This is sadly one of the options that is not possible, “we know you have the technology” yes, we do, it’s utilizing Modern World of Warcrafts sharding infrastructure. Unfortunately a lot of changes made to support Vanilla like gameplay with Classic World of Warcrafts launch changed a lot of functionality to re-create “Realm” based eco-systems.
Being completely transparent with you, it is an insurmountable amount of code changes to make for Season of Discovery to be able to support cross-region style sharding. It sounds like it should be so easy because Modern already does it, that code doesn’t exist in Classic and has actively been developed around to make some Classic content work. It’s a huge amount of interconnected code to unravel and beyond what we have engineering support for right now.
Long term note, we are absolutely talking about making changes to this to better support how Classic flavours of World of Warcraft are actually utilized by you the players. But that doesn’t help this conversation.
As far as this larger topic, our options are few. But we’ll share some of the things that are on the cards for OCE for you to offer thoughts and feedback on.
- Penance, FCMs open to Wild Growth.
a. Lots more players, lots more ping.
b. Doesn’t address Shadowstrike. - Convert Shadowstrike into a PvE realm, open FCMs from Penance to Shadowstrike.
a. Penance is a very small realm, this doesn’t move the meter much.
b. Does this upset more people than it pleases? Is it also a temporary solution, the OCE playerbase is a fraction of the rest of US Season of Discovery, will you remain happy with the numbers? - Open FCMs from both AU realms to the corresponding US realms.
a. People can choose to stay or go! This option almost certainly kills the AU realms as it splits an already small playerbase and you will be forced to move if you want to play with anyone.
Of all the options, the one we are most leaning towards is option 1 for now, Shadowstrike is still a significantly healthier realm than Penance, but Shadowstrike is still >10% the size of say Crusader Strike. Hence our desire to merge.
Overall, please understand we absolutely appreciate this isn’t a great place to be in. It is for a similar reason that with our Seasonal realms we do not do the usual full suite of language specific realms in Europe. It is however a more problematic… problem, in AU as the alternative is a significantly higher ping time to US based hardware.
Please continue to voice your thoughts, we will ultimately have to pick a direction that will upset some and please others but we are parsing your responses and they are extremely helpful in building a consensus on the best steps forward for OCE players.