Just wanted to rant here a bit to see if anybody else has come across this pretty annoying find. I played classic through MC, skipped BC, and started back up in WotLK classic to find that my server (Whitemane) now has a population of like 20k horde and literally 36 alliance according to dexerto and Warcraft Tavern. It truly makes playing a bit annoying, especially in open world PvP such as Wintergrasp or capturing the 3 towers in Hellfire Peninsula, etc. What happened to all the alliance players? Wondering if there could be a rebalance? I’d rather not have to spend $25 because Blizzard cannot keep the servers balanced, and will likely just move back to retail or try SoD (as they recently posted that they will do pvp faction balancing, though that seems like an initial balance, which will not prevent players from paying for a faction / server transfer). Thoughts?
you have been away for a while. wintergrasp is not open world pvp, it is a cross server instance.
I highly doubt it all the super populated servers become one sided with the lone except of maybe grobbulous.
not much they can do if players transfer off of a server, once it’s unbalanced no one wants to take the risk of rolling / transfering on a pvp server where they have the disadvantage
I have been away for a while, and albeit not even level 80 yet on my primary toon. Good to know that its cross faction. I suppose that will help with some struggles of having bare minimum players on the faction in that server. However the issue still remains for normal open world pvp and such, guilds, auction house… the whole experience is now lackluster and not very fun.
The thing is this: I believe a lot of people rolled on pvp servers in vanilla classic because that’s what they did back in the day. I believe alot of those people found that being an adult with limited time to play video games they didn’t have time to worry about being ganked while questing or farming and by mid-tbc a lot of the servers that were going strong in vanilla classic were dying. thus a mass exodus from the dying servers, and at this time people took the opportunity to transfer to servers where their faction had the advantage so the 50/50 split servers became 60/40 and then 70/30. then the smaller factions on these servers got fed up with the now near constant ganking and transfered off making the 99/1 servers we have now.
Not sure if the window is closed, but at at point there were free transfers going on that more or less funneled everyone up to the mega realms. Even had whitemane getting free transfers to benediction and vice versa.
Ultimately the players were given power. The toxic players abused that power. The non-toxic players said screw it I’m leaving… and now here we are.
It almost fixed itself at one point, but Blizzard screwed that up. back during TBC the populations were beginning to balance on most realms due to battleground queues. However, the complaining won out and Blizzard implemented same-faction BGs… then they did one other mistake… That killed the low-pop realms and badly damaged the mid-pop realms. They couldn’t put things back so they just finished killing off a majority of those mid-pop realms. The queues came, then Wrath came, people thought they wanted fresh, and a few realms popped up… only to die in a few months because no one really wanted fresh. The refugees from the queue had the realms they go to die as well.
Long story short. Classic Phase 2 PvP screwed us all, and now if you want to PvP you do it in a battleground or arena. Unless you want to be hordenously unnumbered with the sole exception of Grobbolus who somehow stopped themselves from falling to a single faction realm TWICE and they won’t tell us how they did it.
They mostly transferred to Bene early into TBC Classic.
As you say, move back to Retail or try SoD. Considering you didn’t play BC or Wrath, you could also just reroll, since 1-60 isn’t really much of a grind anyway.
Either way, best of luck!
Wrath only has a few months left. Even if you could transfer your old 60s for free, you would still have to level them to 80 and gear them. If you really want to play it now, just buy the Cata CE which comes with a level 80 boost and start doing heroics in RDF.
to be fair PVP servers went lopsided by AQ-TBC in original too. People like open world PVP in theory, they don’t like it in practice when they just want to level an alt in STV and are getting camped by 4 lvl 60s in full warlord gear
Ok here are the deets, alliance is populated on pagle. Horde on faerlina. I would just do one on those and make a dk at level 55 for a herb/alch alt. I guess a whitemane alliance toon might be worth something if you can get some of those pets unique to alliance from argent tournament.
But really now is not a good time to try for more as many are mildly interested in cata. But with the final destination being dragon soul, and really ds just doesn’t have the impact as the other final raids of each expansion.
you know how you left?
so did they.
happened to me after a 1.5 year break
what’s crazy is if there are no free transfers off a dead server, you have to pay for one…
This was not my experience in original TBC, or at least not to the extent it is now, maybe because server population caps were lower?
This we completely agree on. Earlier i said i think that’s because more of the player base are adults who don’t have time for such things, but i think part of it is that there’s no low to mid level game in classic it’s just race to max level then go back and gank lowbies. Lowbies themselves got no time to engage in pvp with other lowbies.
A lot of servers went severely lopsided fast like Mal Ganis, Illidan, Area 52, Sargeras
Others were lopsided 60/40 but eventually became one faction dominated like Korgath.
A lot of other servers were just too tiny that it didn’t really matter, I used to play on Chromaggus and that server was straight up dead by TBC
Those early single faction megaservers were the exception, not the norm, at least from when I played during TBC and Wrath. There were like 100+ servers and the majority of them had two viable factions. There wasn’t a great centralized resource on server population data so people just kinda played where they played and didn’t really concern themselves with whether the grass was greener somewhere else.
A lot of people liked the idea of a fresh server. The issue was months after the “fresh” feeling was gone, Blizzard STILL never opened up transfers to the servers nor did they allow boosted 70s to be made. Instead they allowed free transfers OFF while not allowing the above, killing them completely.
The playerbase did not kill fresh servers. Blizzard’s poor management skills killed fresh servers.
Sadly mistaken.
First, those realms were dead… which was why free transfers were allowed. In other words. Free transfers were the result, not the cause.
Second, allowing transfer to the fresh servers kill one of the major reason why fresh realms were being asked for. An economy reset… because an economy reset would fix things! In addition… to that it would kill the “everyone starting on equal footing” thing that was another reason as to why “fresh” was needed. People claiming “I don’t want to be X year behind everyone else! That is not fair!”.
Third, Why would a boost ever be allowed? You are supposed to start over from nothing. Not start over from 70. In essence, what you are asking for here is either A; a pay-walled community in which you need to pay for a boost to be part of it… or B; a way to be able to get an advantage over those who don’t pay (which goes against one the points of requesting fresh, that no advantage thing). Maybe you are even scummy enough to turn around and mess with all those who didn’t pay by now having your “fun” ganking them… and now we are at the reason that a majority of the realms died.
The player base killed fresh because the player base does not want fresh. The player base wants that hectic few weeks at the start of the game where everyone is scrambling everywhere and you can’t go two seconds without seeing someone in the open world.
What the player base refuses to realize is that… this isn’t how a majority of people including themselves play the game. That because knowledge is so widely available and that there isn’t a constant influx of millions of new players (ala the original vanilla, tbc, and wrath) you will not ever see that. You will always get to a point where everyone is passed that… and then things get parse in the open world… because there is no content in the open world. So… now we need a new fresh to experience that all over again!
Ever wonder why vanilla worked the way it did… they had content in the open world… World Bosses that guilds needed to fight for, Events like that opening of AQ that forced everyone into a single zone, and things like that.
TBC and Wrath had those things on timers… but after people get their rewards from them… you have no reason to bother with them (World Bosses suffered from this as well). The thing the player base is seeking requires that Blizzard constantly put in new events with things the player base HAS to do to open more content or SEEK to do because they desire some rewards, and in really memorable cases has both.
Bro I started on Skyfury. Don’t tell me what those players did or did not want. I was there. I knew what we wanted. After 3-4 months it the “fresh” part no longer mattered. It was solely for the leveling experience and initial building of the community. When that community was no longer able to grow, it died and then the server followed.
The reason the populations are starting to decrease is because they are not adding Wrath Era Servers and are forcing everyone into Classic Cata. So it’s kinda making people quit.
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