I was on Heartseeker- a server with an amazing community that slowly- then very quickly- dithered off onto megaservers shortly after the TBC launch.
It’s really upsetting that server merging never happened, especially in the case of realms like Heartseeker; a realm that was at first very balanced when I xferred to it off of Skeram very early on, then the second it became slightly Alliance favored, it slippery sloped to being quite literally 99.9% Alliance by Naxx. Even then, most “Horde” characters were really just Alliance alts.
It felt awful to leave a server full of people I spent 2 years building a rapport with- and a server I was very, very much a large part of- to go xfer to Benediction. We had drama, love, hate, war, politics, memes, friends, server lore, it was beautiful.
Transferring was like leaving a little town in the hills and then being dunked right into the middle of Times Square.
Don’t get me wrong. Change is good. New faces are good. But the jump from homely Heartseeker to the bustling metropolis of Benediction where I’m lucky to recognize anyone at all feels so bad.
Regardless, a realm like that really should have been merged with a 99.9% Horde realm of similar pop…though the issue really stems from there just being too many realms to begin with. Hindsight doesn’t help in the case of TBCC, but I think slapping tons of more realms out was never the correct answer. Thankfully they seem to have not done that with SoM, and it’s nice to see nearly all of the SoM servers be thriving.
The amount of realms in TBCC has just lent itself to hemorrhaging people everywhere left and right. I wish there was a good answer moving forward other than merging the small realms; I think eventually it will all equalize itself and create a handful of megaservers, but those will still be unbalanced, and the path to get to those megaservers, merge or not, will not be pretty.
My guild (and many more) only left because of recruiting prospects chiefly, and then the lack of people to trade and group with in general was really the final straw. We hung on to our old server for as long as we could, and were among the last to leave, and by the time we did, there was less than 20 people online at peak hours, including folks our guild.
The saddest part is that this story I’m telling- and that you are too, Sixx- is more often than not, just the standard, common experience of people on Classic servers. Either you got lucky and chose a megaserver from the rip, or you stumbled your way onto one multiple $25 payments later.
The thing that made Vanilla-WOTLK so special to so many people was the sense of community, and the sense of “hey I know that guy/guild/etc” and making friends in the open world. In retail that feeling is basically entirely lost, either with realms like A52 being so obscenely large that you never run into the same person again, or a smaller realm that just gets phase-hopped to who knows where and thus never runs into the same person again. A lot of times in retail I struggle hard to find anyone else from my own guild in the world when we’re in the same zone, even.
I’m very scared of this happening with Classic. I don’t want to find myself in WOTLK Classic doing a dungeon with 4 other people who refuse to talk that I see for the 30 minutes in the dungeon then literally never again. It feels soulless, unconnected, and like I’m running with literal robots, and the retail environment has fostered this strange attitude and coldness. I can easily see Classic moving this direction…the disparity between the homeliness of Classic and retail is scary sometimes.
There does need to be a solution for this though- having to pay $25 per character to transfer feels rudely a lot like running away from a problem, not fixing it. I spent hundreds getting all of my spouse and I’s characters transferred just a few weeks before free transfers opened, and we did so out of necessity, not out of want, and it just feels awful.
- Restrict paid transfers based on faction and closely monitor the faction balances to start/stop them when it’s time to do so
- Free xfers for overwhelming majority factions off of that server and onto servers where that faction isn’t the majority, or incentivize them otherwise
- Merge small realms appropriately
- More layers when necessary
- No more new realms, let population redistribute following the above protocol
Thank you for your time!