Realm Consolidation FAQ

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
1

Hey folks,

We’ve been reading through your feedback and we have some things we’d love to try and clarify as well as some updates on a few things we’re doing to make this as frictionless as we can within the time constraints we have. This may get a little techy in places and introduce you to some terms you’ve never heard before but its all in an effort to help explain some of our moves.

In no particular order!

  1. What the heck are Connected Realms?

If you’re joining us for the first time, you may have missed when we performed realm connections in mainline World of Warcraft, and also in Vanilla Era. Connected Realms are a way for us to join realms in such a way that players on multiple realms can exist in the same physical space, they can raid together, join each others guilds, everything! Players on a Connected Realm will see a “-BobsRealm” amended to theirs or others names in the world denoting which realm they are from. The easiest way to think of this is a Surname in WoW.

  1. Why aren’t you just doing Connected Realms with our existing realms, what is the point of these new realms?

Great question, we’ve mentioned before that Connected Realms would be the ideal solve here, but that it is just not a possibility for us. In full transparency mode, the reason is time, Connected Realms is a massive endeavor for us. It is something we’ve done …3? times in WoWs history and it is a massive task that involves a ton of bespoke work by our Database Engineers and usually months of QA testing time as we go through rounds of internal test connections and data validation. It is one of the most expensive (in terms of raw man hours) things we’ve ever done so while it does solve the problem of not having to move characters and guilds yourselves, it is just a massive chunk of work that the Server team cannot pick up as we are very busy with the largest most database heavy feature in WoWs history (hello Player Housing!) I understand this isn’t likely the answer you would like to hear but hopefully some transparency as to why helps.

So how can you connect these new realms then? Connected Realms to players is one thing, to the development team Connected Realms is a project that involves moving around and manipulating a massive amount of player data, but the other part of Connected Realms involves something we haven’t actually spoken about publicly which is Virtual Realms. As part of Connected Realms, the old realms become “Virtual” and are now hosted by a “Native” realm, this means they no longer run on their own hardware, they run on the Native realms hardware (Pagle in the US for example). These Virtual Realms behave just like a normal realm, you can see them in the Realm List, you can make characters on them, you can make Guilds on them, but since they are all sharing one parent Native Realm, all of them can talk to one another, group, raid, join guilds across the realms. So to solve the issue with players losing their character names during this realm consolidation process, by utilizing multiple new Virtual Realms, we can achieve a Connected Realm like state, give everyone an empty realm that has no blocked player or guild names on it, but without the crazy time consuming part involving the database moves.

We dropped a lot of new terms and tech names there you’ve not heard before, so the shorter recap is -

These new realms are pre-connected, and importantly, totally empty of players! This means we can avoid the large chunk of work that we can’t facilitate for you (the actual realm moves of your characters and guilds) but still give each of the larger realms a new realm to Free Transfer to that will have all of your character names and guild names available to you on.

  1. Are you still going to be ‘freeing’ names up as mentioned earlier before the Connected/Virtual realm news?

Yes! We will still be bringing in the date that we consider accounts to be inactive and any names they have on them become eligible to be used by other players instead. Normally this date is several expansions ago as we do not like the shock it can cause to lose a name you have had for a long time, but for Classic Mists of Pandaria we will use a much more recent time to give maximum chance everyone still playing can get the names they desire. This will apply to all the existing realms such as Pagle, Mirage Raceway, Grobbulus as well as the closing realms.

  1. When exactly are the servers going live so I can secure my names?

Since it is a patch day, we won’t have a concrete answer on this, as you know we tend to post maintenance windows for patch days at 8 hours, but that can vary significantly depending on how the deploy goes. We’re very aware that this means a lot of uncertainty around when people need to be available to try and ensure they secure their names, also in Europe the patch time is significantly earlier in the morning than the US posing other problems.

We’re taking this seriously as everyone has strong connections to their names they have often had for the entire lifetime of Classic, so we are going to do our best to ensure that you are as close to as possible guaranteed your name on your servers destination realm. To do that, we are going to be closing character creation entirely on the destination realms for at least one week, likely two, depending how fast we see everyone moving. What does this mean in practice? If you try and create a new character on these realms, well, you can’t. The only way to get onto the destination realms is by performing a Free Character Transfer, which means you must already have the name you want on the character you are moving on your original realm. No one can take your name from you on the destination until we re-enable free-for-all character creation again.

We do not want to keep this lock in place any longer than we have to as it does create an impenetrable barrier to any new players coming in during this window, but we feel like this solution will ensure we can preserve your names for you for at least the first week. During this time we will continue to allow new and existing players to create characters on the original source realms, after we have finished with this character creation block on the destination realms, we will close the old realms to new players.

  1. What are you doing about the Australian realms?

We mentioned previously but for now we are leaving the AU realms out of this process as a move to the US realms does result in a significant increase in latency, as such we want to ensure that the AU community overwhelmingly wants to move before we take action here.

  1. Will you open transfers off Grobbulus?

At this time no, Grobbulus has a stable but relatively small population (by comparison, it would be a queued OG Vanilla realm!) and we would like to see how many people take the chance to join this unique environment first. If Grobbulus reaches a state where no one is having fun anymore, we will take action and offer free transfers off but we would like to wait and see how things settle first.

  1. Will you be merging the FR, DE and RU realms?

Beyond the already posted consolidation of the language realms, no, if players on these realms overwhelmingly request moving to the mixed language mega realm, we will open those transfers later.

  1. Re-creating a Guild is incredibly painful and expensive with bank tabs and achievements, reputation etc.

We definitely feel that, we are going to be making some temporary changes to try and make this transition a little less painful for everyone! With this weeks restarts the following changes will go live.

  • Removed achievement requirements for heirlooms.
  • Removed achievement requirements for purchasing the banner.
  • Removed achievement requirements for purchasing 8th bank tab.
  • Removed reputation requirement to buy a renown guild tabard
  • Temporary buff to guild reputation (100% increase).
  • Temporary reduced cost for guild bank tabs.

We were not able to find a solution to persisting Guild Achievements through characters moves in the time available, but hopefully removing some of the requirements to some of the player power/cosmetics that were attached to them will help make this less painful.

We hope that this has helped address some of your concerns, but we appreciate that ultimately this change is not without a lot of friction. We are confident that the end result will be nothing but net positive for the rest of Mists of Pandaria.

Have a great weekend and we’ll see you on Wednesday!

Realm Changes & Free Moves for Mists of Pandaria Classic
Cannot create new characters on Firemaw anymore
Bought character level 85 boost but I'm not allowed to create it?
Why do you disable character creation
Dont keep old servers active
Realm Changes & Free Moves for Mists of Pandaria Classic
Why do you disable character creation
Realm Changes & Free Moves for Mists of Pandaria Classic
Locked forever?
3

So you have already connected existing realms 3 times but now its too hard and takes too long? Nobody asked for this sht. Why does this need to happen in a span of a week? 95% of the people are against this and you guys keep ignoring it and now confirming that guild achievements are definetly gone. This is a BIG L as always from you guys. Exactly as expected at this point.

13 Likes
4

Can you please think about making it easier for a guild to swap faction? 50k gold cap is a joke; with a mega server i assume a lot of people can finally think about going the faction they want and not be limited to what server you are on

5

Same questions and but edited to capture the new info post I made on the main thread

It’s hard to post a different view from all of the upset people in this thread. However, here is a different ask / consideration / reality.

If you had told me some 20 years ago that I would end up on an RP server and loving it, I would had laughed at you and gone back to reading the latest post on Elitist Jerks and Thottbot, just trying to work out how to do more dps or tactics to kill stuff…Etc.

Nowadays, We (and the Mrs who I met through this game in a pug) are somewhat older, somewhat wiser, somewhat trying to work out what all the younger audience in game are talking about!? Or to put it a different way, us boomers care very little for furrie fem boi crap talking in chat with zero action taken place for people literally producing word vomit with extreme views and language used…

It made us leave the game for a while, but like most we returned as a couple and decided to move to the RP server: Hydraxian Waterlords. When we transferred with a single character, the silence was deafening but we soon grew to love the quiet, the relaxed game, the peace became addictive and we have been embraced by the community.

We have met many couples (irl) that play and solo players that like us, have an army of alts and have become 100% self sufficient (we now have at least 20 paid transfer between us - any refund if you lock?).

Many will assume an RP server is dead and cult like, it’s not! You can join an event if you wish or not, you will be able to join the community world boss raids, a set of raids where people that are actually loot locked but come along to help others… crazy huh!

There are raiding guilds here, granted it’s somewhat unlikely that you will see a world first achievement pop up but that is not the point. I have yet to see anyone ever ask for an ilvl requirement or people with full HC gear standing proud and posing on the fountain in SW with a big virtual look at me banner above his fat head (or her).

Now why would a realm like this be forced to Mirage, will you lock our server and kill off RP in EU? If so. then expect the RP world march to Blizz!!

This is not an advert for others looking for a quieter home before we get locked but I guess it could read that way, so what are you waiting for?

P.S. @Blizz “listen to the people above and below, you are royally going to screw every guild over that cares about their history with achievements, player naming rants till the cows come home, RP realms locked or forced to move to the polar opposite of what they stand for, lack of PVP realms and on and on the list goes… Be better than this, I double dare you to prove us all wrong and don’t make a mess of this, you have a job to do and it’s actually a job we pay you for every time we hit the sub button”.

10 Likes
6

Multi billion company does NOT have the employe´s to do their job ? Im truly sorry but this is pure and utter rubbish also WHY are we playing classic being affected by some retail feature ? , player housing who care´s ?

If you CANNOT do the job then you dont TAKE the job , you wait untill you can manage the job then you do the job.

Btw guys you heard it HERE first , blizzard is activly trying to kill off Classic because they have “renewed” their IP rights for another 10 years from vanilla to Mop hence have the legal “right” to take down Private servers , if the IP isnt renewed or activly worked on for 10 years its a FREE for all ! …

THIS HAS NOTHING to do with “solving/helping” players it is about hanging on to their vanilla - mist Intellectual rights so no one would/could run a private server where we would all play since they dont screw people over !

Pretty sure you will see the “subs” drop right off a cliff with this and im GLAD you will not see your ignorance untill it is to late !

14 Likes
8

Yes Microsoft who killed off Lionhead studios (fable series) because they wanted to make Fable into something that was not techincally possible at the time (might not even be possible now even)

9

Will each virtual realm have their own achievements for Challenge modes and Realm Firsts? I would be against that personally.

11

Good thing they take the time to delete posts critizising them.
That’s why you need to go to xtwitter.
But oh well. It’s all over now.

2 Likes
12

So still no pvp realm. Thats what the feedback been about. Zero info about that. Thanks for listening to the feedback blizz. Kay thanks bye

5 Likes
13

Well we had PvP realms, players decided turn those to single faction pve realms and this time they listened and now we got only pve server.

14

Well sadly no guild transfers. Expected.

1 Like
15

Blizzard, I’ve read the so-called “transparency” post and honestly, it just makes things worse. You’re admitting that Connected Realms are the “ideal solve” but then immediately saying they’re “not possible” because they take too much time and manpower. That’s not transparency, that’s just a corporate excuse. You’re not saying it can’t be done, you’re saying you won’t do it, because you’ve decided our communities, our guilds, and our history aren’t worth the resources. Let’s call this what it is: a choice. A choice to prioritise shiny new features like Player Housing over the basic preservation of what players already built.

You keep throwing around terms like “massive endeavor” and “one of the most expensive things we’ve ever done” as if that explains why it’s off the table. You’re a multi-billion dollar company. You’ve managed cross-realm tech, mega-servers, sharding, phasing, group finder, cross-faction play, and massive system reworks in both retail and Classic. You’re capable of pulling off mind-bendingly complicated engineering feats when it suits you. So don’t insult us by pretending that preserving guild data is beyond your reach. The truth is you don’t want to put the work in because it doesn’t generate revenue. That’s it.

And instead of fixing the actual issue, you’re trying to sell us this half-measure about “new realms that are pre-connected and totally empty.” You’re acting like giving us a blank slate somehow makes this better. It doesn’t. That’s not preserving communities, that’s erasing them. Guild banks, guild achievements, guild history all gone. We have to rebuild from scratch, and then you pat yourselves on the back for giving us an “opportunity” to keep our names. That’s not a solution, that’s a reset button. You’re asking us to pretend the last several years of work never happened.

The worst part is the insult of the so-called “workarounds.” Lowering the cost of bank tabs. Removing achievement requirements. Throwing in a temporary guild rep buff. That’s not compensation, that’s a slap in the face. We already paid for those bank tabs. We already earned those achievements. We already grinded that reputation. Lowering costs doesn’t change the fact that you’re forcing us to re-purchase what we already own. You’re making us pay twice for the same thing and trying to frame it as you “helping” us. You openly admit you couldn’t find a solution to persist guild achievements, and instead of delaying the rollout or putting in the work to do it right, you just hand-wave it away with a discount and a buff. That isn’t respecting the playerbase, it’s dismissing us.

And please stop hiding behind “time constraints.” You set the timeline. You control the release schedule. If Connected Realms really are the ideal solution and you actually cared about your community, you’d delay until it could be done properly. Instead, you’ve decided that rushing Mists of Pandaria Classic out the door is more important than respecting the very players who made your game worth relaunching in the first place. This isn’t about what’s possible, it’s about what you’re willing to do. And right now, you’re showing us loud and clear that player communities are expendable.

The guild system is not just some optional side feature. Guilds are the backbone of WoW. They’re where friendships, memories, and long-term investment live. When you break guild continuity, you’re not just inconveniencing people, you’re dismantling communities. People who lose their guilds don’t just shrug and move on they quit. And when enough of them quit, those “net positives” you’re so confident about vanish. You’re mortgaging the health of the game long-term because you don’t want to allocate the manpower short-term.

And let’s be honest here: “we’re too busy with Player Housing” is about the worst excuse you could have given. You’re bragging about tackling “the largest database-heavy feature in WoW’s history” while simultaneously telling us that transferring guild banks and achievements is just too much to handle. You don’t see the hypocrisy in that? You can re-architect massive systems when it makes for a flashy announcement, but you can’t respect the thousands of guilds who already invested years into building their communities? This is why players feel like you don’t care. Because your actions keep proving it.

The truth is simple: you’re forcing us to pay again for things we already paid for, and you’re forcing us to lose things we can never get back (Feats of S Achvi’s). You’re dressing it up in technical jargon and half-solutions, but at the end of the day, you are deleting guilds and calling it a feature. And we’re supposed to thank you for a “discount” on the privilege of starting over? No. Absolutely not.

If you actually cared about your players, you would implement free guild transfers with full preservation of banks, achievements, names, and history. If for some reason you truly can’t do that and I don’t believe for a second you can’t then you need to fully compensate every guild. Refund the gold for bank tabs. Restore achievements. Guarantee guild name reservations. Anything less is theft of player investment.

Stop pretending this is about feasibility. Stop hiding behind “time constraints.” This is about priorities, and right now Blizzard is making it abundantly clear that preserving the communities that keep this game alive is not one of them.

-Dej

45 Likes
16

100% agree with the sentiments in Dej’s post
He is the Admin of the PWV Discord and has the backing of the GM community on PWV

6 Likes
17

If you can retain player personal achievements, why can you not do the same for guild ones? They are related to the name of the Guild, so surely it should be just as easily done - I get that saving progress on an not as yet earned achievement might be more tricky, but I’m assuming that character progression achievements will still transfer with the player, so that should also be possible - you just transfer it all when the GM of the guild moves

4 Likes
18

You werent able to make a system that was already in the game in retail and in cataclysm classic work?

Is there a single actual developer on the classic team?

3 Likes
19

We are paying Blizzard (101k people online rn x €10-13 euros p.m.) 1010k-1313k (1mil to 1.3 mil) each month for a guy telling us they have to work to keep their customers happy? How can you even say such a thing.
I am very sorry but since when isn’t the customer king? You guys should be ashamed of yourselves and rethink this decision.
Look at all the backlash you guys have caused with this narrowsighted and non communicative actions. DO BETTER.

5 Likes
20

PVP Realm? No? ok,bye

6 Likes
21

if 5 people have the same name it defeats the point. Just do the original plan and move everyone to Mirage. Its better than seeing your name 5 times man xD

3 Likes
22

Soo, are we getting to choose if we use our free transfer to either Mirage, or one of the alternate ‘new’ realms? Because I’d rather just go to Mirage