This wouldn’t work, because you would effectively close off Oceanic servers from the US server population.
If all Oceanic servers were block connected there will still be times long queue times for pugs because our population is simply not large enough to support fast queue times. We’d be looking at frequent hour long wait times, or even more.
I wonder if this takes faction populations into account at all. There are plenty of realms that have a large enough population if counting all players, but have a Horde or Alliance population that’s just barely hanging on. Ideally lopsided realms like this would be connected to opposite-lopsided realms to create balance.
gets out his hazing paddle
CRZ was originally created to help out the leveling zones.
The problem with leveling zones is that any given time, there may be only 2 or 3 people in the entire North America region who are leveling characters in, for example, The Ghostlands. CRZ was made so that new players, leveling up their first characters, don’t log into WoW and think “hm… guess nobody plays this anymore”.
However, I believe Blizzard initially said that CRZ would NOT be implemented in max-level zones of the current expansion. Something they have since gone back on. They could certainly do away with CRZ in current expansion zones.
Thrall isn’t connected to ANY realms. Nor is it likely to be, since it is a “Full” population server (highest).
I really hope Carine gets more connections. I can log in an do who “class” during primetime and get less than 50 people. Our economy is a basket case right now.
you might want to just move off there
I started out on Bloodhoof and switched to Elune because of the name. I will be a tad bit upset if it changes.
They have before, but it didn’t help much.
When my realms were first connected, they picked a couple of lopsided realms to kinda balance it out… Until the next patch when a bunch of guilds faction changed and broke it again.
Well if you didn’t have a huge content gap with nothing to do but grind out boring currencies then you might not have low pop realms.
why cant we all just play on 1 server
Honestly it feels like there should be more limits surrounding mass transfers like that. How many times now have previously healthy realms withered due to guilds flopping around like fish?
During the late evening hours, quite a few Rag server people start showing up in M+ runs and the like.
With PvP servers removed, though, creating “balanced” servers is a bad idea.
Let’s look at 2 scenarios. In each scenario there are 10,000 players of each faction:
SCENARIO 1
Realm A has 10,000 Horde, no Alliance
Realm B has 10,000 Alliance, no Horde
SCENARIO 2
Realm A has 5,000 Horde and 5,000 Alliance
Realm B has 5,000 Horde and 5,000 Alliance
Scenario #1 is better for everyone.
All the Horde players & all the Alliance players have more people to talk to, more people to form guilds with, etc.
There is zero benefit, to anyone, from having “balanced” servers.
You mean in group finder? Group finder is universal. So is CRZ, for that matter. Neither has anything to do with connected realms. Thrall isn’t connected to anyone.
Well, except for the stragglers who are stuck with slapping down cash for a transfer or playing solo forever. If monoservers are going to be a thing, free transfers should be given to the dead faction on each realm.
Stragglers need to move, no question. I did.
Here’s my realm story!
I started out on Icecrown because friends of mine IRL did. But I’m on the west coast and Icecrown is a Central time zone server so nobody was online when I played, they were all getting ready for bed. That’s ok, my mistake.
A friend (also in PST) wanted to play on Windrunner because he liked the name (yeah…) so we moved there. It was a west coast server! But Windrunner was 99.99999999999999% Alliance and we were Horde. During prime time evening hours, a /who showed less than 5 max level Horde players on the server, so the 3 of us couldn’t even do a dungeon. (This was before LFD.) That’s OK, my mistake, I should have looked into it before we moved there. So I moved again.
Went to Silvermoon, which at the time was the highest-pop west coast PvE Horde-heavy server. Was there for a few years until Horde started to decline and it became an Alliance-heavy realm.
So I moved to Hyjal and been here ever since.
I have alts of every class, btw, so this wasn’t cheap! But having a good gameplay experience is worth it.
But, going back to my example above, the solution is to get the stragglers to a higher pop server of their faction. Not to punish 5,000 people by connecting them to a dead realm rather than giving them a much richer experience on a 10,000 pop server.
You will keep your server name, that hasn’t changed in the past with the previous connections so I see no reason for it to change with the new round of connections.
See my previous post 
for more info.
I was not in any type of instance, I just advertised in trade.
The other player was from a connected realm.
If they were making new realms now, you’re right that it would be better to just designate them H/A.
But basically telling stragglers they have to move to a new server if they want to keep playing is a recipe for drama. Even if the moves were free, you’d have people complaining about losing names, having friends split up when different guilds move to different servers, or just because someone like their server name.
Granted, they could split up the realms by faction, then reconnect the parts, but that’s getting to a level of complexity that it might be easier to redesign the entire server architecture.