I still cant believe they havent clustered all servers like in Era, most of them are dead…
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No. That is a good way to kill off alliance as there is ~50% more horde than alliance.
Shutdown the dead servers then.
They already shut down most dead servers, I suspect there may be another round of shutdowns upon Wrath/Cata/Wrath Era transition. And as Nikkyblond above said, if you cluster all Wrath PvP servers, all that will achieve is maks sure Alliance only raidlog and do their daily FoS out of Dala, never ever landing on the ground in the outside world.
It’s late Wrath, you are never getting your victims back.
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Clustering the realms would make the entire Alliance population faction change?
Who ever lands on the ground in the outside world currently?
Have you ever played as the minority faction on a PvP server?
Clusters mean that you would likely see mostly even population in the open world though.
Tell that to Alliance on Gehennas.
Am i confused about what clusters do or what?
You’d get layered onto open world zones from 20k pop alliance realms, you would not be 99/1 open world pvp anymore.
I think 50% more is an overstatement. According to Ironforge the total faction ratio on all EU realms (PVP, PVE, RPPVP, RP) is 43,5% A : 56,5% H.
@Eramai: Some, however, are far too big to be connected. Also, not everything is directly compatible (language / server type).
@Daigar: Slightly, but not necessarily very. 40-60 split would be 50% more. And if we drop PvE and RP out of the equation, things get (MUCH) worse for the alliance. Ironforge does not cover everything reliably, but as an example approximate 28,2% vs. 71,8% means there is only about 3 alliance for each 7 horde, which would give horde more than 130% advantage in average numbers across the region in PvP realms…
In clusters the realms would just be layered and you’d get xyz alliance in Stranglethorn and xyz Horde, since you have 40,000+ of each to pool from it would only be a few layers where this wasn’t an equal number of players right?
They will probably cluster them in the same way they did for WoW Vanilla.
All EU English PVE servers together, all EU English PVP servers together, all EU German PVP servers together etc.
@Yinkai: Very unfortunately, absolutely not. Layering (to my knowledge) has absolutely no impact on faction (or level) spread within layers. So in theory you could/might have a layer with large alliance majority, but that would just make the others even more heavily horde dominated… and given the inherent imbalance (in PvP realm numbers, specifically) the most likely result would be a number of layers, all of which are horde dominated, but with (somewhat) different ratios.
@Kovalos: If my recollection is not entirely faulty, EU English PVP era has two connected realm groups, not just one. Also, I suspect and as Nicolay noted, such a change would be at some later date, not any time very soon (probably).
I guess capping a layer at x players per faction is just futuristic technology we don’t have access to 
Reminded me of all those horde back in Classic crying for someone to invite them for a layer change because “there’s Alliance in my layer!!!”, hahaha.
Cluster (and to a lesser degree layers) were one of the worst things for me to experience as a player. The open world seems to be lively, but interaction with those players is limited. If you want to interact with them, you cannot trade with them, you cannot add them to your player-friendlist and you are likely to never see this player again, although you are at the same locations.
So while clusters increase the rate you see players, they make the game feel even less immersive and interactive. Personally I think a solution for dead servers should be a merge, not to cluster.
Thats why i put the ~ there. Wich means it is “around” 50%. More horde than alliance.
We did not have it in TBC atleast. There it could be as Trelw explained. Some layers where alliance heavy some horde heavy and alliance was the minority faction.
@Yinkai: chuckles heartily Not really, more of yet another not implemented feature… But let us consider a few models. Basic parameters as follows: We have approximately 40 000 PvP players at our disposal. Ratio is roughly 30-70 so about 12 000 vs 28 000. Layer overall maximum is set to roughly 6 000 (about one very large old realm).
Scenario one: No faction specific cap. There are 7 layers after all available players have logged in. All of the 6 first are likely to contain approximately 1800 alliance and 4200 horde. The last one will have roughly 1200 alliance and 2800 horde.
Scenario two: Faction cap is set to 3000 / layer. Horde now requires 10 layers. Layers 1, 2 and 3 contain roughly 3000 alliance and horde each. Layer 4 will likely be mostly full as well. Layer 5 might occasionally contain a minimal number of alliance, but mostly just 3000 horde. Layers 6 through 9 will be full of horde. Layer 10 will have some horde.
@Triva: Cross realm zones (CRZs) are (mostly) a thing of retail only. In certain respects, BGs and Arenas are as well, but we are largely discussing “outdoor” locations here. If memory serves correctly, layering became into existence as players told Blizzard NOT to implement sharding in Classic, which is closely related to CRZs. Also, unless I am severely mistaken, CRZs and sharding are NOT compatible with layering. Which, in turn, is both a blessing and a curse, depending on one’s point of view and specific situation at hand.
What this means in practice is that systems that have shards do not (usually) crash from local pressure, because the systems will just boot up more copies of that specific area, for example Elwynn Forest or Orgrimmar. It also means that there could be four dozen Elwynn Forests and just a handful of Stormwinds. Layered systems, on the other hand, can be forced to crash by simply stuffing too many people into a very small area, because the layers are huge and function best when people are spread out all over Azeroth (and beyond 
). Addintionally, each Stormwind has a corresponding Elwynn Forest, so if there are seven layers, there are seven Stormwinds and seven Elwynn Forests as well regardless of how busy they are.
As far as things concern connections… Connected realms effectively function as one, excluding one area, our names. If the connection process was not so prone to various kinds of errors, it should be used a lot more, in my not so humble opinion…