Trolling the recruitment channel doesn’t mean you have a community.
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Don’t even know what this is. What’s a recruitment channel? And who’s trolling it for what?
So again, sounds like your server has no community. But you aren’t everyone.
I’m confident that they could pull it off. The individual server identities have been placed to the side for a while now, even the RP realms are linked.
My opinion is that they could easily cut the number of servers to a 3rd of what we have today, but they won’t, because it would be openly admitting to the stockholders that the game has far less individual paying customers than they are led to believe on a quarterly basis.
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Cutting servers because of shareholders isn’t the reason, me thinks. They don’t give a damn who or what is playing so long as the revenue continues to go up.
What’s more realistic is that deleting servers would delete characters. Merging servers is the soft handed approach, and that still made quite a lot of people upset.
What they need to do in the meantime is to stop funneling new players into these dead realms. It’s probably adding to a bad feedback loop - creating zombie realms.
First I’d imagine technology speaking it’s faster to maintenance servers with a specific number of players on it than all players on it.
Then there’s the fact not all players enjoy wall to wall people on their server. This falls simply in the “it’s good to have options” philosophy.
Myself I have characters on one server specifically because it’s low population. Then another is higher pop these choices were on purpose by me.
There’s also redundancy. There’s times some realms are down but others aren’t… so you could still play. You have one megaserver you have no options that’s down you aren’t playing.
I agree, and furthermore, I think that any remaining realm restrictions are relics of a bygone era and are holding the game back.
I’m firmly of the belief that Blizzard is keenly aware of this and has been working toward incremental improvements and solutions for years.
Notice they stopped the realm mega-mergers (we’re talking the ridiculous 5-realm-long names) for small servers. Mergers have just become too technically awkward.
However, they’ve pushed forward with existing clustering technologies such as sharding, a region-wide AH, and cross-realm and faction dungeons.
As the OP indicated, we’re practically there already except for a few major hurdles.
We need cross-realm guilds. And… not to dogpile on this issue, but the entire guild system needs redone. It’s as archaic as realms.
Guilds and the community system need to merge into a Discord-like system that is realm and faction-agnostic. You should be able to join multiple guilds/communities and interact with them just as you do guilds today, with banks, calendars, and whatever other perks are available.
Right now, both realms and guilds as they exist today are barriers to entry for playing how you want, where you want, when you want, and with who you want.
A huge chunk of the player base is fragmented into little ghost towns for realms (speaking from personal experience on Feathermoon-Scarlet Crusade), where those of us left fondly remember the “good old days” when we had realm queues, 18 years ago.
It doesn’t have to be this way, just because the game is approaching 20 years. There are so many ways to answer the challenges people bring-up about a truly realm-agnostic WoW.
Character name uniqueness? Not a problem. Realm suffixes need not go away, for legacy’s sake. Want to get more interesting? Surnames, anyone?
How to handle play preferences such as RP and time zone? No problem. Have flags same as how /pvp solved that issue. You could flag for /rp. You could set your time zone sharding preference with a /tz command (or something like that).
Now, I realize I’m just throwing-out ideas that are fairly technically complicated to implement. This is understood, and also why I think that Blizzard is taking their time moving in this direction. My sincere hope is that they get there, however, and the sooner the better.