Classic WoW servers were once akin to small towns, where a community of residents grew up together, worked together and generally saw each other every day. When megaservers (really Activision) came around, it was the equivalent of foreign real estate speculators coming in and buying your town square to turn it into a mega shopping plaza. Sure, the local economy is booming, but at what cost? Your neighbors are gone. The local businesses are now obsolete. Everyone you see walking around your town is a tourist and doesnât have a stake in your community. Very few of them even speak your language.
These tourists have been openly breaking the law, but your local police refuse to enforce it. Why? None of the concerned citizens who come from your small town can understand whatâs going on here, but the local government is growing increasingly wealthy. There is zero accountability. Letters and phone calls go completely unanswered.
Now, the average Classic player has megaserver fatigue. We know the alternative, and this pale imitation of the game is just sad. Thereâs a huge botting / farming problem, and there are simply too many of these leeches to even report. Even when you do report them, nothing happens. If there were smaller servers, the player base would be more inclined to self-police, and the bots would eventually just disappear. Itâs clear that Blizzard cannot and will not ban these people, so we should at least be granted the dignity of getting far away from them on smaller servers if weâre going to be charged the same amount of money as we were when there were normal servers.
What are we paying for?
Megaservers have brought nothing but problems to classic WoW, from the impossibility of completing certain quests, inflated economies, to ninja looters disappearing into the woodwork and beyond.
Megaservers also permit Asian botting / farming mafias to be consolidated to one place, making it easier for them to mass report and eliminate their competition (and even people they perceive as a threat). And yes, mass reporting is a thing. It also permits them to have complete control over the serverâs economy.
The megaserver experiment is over. Itâs clear that you wonât ban those generating RMT, so give us an alternative.
lack of accountability to a community causes people to not care about their actions which is why the anonymity of the megaservers causes such chaos amongst the playerbase
And then Chaos Bolt was closed because Blizzard decided that there wasnt enough players to keep the server going. I know some players are fine with a server with a very small but dedicated base, but thatâs just not how the servers for Classic are going to be run anymore.
Players created this problem. We had realm choice in 2019. Players widely decided to over fixated on âthe most populated serverâ and then began the âdead serverâ trope on perfectly healthy realms, thus sending them into death spirals.
Blizzard responded on every iteration after, gradually shrinking our realm choice and actively managing as the same behavior happened. The result is, we have two realms on anniversary.
Last and most importantly: Communities are built not granted. while I agree mega servers are terrible for community, and I agree with all your points, this canât be understated.
To that note: weâve been building our community on Grobbulus Classic Era for the last 3.5-4 years. Itâs not much, but itâs honest work. For those seeking community and willing to accept trade offs, you may find that small town server youâve been looking forâŚ
Itâs way too easy to blame the players and write it off as a problem impossible to fix. The fact of the matter that this is a problem created by Blizzard when they tried penny-pinching with cross-realm zones in 2012. Theyâve been actively trying to destroy the concept of a community for almost 15 years. Good luck building a community on quicksand.
Brother I donât need luck, weâve been a community active on era for nearly 4 years, but thank you anyways.
I do agree, blaming only the players isnât fair either. Blizzard too has caused issues, but imo they have caused issues as a reaction to player demands and reality.
Of course they also are trying to minimize their maintenance and operational overhead. We see this consolidation of clients as a prime example: SoD, Anni, and Era all on one client which in theory is less work for them to maintain, but as a result caused new issues like SoM leaking into Era/Anni, etc.
I also strongly agree with you that blizzard has actively been working to destroy our communities for a long time now. I just donât think itâs fair to primarily blame them still, and I see this largely as a player driven culture problem (ie âmega server or bust, dead serverâ mentality).