Don't merge realms of different languages!

Community General Discussion
778

trelw it sounds legit that merges of higher effort have to be implemented in parts. so I will donate to the ones who need if this plays out the way you described.

However, it just doesn’t help that blizzard decided not to inform the community about any roadmap or intentions when it comes to connecting servers and realms. This leads to theorycrafting as in this topic.

It just seems they decided to as little info as possible, in order not to create expectations from the community towards certain milestones.

@Janek okay now I got you. Yes indeed, if its the same efforts towards both servers (Scarshield, Argent Dawn) it might probably be wiser to choose Scarshield.

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779

@Stixy: It is basically just that they are not able to do A + B + C in one go, it has to be either (A + B) + C (later) or (B + C) + A (later). In this particular case they just in a sense went with a (A + C) + B (later) sort of approach.

There is another factor, which relates to this thread’s topic. Preannouncing something that is viewed in an unfavourable light far in advance might cause mass exodus / mass influx style problems, which could throw monkey wrenches into the overall work. I do fully agree that there are cases, where they should have clearly spelled out something along the lines of: “This configuration is NOT final, more will be done a bit later.” Unfortunately, as a single player my agreement on that has no weight in the matter whatsoever.

780

Ah, this thread is back.

So, with hindsight I can now say that the English community on the Alliance side won out and the Portuguese community on the Horde side won out.

So that means I’m not forced to try to understand Portuguese, which is kindda nice… I suppose. There is no longer a Portuguese Alliance community. It’s completely gone.

On the alliance side raiding scene, what remains is Deus Ex and Silverblade and possibly Velvet, although it generally doesn’t clear full Mythic. They get close though.

So anyway, that’s realistically 2 guilds that clear Mythic left. Grim Batol and Aggra both offered 0, and we lost 2 as a result of the merge.

So yeah, raiding scene got worse and the Portuguese community on alliance is dead. Not exactly a success if I might say so.

How’s the overall population looking @Trelw? According to wowrealmpopulation we’ve gone down to 2000, which is about 600 less than before. Interestingly no community site considers GrimBatol-Aggra-Frostmane a single realm yet. Not WoWProgress, not Warcraftlogs, and not wowrealmpopulation.

781

Raider Io does…

wowprogress doesn’t even have US-Nemesis and US-Tol Barad connected, those realms were merged in 2014 during the last connection programme.

I don’t really have post merge statistics since the whole events of the connection are still rather new but I would say thats about the result I would have expected, Aggra as a realm was always heavily horde dominated anyway, most of the alliance on the old cluster would have come from grim batol.

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782

Grim Batol was also dominated by the Horde the entire time.

All the census data I can find indicates that Aggra-GrimBatol Alliance is actually quite full of people, and being there now indicates the same. It’s not an empty realm. It just has very, very few good players on it. For whatever reason, the realm is also not particularly Portuguese, but seems more Swedish, which is quite strange given the Horde side actually lives up to the realm’s official language designation.

Either way, it does nothing to change my opinion, really. Don’t merge realms of different official languages for pete’s sake…

783

@Ishayoe: That is a very difficult question to answer, because something in the process broke CP, too. Grim Batol and Frostmane data gets correctly recorded, but Aggra is now called Aggr and fails to register correctly on WCR. I am going to have to resort to disassembling info to and from my future screenshots and try to figure out relative figures based on those. Looking at what little I have managed to upload to WCR and note myself while playing there tells me the following. Frostmane horde is effectively gone, there might be as few as less than 60 people left. Horde on Grim Batol is not in much better shape. On alliance side Frostmane appears to be noticeably stronger than Grim Batol’s.

I should actually be sleeping, but due to stomachaches I am currently up. I am going to run a post-midnight scan on both sides and see what comes up. If I do not fall asleep too soon, I will make another brief post once I have had a look at both factions.

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784

Hope you get better - but get some sleep. The research can wait. :stuck_out_tongue:

785

@Ishayoe: I did the scans and the results were… interesting. But now, despite the aches, I have to get some sleep or I will hit my forehead on my desk soon. Good night for now!

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786

Can, but they don’t want to.

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787

Incorrect, you chose to play a UK labeled realm. So there’s that.

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788

I’ve never quite understood the mentality behind “there’s no english servers” when they quite clearly state that chat in public channels will be (and as a code of conduct point) will be done in English.

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789

This makes me curious, how many people did you find on the 2 factions?

790

Interesting developments, I wouldn’t have bet on it because I was always convinced grim batol was an english speaking realm, so with just aggra speaking portuguese and frostmane coming I thought ally would take majority, but since grim batol was also portuguese this made it not so obvious, so I’m surprised the portuguese alliance community died out (also sad actually, was the only such realm).

From what you say in the raiding scene it doesn’t look like an improvement, and like janek said there’s only raider io who actually updates connection data in a timely fashion (few days to a week after the connection happened, first they will update the names, a few hours or a day after the numbers and balance too).

Who checks are obviously a good way to track active population, but unfortunately I don’t have any char on that realm cluster, so we’ll have to wait for trelw’s results, from how you make it look I don’t expect more than a few hundreds per faction at the time he checked, and I believe numbers should probably be at least 50% higher on ally than they are on horde.

791

@Esploratore:

Frostmane looks like this:

1 180 1 40 1
8 74 1 15 1
12 221 1 51 1
13 198 1 86 1
14 0 0 38 1
16 0 0 55 1
17 383 2 0 0

Grim Batol like this:

1 197 1 183 1
8 38 1 12 1
12 175 1 112 1
13 165 1 192 1
14 0 0 107 1
16 0 0 144 1
17 255 2 0 0

And as I noted, Aggra’s scan is broken and it fails to update on WCR.

That is not very much data to go on yet, but as you can see Grim Batol has much stronger horde values than Frostmane, but Frostmane is stronger on the alliance side. Because I was very, very busy with both lectures and other school work yesterday evening, I did not manage to run prime time scans yet as I originally intended. However, the data I already have, very strongly suggests that Frostmane alliance beats Grim Batol at prime time peak. I just can not say by how much yet.

The after 8 values are from today, just after maintenance had ended, so they are not very relevant overall except to confirm Frostmane is heavily alliance biased and Grim Batol is more balanced around the clock (at least outside prime time, for which I do not have data yet).

Since Aggra’s upload is broken, I need to do more manual notes. I can reaffirm one thing though. I am even more convinced than I was before that this connection needs further expanding. The overall activity totals are simply too low. As you know, Blackmoore was connected and for comparison some of its’ data looks like this:

17 1127 3 0 0
21 1663 2 0 0
22 1484 3 335 1

382 + 255 + x from Aggra vs 1 127 average alliance after 17 means that in terms of activity Blackmoore beats the 3-way even without its’ new components.

I have a contact teaching lesson coming up, so I will fairly soon depart for school (in about 40 minutes, it is now noon my local) and return around 14:35 my local.

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792

It’s a little bit difficult to read these tables that are unformatted and without headers.

Therefore I must thank you for making conclusions.

It’s unclear to me why the realm connection is considered high population if the numbers are this low. It is remarkable that Aggra-GrimBatol pretty much had the same numbers as Aggra-GrimBatol-Frostmane.

It’s even more remarkable that Aggra(Portugûes) is now called Aggr. It’s like they thought they could delete the Portuguese tag and we wouldn’t notice or something, and then they accidentally deleted a letter too many. I feel like a fool, playing a game like this.

What is clear to me is that this merge did not have the intended effect. There has to be excitement from both sides of a merge about that merge, and that absolutely was not the case here. It still boggles my mind why Blizzard chose to merge realms of two different official languages. There is just no excuse. I’m still pissed off.

793

@Ishayoe: Format is as follows: Server time in full hours, average alliance of scans, number of alliance scans, average horde of scans, number of horde scans.

So, for example: 1, 197, 1, 183, 1 means that after 1 server time, one scan found 197 alliance and one scan found 183 horde.
17, 255, 2, 0, 0 means after 17 server time two scans found an average of 255 alliance and no data on horde is available for that time point.

As for the “High”, “Low” dilemma… the connection has a “High” population, but that does not automatically mean it has a high activity rate. Slightly different view, but Silvermoon is “Full”, despite having an extremely tiny horde faction.

I know this does not make you feel any better, but I am only able to conclude that Blizzard has decided that Grim Batol / Aggra was also too low activity to remain alone. I need to go in a few minutes, so I have to stop for now. I will return at some point during afternoon (I hope!).

794

@Myself: About 18:30 server time, horde scan completed, 519 horde found. Initiating alliance scan…

EDIT: Scan complete at approximately 19:12, 918 alliance found.

795

That’s way too few. Is that all the realms combined or just one of them?

Also, ~500’ish sounds too large for Frostmane Horde. Afaik it’s definitely smaller.

796

@Ishayoe: Those were total numbers from the scans, all 3 subrealms included, levels 20-120 as is usual for CP. A few race class combos exceeded 49, so actual numbers slightly higher (+naturally a handful of 1-19s).

797

Better to have players with different languages than dead servers/AH. In vanilla did my server have majority players from Greece and that did go just fine! Thank you Blizzard for the merge even if u guys did proceed it some years to late!

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