Good news, everyone! Connected realms are functionally merged realms, but you get to keep your character/guild names!
No, because your realm name functionally becomes a surname. Everyone keeps their existing names.
But seriously, realm connections and their terminology are not that old. Do people forget that easily? 
ragnaros is the most full realm on US with 55000 active characters, why do you think they will be paired with any other server?
Duuuude I LOVE that show, but please tell me your guild only lets in undead toons. lol
only problem is they are not looking to connect full-high pop realms together. So MG WRA wouldnt get a merger together
Itâs both. If a realm is low pop, itâs almost impossible to recruit enough people for mythic raiding. Thatâs why my realm only has like three or four guilds running mythic, and the highest is at 3/12. Itâs just not doable.
No, because that would mean transferring whole guilds and having to change names. Connections are 100% better.
Theyâre not connected. People donât understand what connected means.
Right? Either these people are new or they didnât pay attention when it happened the first time.
Which is exactly what I told them:
How is that an argument not to connect realms?
Sorry, Iâm not a pro on proper server terminology. You know what I meant.
This might be a good start, but do you have any plan to balance out the factions?
So you want those realms to just be isolated from other realms and have super long queue times? Thatâs nice.
Kiavax i love how you guys decide this after i move from misha, lmao on that one. That being said im happy blizz is atleast acknowledging there is a problem.
Donât care. Better than trying to communicate with a group that doesnât speak the same language.
Iâve run Mythic+ with people who donât speak English just fine. If you donât like it, thereâs plenty of other groups you can join; no one is forcing you to group with them. And if youâre complaining about heroic dungeons or LFR, that stuff is so easy that you donât even need to communicate. Youâll live.
So blizz this wouldnât feel so silly if when you merged realms each had full ârightsâ to each meaningâŚtheres some guilds you cant join even though that guild is on a realm connected to âyouââŚthats stupid.
Theres characters on other realms when you click on their name you dont get the level and realm info that you do with someone literally on the same realm as you. Thats stupid.
If we can see the character and quest or run instances with themâŚwe should be able to join guilds sign guild charters and yes pst and get their basic level and realm info.
@Blizz. Please do this for classic as well, so we can have a better server economy and healthier populations to replace raiders who stop playing.
I donât want shards, clusters or layers. If I wanted that Iâd stick to retail. I want to be able to see and play with people. In retail I never see the same player more than once, due to all these things. Horrible & terrible changes here to classic. I donât approve. 
EDIT:
Cross realm zones= You may see people from other realms
Cross realm groups= you can invite people to your group, and they will join your realm for now
Sharding= when there is too many people in a zone, it will split you up into multiple shards, and these shards will be unable to see each other, basically as if they were on different servers, but they can invite each other to hop shard
Sharding + Cross Realm Zones= if a zone has TOO FEW it will shard people from multiple realms all with too few people, to make one big shard with plenty of people!
Layering = Sharding, but it swaps you far less often, there is NO CROSS REALM, and it will ONLY swap you if you join a group, you will not swap if a better one becomes available, or if you log out, or if you go into an instance
Is this change for Retail or for Classic? Retail has only a 1-hour maintenance window tomorrow while Classic has an 8-hour window, so it appears Classic may undergo the changes. However, the blue post contains this line which leads me to believe itâs only for BfA:
âWhen maintenance is complete, players on affected realms will log into Battle for Azeroth and find that theyâre now part of a larger connected-realm community.â
Having played MMOs at their release and their eventual decline in population that necessitated server merges â and having been on a dying low-pop servers at the time â I totally understand the desire to beef up populations to make the experience more enjoyable. Server merging is okay with me for that purpose. It sucks having to rename a character or guild because itâs already taken on the destination server, but it needs to be done sometimes.
However, I am not a fan of other options that Blizzard has implemented at times to help resolve population issues such as cross-realm zones, cross-realm groups, and sharding. I hope these things do not come to Classic. These things are all done w/ the good intention providing a more robust player base for each player to participate in, the idea being that the game will be more enjoyable because you can get into groups or accomplish activities that require players to band together. What I feel is lost in those options, however, is the social element of whatâs supposed to be a massively-multiplayer game.
Since starting up Classic Iâve felt that social cohesion that I remember from Vanilla WoW or other early MMOs like EQ and the like. I see a person leveling in a lowbie zone and then weeks later I see them in a higher level zone. I party with someone to do an Elite quest and then some time later theyâre randomly in a group that I join for a dungeon. I cast buffs and heals on a struggling lowbie as Iâm running to a quest NPC in a low-level zone and then later on when theyâre higher level they save my life when they see a gang of mobs about to kill me when I get in over my head. I get ganked by an Ally while Iâm questing in a zone and then 10 levels later I get some sweet vengeance when I see that same Ally running through a neutral town.
These are examples of interactions that I just donât have anymore in Retail. It has been a long time since I ever see the same Ally out and about in the world in Retail, let alone one that previously wronged me. Since I donât gank people and instead prefer to get revenge on those whoâve wronged me, world PvP has long been pretty boring for me in retail. Since I hardly see the same players again after having interacted with or partied with them days, weeks, or months earlier, I donât build nearly as many bonds or friendships over my play time. The automated-LFG system creates a dungeon experience where you join a group, run a dungeon, and then leave, without a single word ever spoken.
In fact, by the time we were at BfA I hardly ever saw my own friends or guild members anymore either unless we were specifically grouping for a task; sharding made it such that my own husband sitting right next to me at his PC wouldnât be visible on my screen, not to mention any of my other RL friends. If we could pass each other in town and not even know it then certainly it doesnât bode well for ever forming better bonds with randoms we meet along our journey.
The bottom line is: a low-population server is not very enjoyable for those who are on them because itâs hard to get activities done, but many of the options intended to alleviate these issues create an environment where I largely feel like Iâm playing a single-player game. When everyone we come across - from friends to foes - just becomes another nameless rando who weâll never see again, it creates an environment where our incentives to play a massively-multiplayer game become hardly distinguishable from those of a single-player game.
Why would they need to balance out the factions - the wPvP is cross realm now?
they post changes to classic in the classic section not here - this section is for the current versions of the game.
It is true that several (if not all) medium pop servers are actually dead. Half of the accounts, if not more, are from multi-botters (as I call them) and inactive accounts. So please consider connecting âmediumâ servers as well.
Thank you! I hope thatâs the case here.
It doesnât help that the launcher shows all WoW news regardless of whether itâs for Classic or retail. I see a message about an 8-hour downtime and then check the Blizz CS tweet mentioning downtime of 1-hour for retail and 8-hour for Classic, and then we check the forums and this is the only post about any of it.