the title says it all, hardcore wow has the best community in all mmo’s. we are suffering from low population. just merge the two servers FFS.
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servers cannot be merged. they are on different time zones 
also, their population is on the low side but fine. not everything needs to be a megaserver.
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Why merge the two servers when blizzard can create a third empty one for streamers?
Remember, when a clear good idea is available, always throw it out the window and do something insanely chaotic instead.
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What streamers are playing HC ? Retard alert.
There’s a huge streamer movement to start the hc challenge again. I’m not sure when they were saying I think November was the new planned date.
There has been rumor going around that blizzard is possibly going to help them by making a new hc server, though this is unconfirmed. That was what he was talking about.
Or perhaps the streamers are just trying to convince blizzard to do it, as a way to advertise the game. I haven’t followed it too closely though. You could probably find mention of it as they plan to restart that streamer only guild.
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why can’t the streamers just do it on one of the existing realms like, seriously, what’s the difference
HC fresh only makes sense if they’re making it a new rules based server, like SF. I would like that.
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I think it had to do with making it less likely for them to be stream sniped or boosted. Or at least that was the rational. Some of them did just advocate for starting on one of the existing realms.
I have no idea if the rumor or their request will even be considered, I just know what some youtubers have mentioned it. And that they were setting up a date to play.
it’s such entitlement to ask for a new dang realm to avoid getting “stream sniped” but blizzard loves catering to streamers so wouldn’t surprise me
Because its not “new”. And blizzard hates the HC community. But I mean you do as well.
The servers run on a virtualized platform, not physical servers. They can merge & timezones can be adjusted easily enough
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Wrong – you have so many awful takes is crazy.
Since the Dawn of Fresh Servers people have loved them. Its a new start with people running around everywhere trying to level up. With that new meetings and new friends and enemies alike are made. new Guilds and Guild Leaders have a chance to make their mark, and forge new communities that last lifetimes. Its like a whole new “instance” of the same game and does not need to have all new sets of rules at all to be fun.
Youll figure things out one day… or just remain a grumpy sour individual.
I’m all for fresh servers. I’m one of the biggest proponents of vanilla fresh on this forum But it doesn’t make nearly as much sense for HC. We certainly shouldn’t be getting a fresh HC before a dang fresh vanilla.
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I wonder if they plan to announce anything fresh in November because of the wow anniversary coming up that month. It is the big 2-0 after all.
Servers should be merged.
Era servers should also be consolidated.
HC would only benefit from merger
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Maybe they will announce subscription increase to $19.99/mo 
How far Blizzard has fallen, I would not be surprised if that would be the only announcement
A lot of things are possible. That doesn’t make it “easy,” or “easy enough” to make business sense.
Do you have a presentation you could link that someone from Blizzard could use in a meeting to convince higher ups that resource allocation to design, develop, implement such a task would result in an ROI that makes sense?
If so, that might be a lot more helpful and inspiring for someone in a position to care about your request than just a random, “it’s easy enough.” imo.
These replies always seem haughty to me. Casual observers can absolutely make common sense inferences about areas they’re not expert in. If an electrician tells me that adding a generator hook up to my house will cost $25,000 and take 6 months I’m going to go “yeah, no, it’s an easy hook up, takes two parts and shouldn’t cost more in parts and labor than $1000”. What would you say to me, “well you’re not an electrician so…”?
Blizzard HAS the technology and capacity to do server mergers on the Classic architecture. How do I know that? Because they’ve done so. Now how many people that takes, what kind of man-hours that requires, what the cost would be in exact dollars and cents (6 people, from three departments making a net average $42.47 an hour, requiring an estimated 84.1 hours, with the additional cost of renting a server for the 6-hour transfer block estimated to be $2200, then the increased electrical usage billed at $0.47 a killawatt in Irvine California… yadaa yadaa). No one can say that. We also cannot quantify the dollars that Blizzard ascribes to player happiness. It might take a developer 4 hours navmesh an area of WSG commonly used as a jump-skip. Do you think they calculate the RoI of what those 4 hours of labor hours cost versus the cumulative player benefit of that jump no longer working?
Come on man. People like you are insufferable.
Two things are clear even to casual observers:
- Server mergers seem relatively simple technologically (the biggest pain point actually seems to be player NAMES)
- There’s a significant player demand for the two disparate HC servers, one of which has like literally 180 level 60s, to be merged.
It doesn’t hurt to ask for it and it doesn’t require an actuary degree to suggest it.
As another example, I am a healthcare professional - I work in the pharmaceutical industry. I currently do consultation work with long-term care facilities. Earlier tonight I received an order from the facility for an actively dying hospice patient that required morphine. This specific facility is an assisted living facility, which is a legally distinct from a skilled nursing facility, and I cannot just send them a bottle of morphine. I need to draw up individually measured, pre- refill syringes since no one on site is legally allowed to do any kind of dose measurement. This is a laborious process. It takes me almost 1 minute to do a single one, and I had to do 60 of them. The morphine cost us about $17, the 60 syringes about $20, the syringe caps maybe $7 and 60 labels for each syringes maybe $15, plus the $76/hr I am paid. We were reimbursed $18.74 for the script. Not considering the contracted driver that had to deliver it. Realistically, we lost over a hundred dollars filling this. Do you think we had some RoI meeting about it with corporate and account management? No… Not everything we do is individually profitable. That’s running a business. We make money, we spend money, we even lose money. And the end of the day, we hope to make more than we lost.
This is how 99% of businesses are run. I don’t think Blizzard calls up Activision and Microsoft and has an RoI summet is some glass conference room and decides whether each move is profitable enough to warrant. If their customers want something within reason, they will probably do it without all the bean counters getting involved on day-to-day development decisions.
I doubt that the merging of two servers would be an act of Microsoft financial congress….
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Certainly.
Did you actually read my post and decide this was an appropriate response?
This is a genuine question. I recommend you re-read and attempt to consume what I’ve stated, because this is completely off base, in my opinion.
I think there is most likely work that has been estimated and assigned a priority as well as amount of time it is thought to roughly be completable within. This is relatively common practice with most software organizations.
How it is prioritized is likely based on product management, who may or may not have to justify work completed by some sort of metrics which are very likely to be used in some RoI calculations somewhere within a decision making hierarchy.
Nobody (to my knowledge at least) has suggested that it does require an actuary degree (or any degree) to suggest it. Again, I encourage you to re-read (if you indeed read) what you are responding to, and see if it’s possible you are missing the points being made.
Based on how you described the situation, no I do not.
While I am aware that many businesses practices happen off-the-cuff, that doesn’t fill me with reassurance that what is being asked for in this thread is worthwhile, desirable, or would result in any player happiness. But I do know that it would require some relatively non-trivial attention, and would with some level of certainty impact HC players who specifically connect to their chosen realms due to location and latency issues.
My suggestion was meant to encourage posters to think through their suggestions a little more deeply, and even potentially try to do some of their own research to offer some ammunition to developers or whichever advocates within the company may come across their posts and care to champion their ideas in front of decision makers.
I do not believe the servers should be merged. I believe there is a fresh HC realm coming in the next couple of months, and that if players are upset about a lack of activity or population on Skull Rock or (Horde) Defias Pillager that they just simply wait for the new realm, which should be extremely active for 30-60 days (then also a ghost town).
That being said, no I don’t think server merges are particularly demanding on Blizzard staff. The costs of a server merger calculated in labor hours and material costs would likely be less than $50,000 (perhaps less than $20,000) while Blizzard/Activision makes $6 billion annually and daddy Microsoft is worth like $2.7 trillion.
I don’t think the “RoI” of a server merger is something they would require a presentation on.
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Well, I don’t think the value of Microsoft nor ActivisionBlizzard particularly has any bearing on the difficulty of the task of merging servers. I suspect what you mean is clustering, like they have done with Classic Era, and I doubt that even that was as trivial as you seem to think it would be.
Some common knowledge:
- Skull Rock and Defias Pillager are Western and Eastern timezone servers (not the same timezone).
- They recently offered to “consolidate servers” in SoD, which they have often expressed uses newer technology that helped them achieve better faction balance and large population support. Yet, they did this through FCMs (Free Character Moves) to one server, and locked creation of new characters on the others, but will presumably keep them alive for the duration of SoD.
Neither do I. But for the record, I think that anyone is entitled to post whatever opinions they have and even champion them on these forums, regardless of whether they understand those opinions, or the level of research or support they post alongside them.
If you want something to be a certain way, by all means champion your opinions!
Of course, offering a layup to an advocate in the company who could champion your opinion in front of decision makers would be even better.