Yes but I am 
Not a blizz engineer⌠but I am a Software engineer. Iâm basing this on how I would do it yes. And there is zero reason to ever shard a âHighâ Pop realm with lower realms insofar as they have more than 0.6 shards on a baseline.
Yes and CRZ is designed to make dead realms feel less dead (which it fails spectacularly at). Thus my assertion stands: If youâre seeing CRZ at all, youâre on a dead realm. Blizz did say that very clearly in one of the cited sources.
Thatâs definitely a guess, then, and a somewhat wild guess. It might even have been close to what they did initially, but what they did initially resulted in excessive involuntary shard switching and they have since redesigned the system to minimize that.
Iâve never seen any evidence for this as a goal. As far as I can tell, the only actual Blizzard goal for CRZ is to permit more efficient utilization of the hardware. Obviously they donât tell the players that, since players generally claim to hate CRZ.
They were pretty unequivocal here:
Obviously thatâs old forums but the point stands.
Iâm going to disagree based on personal observations. But there is no point in arguing this. Larger realms arenât seeing CRZ⌠full stop. They shard only.
One CM putting a good face on things. If they were actually concerned with user experience, they would do what the users always ask for, which is remove CRZ.
Wrong, based on my personal observations.
Fundamentally it doesnât matter how many people are in a server, thats not how CRZ works, and no shard belongs to any specific server as each shard is hosted on a nameless server with a server ID that doesnât correspond to any server players come from.
When you log into the game, the game will assign you to a shard hosted by a world server located in the same datacentre as you so theoretically anyone from a realm of the same type in the same datacentre as you has a chance to end up on your shard, the game doesnât care about individual realm populations.
Though in practice, it does seem to have some priority system set in place to assign people from related servers together, particularly in cities.
I think in reality you both have a valid point: wanting enough people to raid and such, or not wanting an overly populated realm, I am one of those who donât like a too big realm, and in the eu forums I argued with someone who complained their new players realm was basically dead.
I said new players realms arenât actually dead, itâs just a tag to repopulate them since people making new accs are redirected there and that the realm in question was actually fairly well populated, having 100 guilds with progress in the current tier, but the other person insisted on it being dead, having played on that realm for longer than I did.
For me 100 guilds of which around 30 with mythic progress are absolutely plenty, for someone they might not be, we all have different ideas of healthy population, and I think this is the same situation in the case of maelstrom, numbers say it could use more links but, also with it being a RP realm, there are also people against that.
As far as the crz being active on high pop realms discussion, my personal experience agrees with Liana, as Iâve also seen several people from other realms when I am logged on some of the biggest realms.
Is this true for RP capital cities? Those are definitely tied to realms, whatever the server ID.
Often the sharding seems to act as if the shards are tied to a realm, although thatâs extremely far from a guarantee that youâll end up on a shard. Possibly this is just the character having a home shard in the relevant server type and data center, with server âtypeâ a little more specific than RP/Normal, perhaps taking into account former PVP status.
If the mergers succeed in making every server âhighâ population, they could perhaps get away with eliminating CRZ entirely, which a lot of players would welcome. I wonder if they are considering that.
Yes, check what shard your on, the ID will be totally different from that of your server even on an RP server, BUT RP servers are distinct in that the game will specially separate them by server in the capital cities so you dont get multiple shards/people from different servers as you would on normal servers.
Wait, Iâm on Area 52 and I see people CRZâd from Stormrage out in the world all the time. These are two of the most populated U.S. realms. What am I missing here?
Popping in for more visibility for low-pop servers.
Earthen Ring, my server, could use a merge. Here are other servers who have chimed in with their voices:
Our CRZ RP neighbor, Kirin Tor.
Our long-time LFD/R server neighbors in Brazil, Goldrinn, Nemesis, Tol barad and Gallywix.
Skullcrusher/Guldan/Black-Dragonflight
Hope you can see and hear us, Blizz.
#mergeEarthenRing
Most likely Iâm wrong and blizz just decided to CRZ entire data centers only leaving the RP/Normal divide. In which case⌠honestly they should just connect the entire datacenter and only leave the RP/Normal divide.
whatâs the point! they should make its relamless with todays tech we should all be on just one Server or relam ! QQ
IMO Amanâthul should link with Frostmourne and/or Cael-Nagrand and/or Dath-Khaz, and Dreadmaul-Thaurissan should link with Barthilas. Heck, toss Saurfang and Gundrak-Jubei into the Barth pile, too as far as Iâm concerned.
that doesnât make sense.
the 2 old low pop pvp servers are being merged as they have nobody on them(jubei & thaurissan) and they go to brath and forst (brath and frost dont need more people but they are the only other pvp servers) and then the remaining ones combine and make 2 ânormalâ servers (Nagrand Khazâgoroth, Saurfang, AmanâThul) to become near the size of brath (10k) the 2nd largest server
end with
frost & thaurissan having 16k (mosty alliance) pvp
brath & jubeiâthos having 12k (mostly horde) pvp
nagrand & amanâthul 8k (balanced) normal
khaz & saurfang 9k (balanced) normal
and honesty they should give transfers off Thaurissan horde and JubeiâThos allaince to one of the normal servers if they want to balance out the other 2, theres no way the faction balnce would ever be fixed on brath and frost. but blizard rather gain that money from transfers then slove the problem
Free transfers arent happening, that would destroy the point of realm connections entirely, and also old PVE/PVP realm considerations dont matter since those realm lables no longer exist.
i know they are not happening, blizzard is stingy, but the reason i stated it as they are the minority of those two servers, and honesty Thaurissan horde geting a really raw deal and JubeiâThos alliance in theory will too and losing 40-500 people on the outnumbered faction wouldnât change anything in that faction balance, but it would assist in the other 2 smaller servers SLIGHTLY, and based on that merge i was interpreting the logic in the future merges, regardless yeah normal and pvp donât really matter any more from game play prospective but i wasnât sure if maybe blizzard accounted for it still, like how they keep rp servers together, but the other reasons i assume is just due to thouse servers having the lowest pops and have unbalanced factions compared to most of the others having balanced ones, otherwise they would of just merged them with the old normal servers, as brath and frost need no help pop wise and have 4 servers with about 11k players
Frost is 1091 horde & 13900 alliance
Brath is 9569 horde & 232 alliance
Thaurissan is 1454 horde & 40 alliance
JubeiâThos 1895 horde & 533 alliance
according to wow progress, if theirs a better metric sure tell me.
Ignoring how bad wowprogress is with giving any accurate population numbers, the goal of the mergers isnt to depopulate certain factions, if you offered free transfers thats 100% what would happen. even if your horde on a alliance dominated server, you still benefit from the expanded economy and auction houseâŚ
Expanding the server economies is 100% the purpose of the mergers.
The Eredar, Gorefiend, Spinebreaker, and Wildhammer realms will join the Hellscream and Zangarmarsh realms.
is this still happening? It is no longer on the list on the login or character select screens.
wasnât saying the goal was to depopulate certain factions, i am saying the goal is keep as many servers factions balanced as possible imo, agian brath or frost losing a minority doesnt do anything to thier servers but i aummse they also trying to not make a balanced server become inbalanced and i also aummse they not trying to balance the faction balance of frost and brath as there isnât a way to do that with the methods they are using, and honesty people are going to switch when they know they going to get roasted with that match up anyway, i know it would boost the economy if they joined them but why would they stick the lowest with the highest like that, there has to be more reason behind it, when honesty both JubeiâThos & thaurissan should be merged with brath. and then brath would rival frost size but with horde
i also aummse forst and brath are already the ideal with 10k+ players so it isnât for their benefit
imo my thoery is the goals they have is
-balance out the pops between the servers
-evenly merge the servers with each other (3)
-try to keep faction balance where possible
-keep the old pvp and old normals togeter
boosting the economy is just a side effect of doing this.
They canât connect entire data centers because that would overload their databases. If not for the databases, they wouldnât bother with connections; theyâd just allow cross realm trade and guilds.