Been playing wow for a while now. First picked the game up during WoD around 2015 and have had an absolute blast for the most part up until about midway through BFA. At that time subscriptions were at a pretty low point across the board and was the first time I actually had real difficulty forming groups (this wasn’t an issue for me in WoD because I wasn’t doing endgame content. Was just a new player exploring all the older expansions).
Fast forward to Shadowlands and the population boomed as with the start of every expansion and had a great time up until about 3 months in. Once again, it was becoming harder to form groups and just seeing fewer people in general. I was burned out anyway and took a hiatus for a few months, hoping more people would resub by the time I got back. Each time I would come back from a break the population was worse than before.
This brings me to last night and I had just had enough. 11pm on Aman’thul, a server connected to two other realms with an estimated total active population of 50k, and I’m going through every single zone in the game via /who checking how many people there are in each zone because no one has spoken in trade, general or LFG chat literally all day. I tallied a total of 114 players from every single zone with no zone having more than 30 people. Obviously you can’t check in instances, but considering that I saw maybe 6 or 7 total groups running keys all night and zero raid groups, I highly doubt there are that many people I’m missing in the tally. 50k active people between those connected realms has to be an outright lie. Out of 50,000 only a few hundred are playing at 11pm? That just doesn’t sound right. I remember a few years back it literally didn’t matter what time of the day I logged on, there were always heaps of people online. And groups were always fast and easy to form.
I’m sick of the struggle of finding people, sick of the emptiness, sick of the silence in chat and. VERY sick of dealing with this ON TOP of higher ping because I’m grouped with US players in instanced content 90% of the time.
Well I bit the bullet and I’ve made the switch to US on the Proudmoure realm and honestly I’m pleasantly surprised at how little I notice the lag. 150ms is about my average ping, which is weird because my ping has always spiked to around 300ms when in dungeons hosted by US players. But mate, seeing so many active people again is such a breath of fresh air and I’m actually excited for the first time in a long time to login into wow.
If any Aussies are reading this, I highly recommend at least giving US realms a shot. The ping isn’t anywhere near as bad as you might think. Trust me, the population difference is 100% worth it. And to be frank, I don’t see Blizzard/Microsoft keeping Oceanic servers around long term with the way the population is heading.