12 million people at 2000-3000 players per server would be 6,000-4,000 servers. I’m sure you can understand how wrong you are here.
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If it happens naturally, then there’s no need for them to do anything. They aren’t “actively” doing anything here. Which I kind of get on some level. It’s a damned if you do/damned if you don’t situation. If you give players freedom, they do what we’ve seen. If you restrict player freedom, now people complain because they can’t play with their friends. If you add some kind of faction queues, that would require you to forcefully rebalance the current servers then add the queues, and now you’d have some people unable to play the faction/race they want with their friends.
There’s literally no win condition for Blizzard here. Letting players do what they want is probably the least bad.
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I think server things are tough for Blizzard to manage but I also think that if TBCC wasn’t so mismanaged we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in today.
Classic (Era) servers had some rough patches. Four of them became 99% one-sided PVP servers and in every case that lasted for like a year with no new 99% servers to the mix. Some servers died early and never picked up (Thalnos) but for the most part, there was a ton of stability, and more importantly a ton of server choice… and a ton of real community stories from each server. To me, this was the game at its perfection.
We had mega servers in Classic (Era) but they weren’t MEGA and people didn’t congregate to them because there was a fear of queues.
Then people found out in TBCC that Blizzard was allowing more players on before the queues started as well as layers and people started flocking to specific servers, which turned to 99%. Any other server choice was “bad” as it may die, which frankly was a very realistic outlook.
Personally, since I don’t play for gear, parses, or any other self-centered reason, and since I enjoy things like the real server communities we had in Classic (Era) and not these community-free Retail like type cesspool servers we have today full of the types of “people” that judge others based on things like numbers alone I know my enjoyment of the game is significantly less than it would have been had servers been managed better. That’s part of why I’m ready to be done with WoW as I genuinely am only having about 2% of the fun I did in 2020 for example and pretty much anything would be better than this. What can you do though? I know I tried to make things better but the truly good people kept leaving and the selfish scum stick around.
I think now that what happened in TBCC happened we can’t go back to how it was and that’s why Wrath C is more of the same.
If you lock a realm, restricting incoming transfers then that requires an action, so yes they are most definitely “actively” doing something.
And I get that people complaining about being able to play with friends is an issue, but lets not pretend that this is in any way comparable (in terms of percentage of players) to the mass migration of entire guilds from realm to realm.
Look, its pretty simple. Blizzard is screwing a majority of their player base, either through inept decisions or lack of action. Feel free to visit ironforge.pro and make your own determinations about how balanced realm populations are.
And instead of bending people over a barrel, I don’t know, do any one of 100 things including:
- Remove any restriction for incoming transfers to a realm where minority faction is in less than 40%.
- Throttle outgoing transfers (server or faction) when the speedometer starts revving.
- Set a cap at server/faction size (feel free to throw out any number that makes you happy).
- Give players a (1) free realm transfer with every 6-month sub.
- Forced realm balance and re-distribution at the beginning of each expansion.
That’s just a hand full off the top of my head and all of those could be automated (except for maybe the last one). Hell they should be coming up with this stuff just to keep players; you can got to several other threads here and see people will just unsub instead of being stuck on a dead realm.
This as a solution that sounds good but is almost entirely invalidated when/if faction transfers are added. People wanting to join the restricted faction would just xfer and then faction change.
Interested in what this would entail and if it would be more effective then just a lock.
This would need to be heavily monitored as accounts become inactive or subs cancelled. Could easily snowball. I think this would also upset people more than a basic server lock
no issues with this what so ever, solid idea. could roll it into the same package that the level boosts come in. Locked realms or not I think this is a good idea.
“oops my friends play on a diff realm then I do” this is a good suggestion.
This is the only one I actually super disagree with as it is just hands down worse than a locked realm. How would they decide who went where? do they move or split up guilds? There are so many factors in forced redistribution. If you have a clearer view though I am definitely interested in hearing.
Are you talking about server caps here? From what they’re saying, there’s a hard cap on server size. If you’re talking about money, then that might be more doable of course, but well, publicly traded company and all
Horrible idea. Keeping people imprisoned on a server, and telling them they need to redo potentially hundreds of hours of effort if they want to move, is a horrible idea.
This might have been more doable before the servers launched, but not now. Even then, you’re still dealing with the “I can’t play with my friends” thing.
I wouldn’t have a problem with this, but I don’t know if it would fix the issue.
Worse idea I’ve ever heard to address this issue. What does this even look like in reality. According to Ironforgepro, faction balance across all US PvP servers is approaching 2 to 1 in favor of Horde. Are you suggesting that Blizzard should randomly race change people at the start of an expansion, and forcing people to rebuilt their communities? If you’re not suggesting that, then you’re suggesting that all PvP servers should have Alliance outnumbered 2 to 1. Which would simply make people recreate the current conditions, or quit.
What we’re seeing with Classic is a prime example of why MMOs don’t do faction based game play anymore. Not only does it take a ton of work to keep things even remotely balanced, but half of the players are effectively cut off from the other half. There’s a reason everybody kind of settle on Horde in retail. The game is simply better with a larger pool of players to pull from.
Bravo on your detailed critique gents.
And for completely missing the point.
As gm I had to inform roughly 30 or so of our raiders last night that Sulfuras was no longer a viable option and we agreed to transfer. About a third of those will pay $25 while the rest will pay $50-150 for all the characters they need to move.
Blizzard has the tools, resources, and money to have prevented this issue, but here were are. Again.
They don’t need random suggestions from me, they’re the entertainment company who should be doing everything in their power to cultivate loyalty and maintain player base.
This is most definitely not the way.
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Definitely not!
I mean, sure, but if the ulterior motive was to profit off of encouraging faction changes, don’t you think it seems a bit weird that they’d only allow transfers between those 2 realms?
I think it would’ve made sense if they said “You can’t faction change for x amount of time after transferring, and vice-versa”, but overall from what I’m hearing, it doesn’t really seem to me like their motives are very different from what they’re openly presenting.
Yeah, I don’t really follow the news about transfers, but I must say that the way some servers are still locked despite being much smaller than they started, or some being unlocked despite edging near “mega realm” territory is weird.
I don’t think I’d agree with either of these points anymore, after the business with locking mega realms. Though before that, absolutely, it was an unmitigated disaster happening in slow motion, like crashing a car going 5 MPH because the road is icy.
As I said above, the way they choose when to lock and unlock realms seems weird to me, but overall I think it’s been pretty great for population distribution across all realms. It also has an amazing benefit that botters who get banned can’t easily replace their numbers.
Alright dude… It seems like we mostly disagree where you want to try and equate anything Blizzard is doing with literal conspiracies… 
It just seems very unreasonable.
I think a combination of A and B is the best way to go, though with the caveat that the hard cap would allow some faction imbalance, and maybe if there was actually some incentive or insurance added for the minority faction.
I’ve been saying it forever… Add a buff to all non-instanced areas for the minority faction that gives them a tiny more PvP damage and a moderate amount of PvP mitigation that stacks multiplicatively with Resilience, and have this buff stack dynamically based on how imbalanced the faction populations are. Then the minority faction wouldn’t have to be corpse camped every time they used a summoning stone and it would probably attract a lot of PvP players.
My point is that, sure they could have prevented your issue, but that would have caused other issues with other players. There is literally no way for them to win here.
This is the only thing I could see having some chance of maintaining some kind of faction balance.
Not to be rude, but I really hate this argument and I’m sick of seeing it. It really makes no sense. The idea of Classic is not to produce a canonical “2023 experience” because it’s literally an old game. If you don’t find the design philosophy of an older game to be fun/charming/nostalgic/good, I can’t imagine why you’re playing the old game to begin with.
I think in part one of the reasons why “we can’t have nice things” and get a similar experience to what we had back in the day is that Blizzard has given way too much quarter for people to treat this like a modern game and it’s difficult to take that back. Much in the same way that it’s been difficult to take back dungeon finder for example.
I strongly disagree, depending on your definition of that. I think most of us would prefer a moderately populated realm, maybe with at least 3,000 per faction, because it feels nice having access to a lot of people for whatever your goals are… But I cannot for the life of me understand how people can actually prefer an experience where their realm never has less than like 5 layers, and every channel feels spammy at all hours of the day, and you have virtually no chance whatsoever of seeing the same people more than once. That just feels like Retail to me.
Depending on what time you play, 3,000 - 6,000 is more than enough people in a single faction for there to always be activity in the cities and chats.
I 100% understand what you mean, I’m also in a situation where most days I can only play a fraction of the time I used to when I was in high school and would literally no life WoW all day during my summer breaks.
That being said, that’s not a good reason why a game should be retrofitted… To me that feels similar to using AI to go back and insert new slang into old music, just so it “fits the times” more. No. WoW was great back then as it was, which is why Classic eventually happened in the first place. I think the original design philosophy should be the cornerstone of the rerelease.
And granted, I’m not saying that they should force some crazy restraints on the realms like capping population at the minimum acceptable level. I’m just saying that there is literally no good reason why a realm should have more than 12,000-15,000 players in a single faction… Benediction and Faerlina are at absolutely insane levels of grotesque overpopulation, and it’s a real shame that Blizzard hasn’t scattered their populations into the wind. Those two realms on their own have managed to cause problems for the global population and that’s sad to see.
Yeah, as someone who was playing some characters Alliance side on Whitemane before it became unplayable, I’ve given the idea quite a bit of thought. Even when Ironforge showed 800 players on the Alliance, I was still able to find groups who wanted to do content (including and especially leveling stuff). The problem was that we were so helplessly, overwhelmingly outnumbered that the Horde literally occupied the main cities. There were skeletons all over Stormwind and you had to be in the Exodar if you wanted consistent access to the auction house. The moment you tried to do anything where a Horde player could reach you, you’d be dead and have to spend potentially hours to corpse hop your way to an instance portal or to some other form of safety. People just gave up and logged off every time there wasn’t a clear safe path to whatever content we wanted to do, which was basically always.
It’s been my experience that PvP is one of the major barriers that make the game unplayable with massive faction imbalance. PvP can be fun and exciting, but there’s nothing fun or exciting about never being able to win. A buff like this would’ve at least kept the game playable in a lot of cases.
I heavily use the qeue’d instance content that is in the game. Bg anywhere. and WG sign ups in major cities.
I tbh came for the combat rogue. Its way better than outlaw. Also non holy power paladin.
I am the pro rdf- that has accepted this call. no choice no too…but I will still call it a bad call given the server pop layouts.
But I got bg anywhere…so that has me content.
I mean, that’s fair. It’s perfectly understandable, everyone plays the game for their own reasons and there are many different playstyles out there. My point still stands though; It seems extremely unreasonable to me to criticize the antiquated design philosophy of a game when the entire point of that game is to play an old game.
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I didn’t know you were in this situation. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s rough. 
I’m not sure why no one else picked up on how huge of a deal this must be to you but that’s the forums for you, calling out a few things while completely ignoring the person and the story behind the post is typical here. I have no doubt this at least partially led to you making the thread.
People think that guild master is some sort of way to power trip or whatever, but the majority do it because they stepped up because they care about their crew. I doubt the naysayers have ever done it, or even been responsible for leading anything. Running a guild is similar to an unpaid job and if no one did it WoW wouldn’t be that great of a game. I hope your guild can survive the move.
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Not unreasonable to say that the corrupt, greedy, unethical, corporation that is Blizzard-Activision, known for gems like Diablo immoral, California lawsuit, warcraft reforged, etc., happens to be corrupt, greedy, and unethical with Classic.
It’s a conspiracy to say they aren’t doing it.
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A few things here:
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It seems like you’re conflating the highest level of Blizzard’s corporate structure with lower level ones. Of course, the decisions on free transfers aren’t coming from the very bottom level within the company, but I strongly doubt that it’s terribly far from it. The individuals who decided that Activision Blizzard would literally research, develop and even patent methods of predatory business practices for profits, certainly are not the same individuals pulling the strings in this situation.
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Your absolute distrust and skepticism of Activision Blizzard are noted (and not unreasonable). But I’m not really seeing any logical connections being drawn between “free transfers” → “This is the equivalent of carefully designing an elaborate, brazen lie that will cause destruction for the sole purpose of profits”. Distrusting a company (even rightfully so) is not evidence that everything they do is somehow a conspiracy.
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I’ve worked in the industry long enough to know that the low level employees will bend over and throw morals and ethics out the window if it means keeping their job.
There’s a reason why you have stories like Brian Birmingham.
It’s the same individuals pulling the strings, they are just doing it indirectly through wage slavery.
How dare those people want to feed themselves and their families.
Right, that’s exactly why I’m blaming the executives and not the workers beneath them.
Your words are compelling. But they don’t really have substance. We could conjecture until the end of time about all the insane and surprising ways that they might be preying on the consumer (and their own people) without anyone knowing, but really, this is all just a very roundabout way of you saying “I don’t trust them” and not much else.