2022-04-21 EDIT UPDATE: This thread is now nearly 3 years old, has over 1000 comments (26th highest, 9th unlocked), 31.6k views (47th highest, 5th unlocked) and who knows how many likes!
i have not have a sub in about a year which is why i have not contributed further, but i have tried to keep this thread going behind the scenes.
I would like to thank everyone who has kept this thread going over the last year. dead servers/faction imbalance NEEDS to be looked at. playing with other people is at the CORE of an MMO and blizzard donât seem to care. they need to be constantly reminded, if not here, then with your wallets.
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT WITH YOUR VIEWS. EVEN IF ITS JUST âI AGREEâ. THANK YOU. x
I know some people here might disagree with me personally on some posts Iâve made here, but this is a post from several guilds on Ghostlands/Dragonblight EU, not just me. If you have any grievances with me personally, please put them aside for this thread.
Also, Ghostlands/Dragonblight is not unique. Quite possible every low and even medium pop server faces similar issues. Please, if you can relate to this situation, add your voice to this thread, to try get it out to as many people as possible, and to the people that matter. If you are a âcreatorâ, we also would love you to nudge this towards your contacts in Blizzard.
Dragonblight EU has been around since the launch of vanilla, and Ghostlands EU went live on January 15th 2007 at 23:00 GMT, just one hour before The Burning Crusade was launched. They are both established servers with a long history.
However, over the years, the Horde population has diminished, especially since the introduction of Faction Change in WotLK. The current state of Ghostlands/Dragonblight Server is dire for Horde (and not much better for Alliance I presume!) Just finding players to keep guilds going is getting harder every week, with people constantly leaving the server for whatever reason. Clockwork Orange alone has lost 10 players to server transfers, and 8 people to boredom/leaving the game from our raid roster in the last 7 months. 18 people in barely 1 Tier! Thatâs almost an entire mythic raid team.
Guilds raiding here have dropped, with 79 in AtBT of which 20 were Horde, 64 in Uldir of which 19 were Horde, 43 in BoD of which 10 were Horde, and only 21 in CoC of which 6 are Horde. It is clear that numbers able to field raiding teams are dropping to an all time low when compared to earlier expansions. Even just comparing to HM and BRF in WoD, there were 143 guilds, of which 43 were Horde. Imagine what it was like in WotLK?
Getting accurate figures is hard, but YOU Blizzard have access to any metrics needed so you will know the TRUE state of the servers. We have done a survey recently though, and discovered 1,009 Horde guilds found through 3 sources: wowprogressâŚcom, wowrealmpopulationâŚcom, and primarily, the games own guild finder.
Only 167 have more than 30 characters in them. These 167 guilds comprise of 26,184 members, however we believe that 6,226 characters are what YOU consider inactive, ie, not logged on in between 2.5 and 3 years. That is about 1/4 of the population who are inactive!!! However, we can see from guild rosters that many more are ACTUALLY inactive. Only 4,375 characters are 111 - 120 ie. playing BfA content, with 1,339 not yet 120. This means that the number of characters in a position to assist guilds with raiding, pvp and Mythic+ is only about 1/10 of the servers population.
We found out of 1,009 Horde guilds there are:
- 29,801 characters,
- 7,698 inactive (or under level 10),
- 140 GMâs inactive,
- 3,169 level 120,
- 1,448 level 111-119,
- 5,835 level 101-110,
- 4,606 level 91-100,
- 2,559 level 86-90,
- 1,449 level 81-85,
- 1,270 level 71-80,
- 1,539 level 61-70,
- 7,967 level 1-60.
Also, there seems to be a disconnect between what you call âinactiveâ (not played in 2.5-3 years) and players who actually ARE inactive. All those 110 players who have not come back to BfA are inactive, weather they are counted as such or not. So while 7,698 characters are inactive by your definition, ACTUAL inactive players may be two, or even three times that. Also, 14% (at least) of GMâs being inactive does not help things either.
When I took the raw numbers from the games guild finder in January 2019, there were 31,242 characters in guilds on our servers. Now I have finished in April 2019, there are only 29,801. That means that since I started this research, 1,441 characters have left the server or gone guild-less, most likely the former.
You can see by these numbers that guilds donât have a pool of active players to choose from, and if you look at the other 843 guilds armories you can:
- Actually see WHEN they âdiedâ. If a guild has the majority of its characters at 100, or 85, you know that it was at THIS moment (WoD or Cata respectively etc) that the players of those guilds quit the game, and they have not been replaced here.
- You can look at the guild finder description for guilds. When people created them, they were hoping for it to become an active guild. It wasnât created to be a 1 toon bank guild.
- Another indicator that a guild has died, is that it is fairly hard to get more than about 150 guild achievement points on your own. There are guilds which now only have 1 toon which have several hundred or even thousand achievements points. This WAS an active guild at some point, but is now dead.
Ghostlands/Dragonblight IS dying. There are only 6 guilds left raiding in this tier (CoC).
We need a fresh source of players to bolster the guilds that we have, and to hopefully renew others.
And remember, even though we theoretically have access to 3,147 level 120âs, there will be many characters who belong to the one player! I myself have 10. While battlenet and lfg gives us access to all players across the EU, it does NOT help keep the health of guilds in check. If things remain unchanged, we will keep losing players who leave the server or quit the game fully, and it is highly possible that there will be only 1 or 2 Horde raiding guilds on our server by the end of BfA, but they wont be doing mythic.
Ghostlands/Dragonblight are NOT the only servers in this position. Many of the low population servers will be able to relate to these issues, and even most of the medium population servers.
2017-10-05, quote from Ion Hazzikostas:
The good news is that work is largely done. We actually recently connected a couple of Brazilian servers, solving some problems there, but also helping test this tech, ran into some issues, fixed those issues, and the next step for us is to seriously discuss which realms are the best candidates for connection and begin actually formulating a plan to do it. So, we hear you, weâre very sorry it has taken this long, but work is under way.
âThis was nearly 20 months ago. As far as we know, not a single connection has been made, but either way, Ghostlands/Dragonblight is still in a dire state.
Blizzard, we understand there may be certain things that mean this isnât a flick of the switch issue, such as what Ion mentioned before that quote about the massive changes to servers with the release of Legion, but please review the situation, AND rectify it here, as you are killing the guilds on Ghostlands and Dragonblight.
We have made a site to shine a direct light on the problem on our server. Also, some guilds are trying to work together to help each other complete content. If you are on Ghostlands/Dragonblight, and are interested, feel free to check out the site.
https:// clockworkorangegui.wixsiteâŚcom/gl-db
Signed:
Clockwork Orange,
Frogs of Doom,
Another Guild Name,
Vintage,
Anatidaephobia,
Disciples of the Horde,
Avalanche,
The Undertakers,
and yeah, massive difference between 150 and 4,000. or even 300 and 4,000.