The sheer confidence in their internal data and abilities, and the willingness to write off your own concerns as being based on incomplete information, is starting to boggle my mind a bit.
Ultimately, the purpose of a realm merge is to avoid dead realms and provide a better experience for players.
Have they achieved this in the case of my connection?
No. Absolutely not.
Will they achieve it? Not the way they’re going.
I’m not even sure I can sum up the amount of problems, both socially and technically, that I’ve been through these last few days, but I’ll give it my best shot to chronicle them all.
- The merge is announced a few days ahead sort-of quietly, forcing us to cancel a raid night. There is no in-game login message telling you that this realm is getting merged. Many guild members had missed it entirely and got a shock when we cancelled the Thursday raid and instead asking for the optional Wednesday raid to take its place to at least do something.
- I note my unhappiness at merging an officially Portuguese and officially English realm together. Although I dislike merging realms of different language communities, I can see why it must be done, and I understand it - but this, for me, took it a step too far.
- The merge happened anyway with no communication, updates, or anything else. Even when the server was shutting down, which it did during our raid time so we were all online because we just had to experience it, there was no in-game message informing us why the realm was being shut down.
- Immediately upon logging in the next day, Frostmane shows up as having no characters. Many guild members are so confused they call Blizzard customer support. Frostmane does have characters, and they show up when you log in to the realm itself.
- All the players are missing from the guild list, the in-game calendar, and many other places.
- Attempting to add these characters results in “-GrimBatol is already invited to this event”
- Attempting to tab-complete these players that have not yet logged in has them show up 3 times. For instance, Sattana took a little while to log in because he was busy for a few days, and for the longest time I could auto-complete Sattana, Sattana-Frostmane, Sattana-GrimBatol, and Sattana-Aggra(Português)
- Currently the guild information lists an incorrect number of members - I presume it’s doubled all the numbers by counting a GrimBatol shadow-copy
- The item sets for our character panel were not copied over correctly.
- For some players, items that were already used or items that were owned much previous showed up in inventories. For some players, seemingly random items have shown up - although in many cases somewhat relevant items. We presume there have been bags mixed around between characters of the same name or something along those lines, but we’re currently unsure.
- My dislike for a cross-language merger, when better options were available and the Portuguese server was well alive, gets misconstrued as my hating Portuguese people, and I got an extraordinary amount of hate upon logging in. However, saner heads have prevailed and things are mostly back to normal.
- One of the top guilds left. 2 more were considering it, and so were… are we.
- Trade chat is full of Portuguese and English people flaming one another, reporting each other for xenophobia, using the wrong language, being awful, etc.
- Our raid yesterday evening had to be cancelled, because internally Blizzard had apparently used character transfer, so we ran into the limitation that’s supposed to prevent people from selling raid lockouts across servers - we all had independent 0/12M lockouts.
- There doesn’t seem to be much mixing between the two populations so far, with the notable except of FOR THE INVICTA, which is huge either way.
- There have been no updates anywhere about how any of this took place, how it worked, what problems we might run into, etc. Even as we actively run into issues and report them, we receive no replies or updates despite the fact that there is a stickied thread dedicated to exactly that.
- Various fansites haven’t updated their API’s yet, causing sketchy errors. This isn’t strictly Blizzard’s fault though, although if they had an API that didn’t suck, it wouldn’t have been a problem.
- a character had to leave the guild, get deleted, get undeleted, then join the guild. Until that happened it couldn’t be found by Blizzard’s API’s, thus some of our spreadsheets weren’t working, and it wasn’t on the armoury.
I’ve probably forgotten a handful of things from that list. Maybe I’ll update it as I start to remember. Either way, the notion that this was done by competent people using solid data as their guide is completely and utterly absurd to me.
“It was a ****show, obviously.” -Taliesin