Will the efforts needed to open the portal to the Isle of Quel’Danas ever auto-complete on semi-empty servers?
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In Wrath prepatch, probably…
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Thanks. Patience required.
I can’t reply to myself - Vanillataur’s alt speaking:
… at least today it is open on HW - not that it matters much, when the server will be forcefully retired. Sigh.
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Keep LFD, Dual spec, Race and Faction changes in Wrath Classic (but not at launch)
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Give 2 Era servers for TBCC
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Let the RP servers survive.
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Glad that even small server made it. Sadly Blizzard choosed extermination over merging, but hey at least people will be able to join bigger guilds in Wrath.
For me the “fun” of playing on a full server is the opposite, so I’m quitting. I chose a low Pop server willingly and with open eyes because that’s how iI tick.
Vanillataur is on a whole new Level ahead of blizzard.
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IDK for me finishing the Classic triology is the main reason I started the Classic project to begin with, since in 2005-2010 I was a casual and missed 80% of the raiding, especially in Vanilla and early TBC. For me it is like new content, just chilling and having nostalgic vibes from it (like Isle of Quel’Danas today I one-shot daily quest mobs and comparing that to the effort I had put on my barely geared druid back then 
) . I played on our region single PvE realm that was around 3K raifing population wise, before this year events and change of policies rapidly decimated it’s population to about less than 1K active raiders, so in case it dies I am leveling Horde alts right now on the last surviving PvP realm of our region. Not like I never played on PvP, monofactional, small or large realms all these 17 years (with many breaks of course) for this circumstances to stop me from killing Lich King this time.
Everyone who was targeted by their latest announcement chose to stay since all of them had the opportunity to transfer for free for at least 4 month. So basically this entire decision was completely against the community. One has to give Blizzard respect for their track record in such decisions. Communities that don’t want intervention get it and those that actually want it get ignored 
.
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Well Blizzard clearly lied about not wanting to introduce faction change due to Roleplaying community, only to announce closing of all RP servers a month later.
We can then assume they are lying about every other decision as well, brcause why wouldn’t they? So that means closing the servers has some ulterior motive and has nothing to do with wishes of the players on them.
Much like Diablo Immoral was developed to sell predatory microtransactions, I now simply assume EVERYTHING Blizzard does is motivated solely by immoral, short term profit. The only question is, how will they profit from this?
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You need to draw parralels with Firemaw closure topic. When Blizzard opened transfers to almost every half dead realm there was such comment that people would never really profit from transfering off Firemaw, because population is spread too thing among other realms and if they would limit transfer from Firemaw to some few servers the process will begin faster. Blizzard must have thought about that and desided to prepare ground for it.
Well each to his own. I won’t ever play on a PvP server, I don’t get any fun out of it at all, and the corpse run - I loose every time - is just a waste of time.
Playing on a larger server, where every Quest you have to stand in line and wait for Quest objectives to spawn … well, no thanks. I moved server with my guild when free transfer came, but moved back to HW - paid transfer - because I did not like life on a high pop server.
I stay on HW with my main, and if I can’t play, well I just let my sub run out.
I’m really feeling let down over this high handed way of treating players.
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My guess would be that contrary to common belief additional “virtual” servers might still cost Blizzard additional money. With shutting them down they can reduce the overall (sharded) server performance and safe some money. Just a guess but otherwise I don’t see a point in closing them. If they would like to warn people that they may choose a scarcely populated server they could just add an additional server status → “Empty” below like 200 people.
The entire population of all the EU servers was 160 people - 110 of them on Celebras alone. They have no real impact on the overall population density. Also I would watch very closely what is happening to Firemaw. What we currently see is that is that people transferring off Firemaw are not distributing evenly accross the realm. In fact they only fuel the highly imbalanced realms like Earthshaker, Golemagg and Gehennas. Smaller realms not profiting at all and it might be likely that Firemaw gets also destabilised in the process. It may be likely that we end up worse than we started. I personally think the approach Blizzard is taking is neither smart nor careful,
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Blizz is on a spree not giving players what they want.
Closing the RP servers, not doing anything about Arena ladders, not merging semi-big servers to create a “Firemaw competitor”, not helping out SoM with either the Gong or the population.
All what they do are either too late, too little or heavy-handed in the extreme.
“You think you do - but you don’t” … are they just trying to make this a true statement?
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I also saw people quoting that statement when others demanded “retail”-like features. And I always argued against that, due to the same you are implying. BLIZZARD tries to create such a bad version of classic that we get the worst impression possible. They create an environment were retail like features are needed to cover shortcomings Blizzard is currently to lazy to address (look at the current LFD discussion and the impact of LFD on smaller servers).
Another example: The ingame economy is highly inflated (even worse than in real life right now lel) due to botting and gold selling. When developing WoW Blizzard hired real economist to create a self-sustainable healthy ingame economy. These people are long gone. The developers currently running the game have no clue about economy. And they are too lazy to maintain it. For having it to work Blizzard needs to ban botters and other exploitive behaviour. Both can be best compared to people paying with counterfeit money. But that is not wanted because these bots also create revenue - This whole loops destroys the entire economy and it can only become worse and worse over time.
It is not the players fault that it is that way. Blizzard just doesn’t follow the intentions of the OG developers and this in the end leads to a mediocre experience.
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If this was the reason, closing a heap of Retail servers would net them way more.
Don’t trust IF numbers. I for one has played on HW every day since it opened (- 2 months away as I moved over with my guild but returned via paid transfer), and I’m not included in that number.
Exactly - why not just leave those that chose to stay on these servers with open eyes be? Because this:
EDIT: I actually think we mostly agree 
You are excluded for 1 week. After that you are included in the data. From my experience Ironforge is a very good tool to detect trends. For example the free character transfers Blizzard provided were very likely connected to an overall (active) server population of around 2500 people. At least that was a coherent connection I could draw between both round of free transfers.
EDIT: I actually think we mostly agree
I think so too
To be in IF data - as far as I know at least - you have to register somewhere, and I never did So for absolute numbers, not so good - but for trends just fine.
HW shows at 0 now in IF - I play there and others too, at least I’m not all alone when I log in 
You don’t have to register. You must be either logged (so have participated in a raid logged on warcraftlogs) or have played an arena match. And while this data might be screwed on niche communities (like RP) or servers with a non-existent raiding scene they are widely used on even low populated servers. On my servers (200-300 alliance players) all of the remaining guilds log their sunwell / BT progression on warcraftlogs - I mean it only needs one player in the raid to type /combatlog and you have all the data you need.
I have done neither on HW so no, I’m not counted - which is also proven by me playing several days a week, never being alone and IF still showing 0 