When Season of Discovery launched we were excited to leverage some technology improvements that allowed us to achieve significantly higher realm populations than ever before, and we’ve had a goal of seeing all Season of Discovery players of each ruleset playing on the same realm.
To reach that goal, we will soon open Free Character Transfers from all Season of Discovery realms to one single PvP realm and one single PvE realm in each region (where applicable). These free transfers and all origin realms will remain available for the rest of Season of Discovery, but with the origin realms closed to new players.
Most of the origin realms currently still have healthy populations, and we recognize that moving characters can be disruptive to player communities, so this is not a decision we take lightly. Faction balance on the PvP realms is also a concern for many players, and we’re pleased to note that daily active players across all PvP realms has been a near perfect 50/50 split. This consolidation should not impact faction balance. Ultimately we believe, and have seen from player movement, that people want to be with as many others as possible.
Thank you all for joining us in this journey through Season of Discovery. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone take on the final phases together!
Instead of setting up these 2 new servers, and letting the old servers fall apart as people shuffle off … WHY NOT INVEST THE WORK TO SOLVE THE NAME COLLISION PROBLEM AND DO A FORCED MERGE?
How many years have you had to figure out how to support two people named “Tiggle”. Think deeply about it. Provide a generated last name or something. I don’t know. But quit making this same mistake again and again because you can’t architect solutions for the bigger problem.
I miss the days when servers didn’t immediately die after 3 months. They had their own cultures, communities, and identities. Now we are just shuffled around from dying server to dying server, uprooted like a nomadic tribe each time.
Do a forced merge while allowing multiple people with same name with the server name attached the same way you do it with battlegroups/joint servers on retail.
Example
Joe-LivingFlame
Joe-LoneWolf
New characters would then get no amended server tag or the tag of the server considered the destination of the merger.
Disallow new characters under the old server name.
This should let you move entire guilds & keep the communities together as well.
This really should have been the solution to mergers ages ago…
Honestly, just make one mega-server and have it be normal and let people opt into PvP via a warmode option. I wouldn’t even call PvP in SOD actual PvP since it’s nothing more than just zergs and griefing.
Also, please add in a one time faction change or something.
And for those established guilds (ours has 4 raid teams and almost to the full 1000 characters), how would guild transfer work? And retaining your guild name/toon names? This feels really disruptive.
horrible, horrible, horrible idea. just do a merge. this “you can stay if you want” thing is nonsense. wild growth already has a small horde population, you’re condemning any guild that isnt interested in transferring to a slow, painful death. not to mention i dont want to lose my identity and be forced to change my existing characters’ names.
Since Wild Growth is the only NA PvE server (and largest server in SoD) you will leave us alone right? Because making tens of thousands of people transfer for no reason would be a pretty dumb thing.
, and add War Mode.