Realm Connections -- July 23

It is possible that this is mostly a test run using smallish servers to limit any damage/issues that occurred in the Euro server first attempt. The realms listed are all part of the Cyclone Battlegroup which are located in the Los Angeles datacenter.

As someone who has characters on both Stormrage and a dead server, I would love if this process didn’t stop until every server was part of a cluster that had at least the daily login numbers of Stormrage. Everyone deserves access to a functioning auction house.

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I have often wondered what it would be like if there was only 1 AH, for all servers. I mean the supply would go WAY up, but the demand would also go way up. Probably a bit chaotic for a while. And that AH server would be pretty taxes on bandwidth. I’ve always thought it would be good in the end, but I’m no economist so there are probably things outside my opinion that would factor in to it.

There’s no reason to not connect realms to the point where they are all close to equal.

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Can someone tell me why the connected servers are not listed as my realms, even though I have the majority of my characters on them?

Yes.
And this really isn’t an effective way if they are trying to “fix” anything.

Even the connected servers currently listed as “Full” as a result of the realm connections in 2014 aren’t exactly striving, like, at all.

For example, Alterac Mountains / Balnazzar / Gorgonnash / The Forgotten Coast / Warsong, are connected servers shown as “Full”.

They only have 6 guilds dabbling into Mythic progression, and only one got as far as 11/12. The rest are all below 5/12, and no guild has CE atm.

This is because over the years several top guilds who could achieve CE moved onto populated servers for greener pastures.
People often talk in Trade Chat how dead things are on the server.

But no, because this server cluster is somehow listed as “Full” for whatever unknown reason, it’s probably on the very bottom of the list of the servers that are going to be “saved” or getting anything fixed.

I know that there are many, many players in this game who do not care about raiding, but server population is a crucial point when it comes to recruiting players who are interested in raiding.

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may be a bit obvious, but can we start with a basis of merging those servers that were “split” in the over crowded days. Throw the oldest players a bone and let us at least have the nostalgia trip. ie. Garona Split into Baelgun… bring em back together.

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As a member of one of those “below 5/12” guilds, we feel the pain. It’s a damn ghost town around here with 5 servers. Full, as if!

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That was confusing me, too. So if 2 realms get connected, then the players of both should be able to trade with each other, right?

Because when it’s cross realm, you can’t.

Not when they give you a daily quest to kill three of them.

It seems like it would be a nightmare for sellers. Imagine posting something and within 30 sec you’re no longer the most recent seller. For good/items where there tends to be an abundance of supply, it would encourage sellers to continuously cancel and re-list even more than now. At least that’s my take.

So they would, in my opinion, need to make some changed before having a global (or regional) AH. Either change last-in first-out or limit cancellations, for instance.

I feel you. Our server is mid-pack in terms of population but there are only a handful of guilds doing Mythic and the top one just got 6/12 a couple weeks ago. We won’t be one of the first servers addressed, maybe not at all, but we’re struggling in terms of quality raiders.

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Yes, exactly – Players on realms that are Connected to one another can do anything and everything they can do with players on their own realm (trading, joining guilds, etc).

CRZ merely allows you to see and interact with players from other realms – I believe this tends to lump people together by battlegroup (They’re technically still a thing, right?), though players inviting others to a party can circumvent this.

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Game has lost a lot of players since then.

So a few things to mention that I’ve seen in this thread.

  1. The servers being connected are all so low pop that the 4 servers when fully combined will still be quite low pop (30+ servers with populations higher than the newly connected realms. All the servers being connected are of the same type (PvE) and are also part of the same datacenter and same battlegroup on at that datacenter. So if your on a low pop server now, you will still be on a low pop server after.

You could connect every PvE server on the Reckoning battlegroup at the LA datacenter and you still wouldn’t have a population in the top 10 of servers. But, it would make the population hit the 5 digit mark.

  1. Agreed, where the datacenter is has no bearing where it feels like it is located. There are ET, CT, MT & PT servers located at the LA datacenter and the same located at the Chicago datacenter.
    But, as an ET player I have no problems with ping to my LA based server.
  1. Connected servers have nothing to do with how crowded it is in your zone. Bliz sharding takes people from any number of servers and shards them into the same version of a zone so that there aren’t 10 copies of that zone running with one person in each. There might only be 2-3 copies running with 3-5 in each.
  1. For server selection they leave each server separate. They sort of need to because there is a character limit per server. You can reach that limit on each connected realm. What they need to do is just let us make all 50 characters per account on any server we want even if that is all on one server.

I’d guess that they are going to do a connection for that mass of servers. But its probably going to have to be from the same datacenter and from the same battlegroup. Based on the 2 joinings they announced it will probably be one of the following:
Alterac Mountains / Balnazzar / Gorgonnash / The Forgotten Coast / Warsong (1663)
Mannoroth / Blood Furnace / Nazjatar (991)
Skullcrusher / Black Dragonflight / Gul’dan* (1567)
Thunderlord / Destromath / Azshara / Azgalor (2694)
Magtheridon / Altar of Storms / Anetheron / Ysondare (2187)
Arthas (3970)
Bleeding Hollow (8869)

My guess would be Arthas with Mannoroth et all.
Alterac et all with Magtheridon et all.
Skullcrusher et all with Thunderlord et all.
It balances out the closest with what they have shown they are interested in doing. Only issue is that Thunderlord and connected realms are all CT time zone and no others in that group are CT.
Honestly, they should combine all of those PvP servers into 2 big connections of about 10k each and set it all to ET since the majority of servers use that time zone.
Maybe we will get lucky and the connections they just announced are only the first step and they will be connecting more realms to those already listed before SL comes out.
*edited thanks Zaria

One small thing to add - Black Dragonflight and Skullcrusher is also connected with Gul’dan.

Exactly.

So let me use these numbers for an example -

Marked as “Medium”.

Marked as “High”.

Marked as “Full”.

It doesn’t even make sense how and why the Alterac Mountains connected cluster is marked as “Full”.

I would love it if Blizzard can explain us how they determine the server population.

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Those medium, high, full designations are only comparitive to each other.

Full does not mean the realm is actually full to capacity. Aman’thul is “medium” population but it feels dead.

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I don’t know about you, but I’d be more concerned with how healthy my realm pop is than how easy it is to get rares.

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They actually did for Classic in a Blizzard post back when Classic was first launching in August of last year. So here is your Blue post answer (it’s not in blue because I don’t know how to quote it like that from outside this thread)

… the system previously calculated the population labels by comparing all realms to the most-populated realm. This could result in a very crowded realm (with a lengthy queue) showing up as “Medium”, since it was being compared to the realm that had the highest population and a potentially massive queue.

This is how server pop was done for all Classic servers before Classic got fixed to what they posted below.

This system now measures each realm against a realm’s absolute capacity. Medium indicates a healthy total population on a realm – well in excess of what we considered Full in a 2006 – with room for more players to log-in. You’ll now see a High label if the realm is close to having a queue, and a Full label if the realm currently has a queue.

I’ve never seen them say the way Retail server status are displayed, only Classic. While I would normally assume that Retail would be displayed in the original method, it really doesn’t make sense. Stormrage (22608) with one of the highest populations would dwarf anything outside the top 15 that all the others should show up as low.
Since there are 234 servers (120 if you only count connected realms once) the relative population on each server is pretty low. My best guess would be that it is based more on an average. The servers like Mannoroth / Blood Furnace / Nazjatar (991), one of the smallest realms, bring down the average so much, if each has approx. 330 that any server or connected set of servers with a pop over 2k makes them full.