I am on a pretty popular realm, and even this realm feels completely dead every day that I log in and go anywhere outside of the main area of dornogal.
Why not condense the servers down to a few? at this point who cares what feathers are ruffled, there is no reason for the servers to feel so dead and lifeless. Its honestly sad that we have this problem, its a pretty easy fix, and would really change the feel of the game.
I’m assuming blizzard cares, or they would have done it by now.
Pride. And avoiding the possible perception that “WoW is dying.”
They’d rather cross-faction everything and do other half-measures to avoid the inevitable and stupid “WoW is dying” clickbait that will come with merging servers.
Instead of just merging the Servers to bring all the players together in a more real way.
Either way, WoW in 2025 does not need 200 low-to-mid pop servers.
There’s almost literally zero gain but huge negatives in terms of logistics, support tickets, lost political capital, and so forth.
Between X-realm and paid transfers, servers only exist because enough players want to keep their name.
While you ask for this. Tons of people are hoping no one is on their classic HC layer so they can have the map to themselves.
Your subjective preferences are not a universal wish AND there is a very high chance that if you actually got what you wish for, you might just regret it in the right circumstances.
The real problem is having so many people in the same place that you can’t play anymore either because you can’t progress your quest because of lack of quest item being taken by everybody or because the lag gets bad due to overpopulation. eing called a hero while 75 other “heroes” are around you loses all credibility. Having many server and/or layers to reduce the amount of people in one spot is not a problem, it’s a solution to the many problems that come with what you wish for.
The game is better and looks better when it’s not filled with bunch of randoms jumping around in the screen.
We have Connected Realms for many. We don’t need to lose names, guild names, have server communities change just because people don’t like seeing so many server names.
Most nonsensical take I’ve seen.
I think because phasing tech does this on the fly, there is zero reason for them to bother.
I mean… let’s say that’s 60% of the reason.
So while you can probably point of LOTS of examples of where the fails, Blizzard still sits on a “majority where it works” to where they can ignore it as “working as intended.”
That’s how it feels to me, anyway.
With cross realm and sharding, it matters less
Condensing realms means a lot of people lose their name and are forced to take a new one, unless they redo the entire naming system as well
They do the connected realm thing, I’m connected to I think 8 other realms, I am on one of the, if not the biggest realm cluster in the game.
So they managed to get rid of 8 server blades on my cluster.
Town is always popping!
Id like to add that there is no such thing as a low and medium pop server. Both of those translate to “100% Dead”.
High = Low
Full = Healthy
Thats it.
because they came up with crz/cross realm etc et al. A server anymore is only a name and your name. Personally I choose not to lose my characters names
I think the “full server” thing doesn’t hold water at all. I was able to transfer this alt to Dal, which was listed as a full server, and it’s so not lol.
I think the lowest pop servers could be made pvp, I don’t see why not. Some only have a couple thousand players on them.
Eta i see they stopped doing pvp servers a while ago.
afaik, this has never happened.
When they “merge” servers together and make a “cluster”, your name immediately becomes a new, hyphenated name.
So you start out “Akston.” But once merged with 4 other servers, you can form a group with:
Akston-ServerA
Akston-ServerB
Akston-ServerC
Akston-ServerD
Akston-ServerE
Although it seems you all have the same name, because of the different server names, they’re all different to the game.
I’ve never heard of Blizzard “transferring” chrs off a server to another, and then shutting that server down. They just merge servers into clusters.
In this scenario we aren’t talking about clusters.
OP specifically asked for the amount of servers to be condensed.
That means there isn’t serverA, serverB, etc
It would just be server A
I get what you are saying. That’s what they generally do now.
It probably would still feel the same due to phasing. And phasing became a thing to cut down on lag.
Blizzard chose the easy way of just connecting all the realms into one big region wide sharding cluster. I wish they were more proactive just connecting smaller realms into medium ones, because it would have promoted medium realm communities which is I think very important for longevity of an MMO. This is I think why retail struggles to keep players interested, because because there is no “local” social fabric that makes you want to be a part of. It’s hard to feel a part of a giant blob players unless you’re pushing high enough to earn notoriety.
I may have given a longer answer than was needed, but … that’s what they’ve always done, was my point.
Not “generally” or “generally do now” … it’s what they’ve ALWAYS done. There is no other “scenario.” It’s what they’ve ALWAYS done.
Several problems.
Because you’d run into conflicts with character and guild naming.
That’s why they had opted for connected realms as opposed to legitimate merging.
Servers are now virtual constructs that serve to help distribute load. They bear very little correlation with actual physical servers. And what’s more they’re grouped so that you will see people from other servers in your day-to-day interactions out in the world.
Reducing the number of servers doesn’t serve much purpose, except to make Blizzard’s ability to load-balance (shard) less granular. If a “server” is particularly dead, that doesn’t matter much as long as the group isn’t dead. If the group is underpopulated, they don’t need to delete servers, they can just combine into larger groups. They also try to steer players to servers that need a population boost.