if I want a fix for the problem they created. Transfers should have always been monitored so this didn’t happen, but they kept saying the population was overall balanced between horde and alliance, so there was no issues… despite more and more servers being 99% of one faction or the other. They let my original server community die for a quick buck, and it was like watching what happened to my OG server in retail happen all over again in classic. I have no obligation to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It’s already too late, if something were to be done about single sided servers it should’ve been done when they were already leaning towards 70-30, the fact that they’re already 99/100% of one faction is just too hard to balance properly. The only thing that can be done is to merge a 99/100% server with another server of the opposite faction that’s also 99/100% anything else will receive backlash from those servers.
The obvious downside in doing this would mean that those servers are now so big that queue times are going to skyrocket and layering will increase.
Benediction has 30k Alliance players and Faerlina has 25k Horde players. If you were to merge them you’d effectively have a 50-50 server but the server population will be 55k+ players and these are only the ones that raid/PvP. Having that many people on a server is a very bad thing in my opinion, there just shouldn’t be that many people allowed on a server there really is no winning because it’s already been lost.
I dunno, he made it sound like the time to voice one’s opinion is now, and my opinion is that this isn’t good enough. Server balance is more important than closing down former realms that we wouldn’t notice either way if they stayed or not. What we would notices is if the mega servers had an actual opposing faction to them and weren’t just one sided ghost towns.
my reaponse.
Yep, I’m sure your reaponse had loads of insight in it.
I would love this if it didn’t effect queue times. I absolutely loved the start of classic when most pvp servers were balanced. I even transferred from an ally dominated server to a 40ish-60ish% server part way through classic. All for nothing I suppose.