Kek, like Blizz would give up on that income. If they wanted to fix this issue they would already. They have statistics and graphic charts of income stuff. I’m sure in-game store and transfer related things are at least %15-20 of their income from WoW. This is how things work in game industry nowadays and of course for Blizzard Activision as well.
The rise of communitites should be a clear signal to the devs that there is huge demand for x-realm. A lot of people are raiding with their community, despite losing out on some guild achieves. Many would probably love to do mythic raiding - but can’t, because their particular realm doesn’t have enough active guilds.
The number of people who give two toots in a hurricane about realm leader boards and guild rankings is likely far behind the number of people who would just like to raid with friends without paying transfer fees in addition. Not to mention it’s nice to be part of multiple communities. Imagine the power of having all your alts on one server, but one of them is in a casual sunday community, and another is hardcore wednesdays, and nobody else is on your realm - but it doesn’t matter!
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Retail also had FCM when servers were over populated and had queues to log in. It has been a considerable amount of time since there was any need for that in Retail.
Classic has FCM to move people to less busy servers. It’s not special treatment. there is just no need in Retail for this service atm.
There is a need to help players on low pop servers though.
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I totally agree. I’ve said the same thing several times, that if merging is no longer possible that they need to think about moving populations. The problem is that people have to give up all sorts when moving realms, like their character name for example.
If guilds and the current servers atm work with [charname]-[servername] I don’t see why they can’t keep using that when actually merging servers. Then everyone can keep their original name, one problem mitigated.
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With server merges it works that way yes. With FCM it does not.
I am aware.
The point was that if naming is such a big issue, there are easy, already existing, ways to deal with that so that you can literally merge servers without having to rename your chars and guilds…
Pretty much a non-issue for retail.
OK I think you missed the point I made then. We have not had any more merges in Retail since they upgraded the servers. There is speculation that it is no longer possible to merge them.
Obviously merging is preferable but if they can’t do it then clearly an alternative method needs to be found.
Low populations are a major issue in Retail atm.
I know. I didn’t mean merge servers as in connecting them, I meant move a whole server group to another server.
Whether I am Magiola-Darksorrow on Darksorrow(/Genjuros/Neptulon) or Magiola-Darksorrow on Emeriss, it really does not matter, does it?
There are ways to so so, they just don’t want to.
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That is how the merges worked.
I was Punyhuman-Emerald-Dream and I could also have Punyhuman-Terenas. The servers were merged. That is how the merges get round the names and guild names being lost.
The naming worked like that yes, that’s the whole point.
But since they can’t connect any more servers for one reason or the other we will have to close down a server group and migrate those to another server while keeping the same naming as before.
How is that the same?
He means if they decide to close down my server (doomhammer) and move me to silvermoon, i would still keep my name sinaaki-doomhammer even though i’m no longer on doomhammer
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Exactly 
You are asking them to do what merging does, but merging isn’t possible.
A surname or bnet tag system would kind of work but then again I can’t speak for what Blizz systems can or can not do. 
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I would much rather choose my own surname if possible, doomhammer wouldnt be my first choice 
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Hence why I did not ask for a merge like the one they have done in the past.
But apparently I fail to make myself clear enough for you to understand, thus I shall retreat.
It would be comical if I had to keep every server name tagged to my character name, as I’ve moved several times. I don’t think it’s really a practical solution, especially if that server were not to be removed completely (closed down), you could end up with duplicates again. As others pointed out before, they are unlikely to delete servers. Merging was a way round that.
I don’t know what they are going to do. FCM isn’t a perfect solution either. You can make people move. Other games do close servers and force people to move when they log in. In WoW FCM is voluntary and even when there are huge queues many rather stick it out rather than go into the unknown. It would be slightly different offering it to move to busier servers, but you’ll always get some who never take up the offer, no matter what.
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I really wish they would figure out a surname system.
Historically the debate has always been “but how would you whisper that person?” to which the conspicuously simple answer is by typing /w [Alewin Stout] hello
You just mandate everyone to pick a surname then train your players to put square brackets around names and done. Now all those cool names that are languishing on unplayed level 1s and 60s resurface!
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