We are at the end of a season. Wait a couple weeks.
Yes and I agree.
I feel OP was asking for a different route. To lower the amount of servers in general. Not just cluster them.
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Optics. Blizz doesnât want to admit subs have dropped far enough that they need to merge servers.
For all intents and purposes, they are. OCE for example has 12 âserversâ but they got merged into 2 groups a while ago. Blizzard canât really get rid of servers more than that because of potential backlash over duplicates of the same name.
That being said, the very idea of servers is being phased out. You can trade gold and items across any server, join guilds on different servers, place work orders with those guilds on other servers, and I think reagents on the ah are even cross server too. If you feel like itâs completely dead everywhere you go consider that you may just be on an underpopulated shard as most everyone seems to be constantly, because the ideal of CRZ to make zones feel more alive with activity has been twisted to make everywhere have as few other players as possible who might potentially get in your way.
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they are afraid if they start shutting down servers people will cry and say the game is dying and unsub. so they jury rig all the servers together in a weak daisy chain to pretend like theres a huge population. just log into any server, I can guarantee 3/4 of the people you see are from other servers.
Servers seem âdeadâ because so much gameplay takes place in instances these days. Even in the outdoor world, sharding ensures that zones never look or feel too crowded.
Iâm not sure gluing more servers together would do a whole lot. There used to be a pretty even distribution of players throughout zones, but now with timewalks being virtually the most efficient way to level, thereâs no real incentive or reason to go out and quest anymore. Used to be that youâd have to do lots of quests across an entire expansionâs worth of zones in order to hit max. Then, at max level, dailies would take players to places like the tournament grounds in Icecrown, so youâd see many out and about in the overworld.
Now, the only reason to login and leave Dornogal is for weekly quests, delves, M+, or raiding Nerubâar if players donât want to bother with the collect-a-thon stuff. You can complete all your weekly stuff in a single sitting on a Tuesday, and if you donât care about delves or M+, thereâs no incentive for most players to keep logging in beyond Tuesdays. I see the in-game population steadily decline throughout the week, Dornogal is essentially a ghost town on a Thursday. Occasionally, things will pick back up for weekends, but by Sunday or Monday, another ghost town.
They incentivized running dungeon content (be they solo or group) a bit too much. So, most everyone is in those. When theyâre not in those, theyâre likely browsing LFD looking for an instance to run (for M+ or raids), queuing for LFD (LFR, heroic, normals, or timewalks), or are AFKing in Dornogal. However, I was glad to return and find most dailies had been removed and replaced with weeklies. Dailies were getting to be too much of a repetitive chore back in Wrath and Cata.
TL:DR, itâs basically the current design of the game that limits encountering players in zones other than Dornogal, so gluing servers together likely wouldnât accomplish much, at least overtly.
I agree-- if they continued to merge servers the game would be alot more fun. It always feels good to see a mob of folks at a world event or capitol city ⌠I think with enough input in support of mergers they will happen.
But merging servers has no impact on that
this is exactly the mindset that creates those servers.
Nobody is doing world events because they are pointless this late in a season. What is Blizzard supposed to do, force you to go to the weird kidâs birthday party under threat of a ban?
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A lot of people either forget or just arenât aware that âfullâ servers arenât exactly a great play experience at times, either. Area 52 was burning down during TWWâs launch window because there were so many players lol
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The issue is, that they are not able to fix the duplicate name situation, I lost several chars because of that on the Vanilla realms, but also in other games such as SWTOR.
Unless they can fix that, so that everyone can keep the chars he or she owns, a merge would be a disaster.
That being said, they could start by opening up the AH. It´s silly that we can buy and sell profession materials, but not the final products.
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Nah, its not an âits not the fullest so its badâ thing, the terms used are just straight up poor representations of what activity looks like on those servers. Theyre dead.
As I understand it:
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Merging tons of servers doesnât look great, it definitely makes plain the fact all players know but some deny which is this game has fallen off a cliff population wise and will never recover. Is it dying? Yeah sorta. Thing is the death could easily take another 15-20 years and the servers could stay on beyond that time but itâs never going to be a game with 4 million players population playing the same version of the game again. Itâs never going to be a game that gets development priority from the game studio that makes it.
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There were technical problems with some past server mergers and they gave up rather than address them. I think they were of the server load, lag, problems like that variety and their architecture has honestly been trash since they decided to move to cost-cutting measures like sharding which has led to under-powered hardware, inadequate interconnect design, etc.
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See above again, it must be cheaper to run all these tiny server shards than to try and fix the core issues causing problems in mergers which likely means the architecture of the servers themselves is a problem and that the only fix is more money corporate refuses to ever spend on a dinosaur like this which hardly makes any money compared to COD, Diablo, mobile.
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Theyâve already prepared lies. The server population counts are not static, what âhighâ and âfullâ mean today is nothing like that those terms meant in BC, in Wrath, even 10 years ago. They are very gamed and relative to make the game appear more alive than it is. Full servers these days are servers as they should have been, as medium-high servers appeared in Wrath and the hay-day. High pop servers are what the high side of low population servers were in wrath, people still around but not a lot of them and at non-peak hours the server can be quite dead.
I agree they should really merge things but only after they fix their architecture. They still cannot handle mega-servers. Moon Guard for instance has sharding disabled in everything but new content, everyone in Stormwind is on one shard for RP purposes but it lags horribly, the server, the network, itâs not designed to handle these types of things, I personally think under-powered server architecture is to blame and they refuse to deviate from spec for special cases like MG.
If they were willing to do that I think they could merge all the RP servers together (only WrA is barely clinging to life besides MG anyways), merge all the âlow populationâ realms together or into two mega-servers, and merge most of the high pop servers into a handful of megaservers.
But they arenât. Maybe itâs pride, maybe some insane hope that someday the game population will double again among their famously arrogant dev team. More likely it may be a dash of that but itâs mostly the fact corporate wallets are closed to spending more money on a game that is deep into the âsoak the suckers and addictsâ phase of its lifecycle and not seen as worthwhile for investing millions, tens of millions into hardware and architecture changes to benefit player experience.
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They probably thought it would be easier to consolidate realms with low pop into groups like they have now than to transfer boatloads of characters to more populated realms. Thatâs a lot of free character transfers.
Another thing, Iâm sure most veterans would remember when players whined for brand new servers so they can start over and guilds could get server firsts.
Once people got bored of the new servers they would go back to their home servers, hence they being dead.
The only reason separate servers matter is
1- Name availability.
2- Crafting orders and non-commodity AH.
Thatâs it, everything else is cross-realm.
Deleting servers breaks #1 and that matters so no that should never happen.
Problems on #2 is fixed by merging more servers until each group has a healthy population. And if populations change drastically then just rearrange groups, no one cares unless they have a favorite non-guildie crafter which is weird.
Thank you for giving me a good chuckle xD
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With sharding, there really seems to be no reason to even have named / visible servers anymore. They could just have one Azeroth and shard for pop issues and have all the servers on the backend. Battlenet already solves for folks with the same username (using a unique numeric key), so allowing duplicates in world also seems pretty doable.