Hmm Frostmane will join Grim Batol and The Al’Akir cr’s will join Burning Legion. Both low pop servers joining high pop servers. I hope that if it actually works this time that they will connect Kilrogg/Arathor at the same time or i fear they will just ignore and forget about them
They won’t connect arathor etc. unless announced, just like they didn’t connect any more forscherliga after it failed.
As for the connections, quite interesting, hopefully they work this time, blackmoore, grim batol and burning legion are full, high, high, and they’re ofc being used to fix the low pops they’re connected to, as for the others they’re regular connections.
Blackmoore is very balanced but slightly horde dominant, so this should help both factions on lordaeron.
Burning legion is heavily horde, but al’akir has so few allys that its ally population will still become much more decent.
Grim batol is very balanced and will help both factions on frostmane, which is basically ally only, so hordes will finally have some people to do stuff with.
The other 2 mergers are pretty regular ones, should be useful for both factions.
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@Esploratore: I went through my predictions and I must admit that Blizzard managed to surprise me in two of the five cases. It appears they have finally gone for combinations that have a far bigger second component and in other cases it is evident there is a further connection incoming later on. Very, very interesting overall. Now I will just keep both my fingers and toes crossed that the attempts succeed without massive problems.
Some more patience and I believe your wish shall be granted. Ghostlands / Dragonblight is on my prediction list as one of the “suitable partner depends on other preceeding connections” cases. As of right now, there are still multiple options left and as indicated by the already existing announcements, it is not yet possible to determine whether that pair gets combined with some other pair / triplet or directly to some larger currently single realm. There are, at a quick glance, at least 16 possible options left at the moment.
@Gnomeofdeath: I was not surprised by this pairing. However, considering some of the other choices Blizzard made, I am currently asking myself whether there might be an additional connection in the planning after this 4-way has first been successfully completed. I may have to revise my predictions once a bit more data is made available publicly as there are multiple cases where three 4-ways might instead be two 6-ways… ponders carefully
Yes, it’s indeed interesting.
Certainly negative on one side as it means no more flipping rockets and rhinos from BMAH, and likely means having to buy the brutosaur from vendor before pre patch, but bigger realms also mean better economy (and raiding for who raids ofc).
This week’s connections are a lot luckier for my personal realm configuration: lothar, azshara and burning legion connections will simply delete a realm off my missing list, since I don’t have chars on any of the 2, and as for lordaeron and alexstrasza connections, I have a char on these 2 and don’t have one on the 2 they’re being linked to, so effectively that’s 2 more realms I won’t have to make chars on any more.
Some connections are so aggressive that really no realm can be excluded, even draenor or silvermoon could be linked to extremely small realms without impacting the risk of queues significantly, so there’s no point for me levelling the last 4 chars on realms of my pick, cause it’s all about luck if they will end up connected or not, no matter the population.
And like you said, let’s hope these connections actually work, or the majority at least, cause the amount of connections that went through in EU has been pitiful so far.
Update on realms going to be connected on Thursday:
Those are the English connections.
@Esploratore: Keeping in mind the approach of Shadowlands launch and the limited public data, I would say Draenor and Silvermoon will stay single… Kazzak and Twisting Nether probably as well… Below those four… remains to be seen. As I noted in my reply to Gnomeofdeath, Blizzard may have elected a tactic that was outside my initial predictions. However, I can not tell yet for sure, because some of their decisions have been straight from my predictions lists and certain bits of data simply are not available anywhere outside Blizzard. I have already revised some parts of my lists, but they need more work before I do a “reprint”. :D:D:D
Additionally, keeping in mind what happened during (or perhaps better said (soon) after) program 1, we have to ask ourselves (as we will not get an official answer to this and there might even not be one yet even within Blizzard) whether the current program 2 is still feasible after Shadowlands patches have been applied to live realms. In other words, how much must be done in advance and what is possible after the launch spike settles down?
Second unanswered question is… How much has Shadowlands already sold? After massive amount of thinking, I finally decided last week to skip the digital versions entirely and pre-ordered the CE version (one only for my main account) from my local gaming store. Blizzard may already have a fairly good idea, which realms have the highest numbers of already existing Shadowlands level accounts and how many units of CEs they have been requested so far for the launch. It will be very interesting to see, how well Shadowlands sells in comparison to Battle for Azeroth.
Bigger realms only mean better economy/raiding if the added players are on the same side, if its just adding alliance to horde or vice versa nothing changes. Since neither the AH nor Raiding populations can interact. :-/
@Nerubine: Auction houses have been cross-faction for years…
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I guess Ghostlands Doomhammer and Turalyon will be last merged as they are the one who put up a fight for this to happen .
I hope Chamber of Aspects will be merged; although it’s not super low-pop, it still has no guild on either faction that’s 12/12 mythic, basically meaning you are forced to transfer if you want to get into raiding seriously.
@Daestra: For the time being I am just guessing, but I would predict both 2-ways will be used somewhere around the middle…
@Furixe: Based on the activity data I would say yes, possibly even fairly soon. However, again just guessing for now, too many combinations still remain available.
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I don’t know. Its population is quite balanced, so merging it with another realm could shift the balance to one side easily. Besides, the population is pretty solid, so why would they need more people?
Your post can be useful to see exactly what blizzard said, since they didn’t in this thread, but just so you know I and trelw were already talking about those specific connections a few posts back.
@Trelw: you might be right about those 4 realms having a low chance to be connected, cause if you think about it there’s evidence for full realms being connected, but there’s still a huge difference between some of them, and if you check the amount of people online on who at the same time on blackhand vs draenor the difference is crazy, even though both are full horde, and even tarren mill back in 2014 or so was quite a step down from draenor.
@Daestra: they will certainly connect ghostlands-dragonblight, it cycles between medium and low and these days has been low more often than not, a clear sign of decline, however I have to say doomhammer-turalyon is actually doing well thanks to the new players mark, I am on horde there and whenever I check people on who I see A LOT of people compared to most english realms, and the strongest side is ally, if they removed the new players mark it’d show as high.
That isn’t to say it will not be connected, but could be used to help some realm that is actually marked as low pop, who knows, maybe the one you mentioned.
@Furixe: chamber of aspects should really be merged, yes, it’s very balanced faction wise, an anomaly on a realm, and it’s been like this ever since I started playing there in 2013, and this obviously hinders progress cause you don’t have a dominant side with more people to raid.
It’s typically medium, very rarely high, I think it’s been declining in population lately.
Blizzard explain me why Kilrogg, Nagrand, and Runetotem realms get merged but Ghostlands/Dragonblight have less population (horde is to low) I mean what is up with that ?
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Cause Ghostlands wouldn’t live up to its name if they started connecting servers to it /s
In all seriousness it probably will happen they just aren’t doing all the connections at once, give it a few weeks and i’m sure the server will have company. Theres nowhere saying they will stop doing connections after this round and last time they did them, there were connections up until the week before an expansion launched (WoD)
In addition to what janek said, 1) the kilrogg connection failed, no matter what blizzard says on merit, so now it might be really hard to get it connected if blizzard is convinced it’s already done, so you might be better off on dragonblight, and 2) they said they won’t go in population order, it’s based on their physical locations and other stuff.
But they cant be that ignorant, they have to know it didnt work at all, there is posts all over the place about it failing, exept from Blizzard.
also if they do not connect kilrogg-hellfire, but connect the rest, it is the death of theese servers whit no way out anymore.
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Realms being connected today are already offline. Since they’ll only be back early morning we’ll only see tomorrow if the connection was successful.
Does this mean that Blackmoore wille be offline until next morning too? Because in the main menu in the “Breaking News” section no “Blackmoore” is listed.