I see that Chaos Bolt and Lava Lash are the only American servers that are medium pop, while every other server is full. I am heavily invested on Chaos Bolt, and I fear that as the population continues to dwindle and the level ranges get stretched out in the later phases, it will only get harder to find groups.
Is this a legit concern?
Yes. It ended up this way in every iteration of Classic.
Will Medium Population Servers survive?
Probably not in the long run. Sorry in advance for the incoming long post. TL;DR: make an alt on a Full Server now so you have a back up plan for later.
Not in the short-term, yes in the long-term.
As it currently stands, Chaos Bolt and Lava Lash aren’t just Medium Pop servers, they’re 10% the size of the Full Servers on SoD.
Right now, that’s okay because they’re still as big as original vanilla and TBC servers were with about 4000 active raiders on each of them.
With a population of 4-6k players, Chaos Bolt and Lava Lash are fine. For now.
The problem is, SoD is a version of World of Warcraft. And World of Warcraft is a game that does not build on its playerbase anymore. The most people playing any version of WoW is right at the moment that that version is released.
Season of Discovery has likely already hit its peak playerbase. It’s all downhill from here.
This isn’t so much of a problem on the Full Servers because they have 50,000+ raiders on them and populations so big that most of them require 10 layers at prime time and 4 at off times.
As Season of Discovery continues, that 50k will diminish, but even if it drops to as low as 10k by lvl 60 in Phase 4, that’s still more than enough players to ensure a healthy server experience.
The same cannot be said for Chaos Bolt and Lava Lash. Under the assumption that 4000-6000 players is their peak population numbers, both of the Medium Pop Servers will likely drop as the Phases of Season of Discovery continue on. By the time lvl 60 arrives, the server populations could be down to less than a thousand players apiece.
If you’re heavily invested in Chaos Bolt, you’re right to be concerned about what the future holds for the server. Chaos Bolt is a literal afterthought that only got spun up because apparently 100,000 unique accounts tried to roll on Crusader Strike at the same time on launch day.
But while they DID lock Crusader Strike after spinning up Chaos Bolt, they only did so for three days. Chaos Bolt never had a chance to pull in a bigger population because of this.
My advice? If you’re having fun on Chaos Bolt right now, keep playing on Chaos Bolt. But maybe use these next four weeks before Phase 2 to make a lvl 25 alt on one of the other SoD servers. And then once you’ve got your mains on Chaos Bolt in a good spot at lvl 40 in Phase 2, level up that 25 alt to 40 as well before Phase 3.
And so on and so forth, so that in the event that Chaos Bolt DOES die off before Phase 4, you can at least have a back up plan.
I would not expect Blizzard to merge servers to be honest, if only because this is all seasonal content anyways. So Chaos Bolt might literally wind up as a graveyard where people’s characters are trapped for the rest of SoD.
Hopefully we can get a dev response to this about potential server merges or server transfers to ease concerns. I for one would just quit if the server became crummy or was poised to do so and I had to reroll to another server after investing such time.
They released the servers as they did to NOT have this problem and even said as much. As we see it, we are already close with two servers that just never seemed to take off for some reason.
Yeah, the best solution would be for them to just open free server transfers from Chaos Bolt to Crusader Strike if the situation ever got bad enough on Chaos Bolt to warrant it.
I just wouldn’t put it past Blizzard to make people pay for them instead. EDIT: Or not offer them at all because its all seasonable content.
why should l chaos bolters be forced to move off
Open transfers incoming from cs to cb not the other way around
Because like I said in my post, in the event that Chaos Bolt has lost enough population to even warrant server transfers being opened up, Crusader Strike will also have lost more than half its population.
The difference is, Crusader Strike losing more than half its population still puts it in a very healthy place and maintains Full Server status.
It wouldn’t make much sense for us to reach Phase 4 of Season of Discovery, have both Crusader Strike and Chaos Bolt at around 25% of their original populations, and then ask people comfortable on Crusader Strike to move to Chaos Bolt.
Why would anyone from Crusader Strike even move to Chaos Bolt at that point, even with free server transfers opened up?
Chaos Bolt would have a population of about 1000-2000 people, and Crusader Strike would have a population of 10000-20000 people. One of these things is obviously more stable and playable than the other.
This for sure. While the cap is 25. Level multiple toons on a full server. Yes, this means deal with the long queues next level band. But it’ll save you head ache in the future.
It probably won’t actually. Queues on Crusader Strike, the most rolled server, didn’t even last longer than a few days. And while they cropped up every once in a while for a couple weeks, they were only ever happening for a couple hours before disappearing again completely.
And now that we have the numbers, we know that’s not because some huge amount of players went from CS to CB. Instead, I think Blizzard is doing something on their end, maybe something to do with the dynamic layering they’ve implemented for Season of Discovery, and are basically managing to finally give us the ‘mega servers’ that so much of the player base seems to want.
I would not expect 10,000+ player queues on Crusader Strike or any of the other servers come February 8th like we had on Grobbulus for Classic Wotlk’s launch.
Could be wrong about that, but it should be relatively smooth.
Yes, you will be the only person on your server next week.
Don’t hold your breath. We’re getting neither.
If your server is already medium pop that’s not a good sign and it’s likely due to the popularity of other servers and people already making new characters on those servers. If you stick it out you just have to hope Blizzard gets ahead of it with transfers instead of waiting way too late to the point where you are stuck on that server at a higher level and at the mercy of them opening transfers long past when they should have.
Except even if only 2% of cs’s pop moves to cb, it’d be more than enough to make that server healthy
The rest of the other servers populations are absurdly huge, they shouldnt even exist if it werent for the artificial layering technology
Yes but once again, why would anyone on CS move at all?
In this hypothetical, its Chaos Bolt who is suffering. Its Chaos Bolt who is dying. Why would anyone on Crusader Strike be incentivized to move to Chaos Bolt in such a scenario?
Especially since such an infusion of population, even if Blizzard FORCED it, would only result in Chaos Bolt being back to dying a couple months later when more people quit.
Gee i dont know why do people move to rppvp servers anyway. Because they want the community feel, because they like the tight knit nature, because they dont want to be harassed by twitch kids who were told to all flood a server. When i first played classic i was happy to get away from cross realm, crz and other artificial grouping nonsense yet here we are once again. I suppose i was naïve
If layering is still enabled, then your server still has way more people on it than vanilla servers ever had. You have nothing to worry about tbh.
This is true but people think any server that doesn’t have the maximum amount of people is functionally dead
So many servers were ruined by the sky is falling belief
Nah its okay to want those things. The problem is, you seem to be operating under the assumption that these SoD servers have sustainable populations on them.
Personally, I view them more as hourglasses… or open sieves. A whole bunch of sand started at the top, but it’s draining away right now by the minute.
A bigger hourglass like Crusader Strike has more time before the last grain of sand drains away. A smaller hourglass like Chaos Bolt has less time.
Crusader Strike will be just as diminished as Chaos Bolt by the time Phase 4 arrives. In fact, I suspect there will come a point in Season of Discovery where Crusader Strike is reduced to only 1-4 layers even at prime times.
But when that point finally arrives for Crusader Strike, what will have happened to Chaos Bolt? Seeing as its only a tenth of Crusader Strike’s size right now, I suspect something grim.
I dont think this will happen as quickly as you think.
I played SoM, and after 1 month almost every server but Jom was dead. And then by Aq40 even Jom became quiet. So long as Blizzard continues to update content in SoD do players have a reason to stick around and not quit the server. So far even two months in Chaos Bolt is still going strong. Maybe itll become untenable by Naxx, but by then the game is over anyway and according to their own schedule we have plenty of time
Personally I hope you’re right.
My own caution and the reason I’m playing on CS and not CB is because I was convinced to transfer to Deviate Delight off of Grobbulus back in Classic by my guild. I certainly came to regret that decision, lol.
Maybe Chaos Bolt will be alive for all of SoD, but at least I know for SURE that Crusader Strike will be alive for all of SoD.