Now that the fresh (and other) realms are dying and population seems to be consolidating to the same few realms, I think there needs to be some consideration toward a solution to the problem that doesn’t include paying to move all of your characters.
I see a few possible options.
Cross realm dungeons / LFD. Now, this is a pretty unpopular option. I think it would really only solve part of the problem. There would still be a dead auction house and dead world to play in. It’s a bit of a non-starter for an overall solution. But it is probably easy to implement
Merge realms. This was suggested way back when retail started to get this problem of realms becoming entirely barren places to play on. It was never taken seriously, I guess because it looks like an admission of failure. But for classic, should it be seen that way? It’s a decent option I doubt they will take.
Cross realm zones, region wide AH, LFD and raids that can be formed across realms. AKA retail features. I don’t like it because it’s a lot of systems to solve a simple problem.
Linked realms (aka classic era feature). That is, the entire realm is linked with one or more other realms. Of course PvE can only be linked with PvE and likewise for PvP. RP/RP-PvP is a problem. But, not sure what to suggest for that. This solves all the problems without really breaking the classic effect. That is, you have an active world, active AH, ability to form groups and raids, join guilds (can you join a guild on another realm on linked era realms? Never checked) etc. But you don’t need to move realm. The facility already exists and is employed on era realms.
I guess to me, the last one makes most sense. But I don’t quite understand why it’s not already been employed or stated it will be employed. They can roll it out without effort, and it would be a decent compromise versus the other options.
The cynic in me thinks they’re just hoping we’ll keep being the paid service pinata for them to beat over and over again for more money. Prove me wrong Blizzard. You have many options to fix or improve this, choose one.
The problem I see with linked realms are that around 1/3 of the population on the eu english realms are on the servers who are bellow 15k in pop (using ifpro for these numbers because im lazy today) and im going to guesse that a fair few are just like me and dont want to be on super over populated realms, for example Mirage have had a stable pop since day one of classic and linking it with just the other pve realms would make them bigger than the biggest mega server is right now, you wouldnt even be able to know the reputation of all of the semi large guilds at such size and everyone would just be a number for others.
I’m with you on not wanting the extreme pop realms. I also don’t think blizzard ever targeted 30k pop realms. They made it possible because it’s what people wanted.
If they have a more realistic target set for linking realms it could work. Of course it would surge at the start of each content phase, and if you let people join guilds you can’t really unlink realms later. So some thought as to max population target needs to be considered for certain. But they have this statistical data to hand to know what’s likely to happen and plan accordingly.
It´s not, unfortunately.
There is only one RP realm left in Wrath anyway :-/
And yes, in retrospective, i think, linking Celebras and Hydraxian Waterlords would have been the better solution (not sure about Zandalar Tribe, due to the PVP ruleset…).
I guess, there would have been more player willing to stay, if we had kept our little, tiny, beloved Cele.
For era, there is nothing todo.
Zandalar Tribe seems to be more or less empty, unfortunately, and has FCT to Firemaw.
On Hydraxian Waterlords the hardcore community is located, and they always tried to find a more empty realm.
On Celebras, several roleplaying guilds are located. We have about 5 RP guilds with a RP theme (though some of them very tiny), and about 4 PVE guilds with roleplayers (non roleplayers, light RPler and so on mixed).
We do not want to be murdered, merged, consolidated, linked or anything else.
The ony thing i need on era are more char slots…
People can at least hope but you and the like would rather prefer Blizzard opened Firemaw and Gehenna and for the good measure allow free transfers leaving only those two realms alive.
Is it? Where did you get this information? It has been frequently debated if it’s a good thing or not. But there’s no broad concensus wheter or not RDF is unpopular or not.
Only way we could know this is if a survey was held.
Ofc its easy to implement, because the system not only exists in retail, but originated in Wotlk itself. Current version of LFD is inferior in every way.
LFD isn’t a solution for the exact reasons you mentioned. Its a needed QoL thing, but that’s it.
This is the way forward. Connecting the servers together. We already have it done for PVP, so why not for PvE and take the sharding take care of the rest?
Servers should not get scrapped completely though, because they have a purpose, multiple people can use the same char name thanks to it.
