First of all, TBC is my 2nd favorite expansion ever released for WoW and I love the social aspect in this game. If it wasn’t for those 2 things I would have probably quitted this long time ago. (because of botting problem, server bugs, etc.)
Then why would I want to quit?
Because of many things, but most recently I’m very close to quitting because of the server population problem.
I don’t know if Blizzard has noticed, but their servers are slowly dying.
Let me share you a little story:
I started playing WoW Classic on day-1 back in 2019 and I played on realm called Gehennas (EU). But since Blizzard clearly underestimated the game’s popularity those few servers that we had back then were so full that the queue times on them were insane ( 6-12 hours).
Blizzard kind of fixed this problem (though their response time was slow) by opening new realms and offered free migrations to them. My guild was one of those few ones that took this chance and moved to fresh servers where we didn’t have to take a day-off from work just to be able to login to the game. We moved to server called Earthshaker and it was as empty as new servers tend to be, but slowly more people kept coming and the population grew.
Everything was fine for time being, people were happy with leveling their characters, doing dungeons and doing other world activities. The faction ratio was decently balanced.
But then Blizzard screwed it all up by opening additional free migration from server called Flamelash and a lot of alliance players migrated to Earthshaker, which screwed up the faction balance. It wasn’t anything game breaking, but as time went on more and more alliance players kept migrating to Earthshaker, because supposedly it was one of those few “safe havens” for Alliance players who wanted to play on PvP realm.
Time went on and Horde players started to get tired of the increasing alliance population and slowly started migrating to other realms. By the time the TBC launched the faction ratio had crumbled to ~60/30, favoring alliance players. This was probably what broke the camels back for us Horde players and a huge number of Horde players decided to migrate to other realms where alliance won’t outnumber them, which dipped the faction ratio even further to favor alliance players.
Currently Earthshaker’s ratio is sitting around 82/18 and there has been rumors among us horde players that even more guilds have decided to migrate elsewhere because of the worsening situation, which makes the game even worse for those Horde players that decide to remain on the server. Not only the world is dominated by Alliance which makes farming materials or doing dailies impossible, but there really aren’t enough players left to play with outside raids on the Horde’s side. Like so many others, Earthshaker is slowly turning into one-faction PvP realm as more Horde players keep either quitting or migrating elsewhere.
Earthshaker is not the only server with this problem, as most of the PvP realms suffer from this same fate, either dying entirely or turning into 1-faction realms.
So I’d like to know what is Blizzard’s take on this very real problem?
Do you guys even care?
Your only visible response to this has been that you’ve put the server transfer service on discount, which isn’t the solution at all. More likely, server transfers are the sole reason why we have this problem and its a clear sign that you guys do not care about the state of your game. So putting that service on discount will only speed up the process of smaller realms dying.
One good solution to prevent this from happening would have been to implement faction ratio lock, so that the players wouldn’t be able use server transfer service if the ratio dipped too far (55/45). (though we all know why you won’t disable that service)
So, what is your response Blizzard?
You are the ones who allowed this to happen in the first place, so I think you owe your paying customers to give us at least an response on what your take is.
