Posts like this really annoy especially servers on retail suffering since MoP
State of TBC Servers - Community / WoW Community Council - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)
Retail has had problems for many years and never offered FCM from dead to busy servers they have even stopped connections and now asking for to paye for bulk moves .
Yet if classic or TBC players snap there fingers things get done and done quick retail players are being treated like trash.
It’s good that they are paying attention in other game versions but it’s disappointing they repeatedly forget that Retail really needs this too.
Different team, but yeah there’s tons of servers hurting for retail. One of the biggest problems was them opening up more servers going through Wrath because the bigger servers had queue times and the playerbase kept growing. Same thing happened on Classic release which led to so many issues further on down the line.
No idea why they’re so hesitant on pulling the trigger on this issue but they are taking their sweet flipping time with it…
A server transfer doesn’t take that much more effort for retail either. I think what hampers it is that there are a lot more retail servers and while merging to high pop might cut it, the cycle might regenerate itself with medium pop servers so those too might ask for a move, but then A, B and C servers get overcrowded for open world farming etc.
It’s not easy to balance, you don’t want too few servers, but neither too many, so you can cater to the most players’ needs. Luckily, keys can be still done cross-server, if not raiding 
no idea about pvp, however.
Cross realm doesn’t fix realm populations, just like cross faction play wont magically fix that imbalance either.
I think the main reason they did it for TBC and not for retail is that TBC does not support cross realm activities. So fixing these issues there is a lot more urgent.
But that’s still no excuse to just ignore the issue on retail. Even cross realm activities don’t really help with servers having dead economies or no guilds.
If you’re really cynical you could even accuse Blizzard of intentionally making people pay for the transfers themselves.
Indeed, you can’t group with a MR player from Hydraxian. If you are few… well, that’s busted, unless you transfer, don’t hope of clearing anything higher than Kara, even now that attunements were removed to ease the entry into raiding (even though these natural barriers made sure you did get the gear needed to stand your ground in raiding).
If guild restrictions were eased, that would also help a lot with raiding. Even more connections help, but it might be safer to remove that barrier entirely so eg. a Turalyon player can play with those in Silvermoon or Ragnaros.
As for economy, if I’m correct, AHs are server only… then linking multiple smaller realms will be again helpful - removing a barrier here and accessing any realm’s auctions will drop the prices dramatically which again isn’t good.
There’s a sweet spot where the wares are worth enough for the time/work/luck invested but are not overpriced either.
So TL;DR: for guilds, removing the realm barrier, for AH, joining multiple low pop economies will help immensely.
You wouldn’t really be able to have any-realm guilds without having any-realm AH however because of the guild bank - if players from any realm can join the same guild, they can all access the guild bank so materials and gold can be moved between realms, linking the economies anyway. So they’d really have to do both or they wouldn’t be able to have guilds working properly (e.g. imagine if you could join a guild in name but couldn’t access the guild bank, so you would not be able to contribute mats to make flasks for the raid team, or not be able to trade mats so a guildie could craft you a leggo base etc)
Would be nice if they finished connecting realms in retail like they said they would so that people aren’t stuck on realms with nothing to buy or no one to sell to.
Damn, I forgot about this… and this will cause item prices to drop so low that even raw gold farming will beat selling trade goods on AH.
So, merging or connections it is…
Being on a low population realm with my old main is what made it my old main. I don’t really play retail anymore anyway.
But if you look at the free transfer thread in the TBC Forums you can see people still complain, mostly due to their faction being the low percentage faction on the realm with a medium/low borderline population. Even with paid transfers people still left.
Maybe Blizzard should run a poll as to whether people on the realm want a merge/connection or not. Then connect those realms that want it.
btw, 26 days for the reply, if you didn’t notice.
They’re too busy playing Classic SoM hardcore.
You right dee, and classic is f2p, retail should definitly get more attention
Classic versions have no long term future retail does (no matter how people pretend otherwise).
offering migrations to large servers would be disastrous, there’s already an issue where a huge amount of players are concentrated on a few ‘super-servers’. If they don’t go to those servers they don’t move.
Blizzard need to lock the super-servers and start connections again. That would require effort and we know that’s not happening anytime soon.
Makes no difference there has been a thread up for over 2 years asking for connections and FCM and no blizzard reply so no idea why you point that out after all it was thanks giving, xmas and new year . So if you are trying to say they didnt respond quick you are wrong.
You see one blue post in this thread ?
So yeah we do get treated bad compared to classic and TBC you can not even try to deny it.
nostalgia is a weapon to keep people in a state of content living on the feeling of past memories instead of pushing for new memories…
i say no to remakes and re-releases… and everyone else should do the same if they know whats best for this world.
Yet another post about TBC servers
Maybe do something for retail you know thanks.
I disagree and will keep playing on remake, classic and seasonof mastery,retail can go to hell and have all his people just afking or unsuscribing that’s well deserved from the dev team.
Well you seem to spend an awful lot of time on retail forums and always negative so it does not surprise me at all.
Why not use the super server infrastructure like guild wars 2, no server issues, no server boundaries, places are always busy, servers become almost seamless, so cross server guilds etc.
So everyone can play with who they like.