This is a great point that I hadn’t considered!
Man. The amount of people in this forum who can’t think ahead and get stuck on their immediate gratification is kind of appalling.
There are reasons not to merge servers. From the players’ perspective, there are two drawbacks that many of us who have been around since well before CRZ and Connected Realms have been through. I’m not exactly jumping for joy to have my server community split up or my server’s economy all jacked up by merging two communities. I’m also not eager to see people lose their character names because somebody on their destination realm got it first and quit playing weeks ago. Oh, but in 2-4 years Blizz might do a name purge and you can try for the name you reserved before launch then I guess?
Or, alternatively, people can grow up, deal with a few days of queues, more likely have fewer to no dead realms when it’s time to remove layering before phase 2, and for a few days inconvenience we can have more stable, healthier server communities with fewer merges.
But, I get it, it’s all about the hype and the nownownownownow gogogogogo zerg rush meta that’s so fashionable these days.
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Retail didn’t merge all the servers – otherwise people in dying guilds on dying servers would have somewhere else to go, because they’re merged. There’s a very small number of connected realms where they merged it for real, and the rest just got this horsecrap CRZ mess that doesn’t actually add to existing communities and only serves to anonymize the whole experience.
Connected realms did their job. The problem is that when the bean counters and investors see that happening, they panic because God forbid a product has a graceful lifecycle or something instead of making all the monies forever.
That could be a solution but I feel it still wouldn’t solve the problem completely. If your reputation on your server matters then what happens if someone who more-or-less shares your name has a bad reputation? Not everyone will fact check to make sure they’re pissed at the appropriate people.
It also brings the potential for a more divided community where OG server folks take a ‘us or them’ mentality against the merged server. And how would it affect RP realms with their extra naming rules?
To be honest I do like your idea of giving the merged server as a last name or title but I think that merging servers creates about as many problems as they solve.
I’d thought about that myself. I personally would have no problem with that were I on a one of the affected servers, but I wonder how the majority would feel.
There are a ton of Connected Realms, not a “very small number”. There are actually a lot more Connected Realms then standalone realms at this point.