Judging from my experience on the two realms I have active characters on, you need at least half a million accounts connected for the AH to function properly. Maybe more. The fact that there aren’t enough players to fill 100+ servers does not mean there aren’t millions of players.
At the very least, if they don’t connect the entire servers, they should connect the Auction Houses of more servers. (Although TBH I don’t see the case for stopping short of full connection, CRZ is going to determine whether or not you are “lag free” anyway.)
Yup. Garona has two guilds at 3/12M, two at 2/12M and eight guilds that cleared Heroic. That’s it.
It’s impossible to recruit for Mythic without stealing members from other guilds. Everyone who wants to raid is already in a raiding guild. And obviously no one wants to transfer to a dead server.
They should have simply closed some realms allowing still active accounts to xfer off for free. Merging dead realms does little as all you get is a slightly larger dying realm.
I too was on Garona. I left at the end of MOP to Stormreaver, which then died by mid-Legion. Now I’m at Thrall. Each time, I paid to move two characters, the rest I leveled from scratch. I usually transferred at around this time when there was nothing else to do anyway.
This is certainly something they need to address. They said at blizzcon they would look at it after the event but its been like 9 months and nothing has happened still
I think people who want to play on high pop realms have likely already xferred off or rerolled at this point.
Honestly the whole system needs a completely overhaul. Get rid of all of the old realms (keeping existing servers together) and merge them into new megaservers with designated population capacities (Low, Medium, High, Very High) for how full their shards are
As someone who lived (and stayed) through my server having as few as 1200 active max level players in BC, and at one point only 6k people on the server total, I can say that being merged with 4 other realms has done nothing but good. We are a solidly medium population realm now, and I’m happy living here.
I liked Garona when it was medium/high back in Wrath and Cata, but then they connected realms and ignored Garona, and everyone left. What’s sad is Garona was one of the original realms in Vanilla; they did it dirty.
Tbh, I don’t really want to be on a full server like Illidan or Stormrage or I would have moved there before they even made realm connections, but all servers should have a healthy enough population to be able to raid and buy mats on the AH. Garona has been at the bottom for YEARS now and it’s only gotten worse. They were restricted to PvE realms before, but now that all realms are the same, there’s no way they can’t find a couple realms to connect it with. They need to constantly keep an eye on realm populations and connect when needed. Some realms like mine are WAY overdue.
The only major difference between high and low pops are the AH and joining guilds. The players are all around you, but you can’t interact in a truly meaningful way.
On the low pops the AH is a joke, and even if we wanted to do a mythic raid we don’t have the player pool to do it.
At this point they should be embarrassed at how bad the server pops have shifted. I don’t think any servers are balanced, and as someone pointed out, the top five realms have more mythics than the bottom 75. It’s just plain negligence.
Oh, 100%. My guild used to raid mythic and now I’m just pugging heroic through the group finder because no one on my server is even running anything. It’s not normal that the top guild on my server is only 3/12M because there’s not enough people to raid with. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the couple guilds running mythic are borrowing players from each other.
The AH is another big problem. Sometimes there’s not even enough mats up for sale to craft something I need. Even spamming trade chat for, say, a blacksmith to craft something yields no response because the realm is completely dead.
Also, I’ve seen people say that when they’re in Boralus, they mostly see people from their realm and connected realms, but I can count on one hand the amount of people from Garona I see in Boralus on any given day.
It’s just a shame that only a handful of realms get the full MMO experience. It’s been 15 years, merging realms so players can all play together wouldn’t be a bad thing.
They ignore it every time it comes up. Either they know and don’t care that 100 realms are mostly empty, or they’re desperate for transfer money.
Either way, they REALLY need to do something about it. They said they would at BlizzCon and it’s been like 8 months now, it’s not too much to expect some kind of follow-up.
Well, the problem with that is if you close a realm, then who gets the name Racquel on the server I am transferred to, or that another Racquel (or even your name Nehmirra I’m sure isn’t 100% unique across ALL servers) is transferred to? At least with the current way they are doing it, we retain our server designations and therefore aren’t forced to name change just because someone happened to be a day or older or be on the server we are transferred to, or what ever. So Garona, having more people connected with it, would probably see a resurgence, and even if it didn’t, they’d be with all of us from Sentinels, Kirin Tor, and Steamwheedle Cartel.
Yay. Better late than never so credit where its due they are doing a good thing. I would still really like an update to the realm lists so it’s obvious what’s linked with what.
Current connected realms are listed at the bottom of the forums in the Realm Forum section. There are a couple outliers, but it’s fairly comprehensive.
That’s something then I guess but it should really be on the realm selection screen in game. They shouldn’t be alphabetical they should be in groups of connected realms Imo. To paraphrase something blizzard seems to have forgotten they said “people shouldn’t have to tab out of the game to get information” lol
