Surely that’s the holy grail they’re looking for? I mean, I know you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but keeping as many of your paying customers as happy as you can, ideally for as little outlay as possible, is what they should be aiming for. And it costs next to nothing for someone to make one post giving paying customers an update. We’re not asking for a huge long blog post, just a nice quick answer would do.
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The thing is, I don’t think they believe it matters whether or not they communicate, because people will keep playing no matter what.
People will just put up with it, because they enjoy the game for what it is too much. I mean no matter how much a person despises their mother in law, they’ll still love their spouse.
It’s the same with many people playing WoW. An intense dislike for the people who are in charge of WoW, but an intense like for the game itself. So basically, no matter how bad of a company Blizzard becomes, or has become, people still like WoW too much to speak with their money and simply stop playing.
And I’m not excluding myself here.
I would not recommend any game this company puts out, to anybody. I’m incredibly far from satisfied. But I’m still paying, so are many other people, so even if it costs them nothing, outside of two minutes of their time, it’s still two minutes that change apparently nothing, because stupid sheep such as me still play this game, no matter how little of a fork blizzard gives about us.
This. Even ‘we don’t know’ would be better than complete silence. They may well be reworking it because of the Khadgar problems or may even not be able to continue because they don’t know what happened with Khadgar. It’s quite possible they don’t know if they can continue, but please … pretty please with sugar on top … just say something.
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However … to put my reply into context … I was replying to your statement “Satisfied customers or paying customers? Can’t have both.”.
You’re suggesting that there is a choice between satisfied customers who don’t pay, or paying customers who aren’t satisfied. Which I don’t believe to be true.
Pretty sure there are plenty of free games out there that people aren’t satisfied with, but still play, and I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people who play wow, who ARE satisfied with it. My dad loves it … he only scrapes the surface of what he could do with it, and doesn’t do any group play, he just potters around levelling various characters and doing quests. I suspect there are plenty of others doing the same.
All I was trying to get across is, even if it’s not possible to keep everyone happy, for something like this where, at the moment, we’re just asking for some information, not even for them to actually DO anything, it takes very little out of their budget to fill that need.
I’m really hoping for a merge for the Emeriss, Hakkar, Crushridge, Agamaggan, Bloodscalp and Twilight’s Hammer group as well. Even with this many servers, ghost town is an understatement.
I’m also hoping Blizzard will share with us the current (and previous) realm populations so they can show us whether or not they achieved what they were hoping. Because at the moment, methinks no.
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I gave a look at what you said, as in that most guilds between top 1.000 and 2.000 in world rank at the end of an expansion usually struggle to clear the content and indeed, this one: https://www.wowprogress.com/guild/us/area-52/Haunted+by+Murlocs
is the top 1950 world guild, it’s in US area 52, one of the biggest realms in the world and while they cleared nyalotha late august if you just go back to eternal palace they only managed 6\8 before the tier ended and ranked top 2146 world; I know crucible doesn’t count much, so I’ll skip it but ranking was terrible, then in BOD 7\9, ranking world 3.170, and finally uldir 5\8 progress, ranking 3.859 world.
So indeed, you have a point with this, several guilds that are full mythic atm (which surprised me but they are around 2.300) do not clear fully most raids except the final one of an expansion, so our count of full mythic guilds would go down even more on that basis.
And indeed, we have limited data to gauge population, we can use guilds, raider io (more updated than wow progress), personal who’s and the label of player pop blizzard puts, but nothing is perfectly accurate and just as an example, roleplay realms tend to be underrated in these sites such as wow progress and raider io, cause every casual roleplayer that doesn’t raid or run mythic + isn’t counted, argent dawn for example has around half the total amount of raiding guilds (even casual) other top realms have, but when I checked on who all high pop realms it posted higher population number than ANY realm but kazzak and silvermoon.
Like many users you have an incorrect idea of what new players means: it simply means if I select italian language with a new account I get redirected to pozzo, rather than nemesis, and in that case uninformed players, so generally beginners, will not manually select another realm, thereby helping to repopulate that realm.
However new players means absolutely nothing when it comes to population.
Let’s pretend we could connect italian to english realms, most people know draenor and silvermoon are famous for being some of the biggest realms in the world, let’s say they connected pozzo to silvermoon AND to draenor, now pozzo, silvermoon and draenor would be marked as new players, but it certainly wouldn’t mean they’re low pop, in fact this would make the BIGGEST realm world wide, and also well balanced!
This is the reason why nemesis is not marked as new players, cause players are not redirected there when they make a new account.
Now, italian realms aren’t in as bad situation as others, but they also aren’t excessively populated, any of them, so connecting them is a reasonable move and it will also help rebalance population, the fact nemesis has no ally guilds is a real problem.
All we have to see is if blizzard will continue connecting early in 2021, I honestly think they will.
As my currently inactive friend Maybella would tell you, blizzard did this already a looooooooong time ago, back in 2013 they offered a significant discount on realm transfers JUST before announcing the first round of realm connections back then, which obviously generated angry responses, expect them to do similar stuff again.
Also, they closed a topic about connections in the US forums purposely and didn’t answer the players asking if they were done! I know it’s purposeful cause topics stay open 30 days, that one was closed after 10!
There’s also zero reason to connect it with low-pop servers as well. It won’t solve a thing for us. CoA is a casual server, but it’s not a dead server by any stretch. Not having a 12/12M guild isn’t a big deal in my opinion.
And connecting us to one or two low-pop servers won’t really make the AH suddenly much better.
So no, I can’t agree with this. I used to be on Vek’nilash before it got connected to Eonar and Blade’s Edge, and the connection didn’t help much, if at all. All three servers are dead now.
I think it is a horrible misperception to believe that WOW simply sustains itself, just because there is no better alternative on the market. A synergy between developers and players is the bread and butter for any successful game that plans to exist many years from now. Those who fail to maintain and foster this synergy, won’t survive in the long run.
Just to give you an example.
People are spending countless hours and efforts testing the WOW Beta and reporting bugs to the development deam. As much as it looks like a premium gift from Blizzard to be allowed to test it before the actual release, it much more helps Blizzard to improve and develop their product. On top of this they even cash in on monthly subscriptions of those testing.
Its a synergy of game developer and player, in which one cannot exist without the other, thus both parties have to be treated with equal respect.
In my opinion, this synergy got a little bit out of balance. Shadowlands was postponed as inofficially predicted and the development team turned into silence mode about a burning topic (Server Merges) that might not be important for them, but for us.
And this imbalance is what causes people to be upset or disappointed, and as someone who is playing WOW on a dead realm pool I am telling you in all honesty that we have lost many players to the game entirely because they couldn’t participate in end game content, but couldnt afford to pay a server transfer.
It is just ridiculous and just pure incompetence.
It wont make me stop playing the game, but it makes me entirely disagreeing with their mindset vision and this might impact me in the long run, as soon I get a better alternative or loose interest in the game itself.
The cherry on top is that they even give a cash discount on server transfers instead of just admitting that they failed and need a second attempt later this year or the next one.
this thread has 24,4k views at this point of writing and its evident that they intentionally ignore what the community has to say.
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I wholeheartedly agree. I would just say the said synergy hasn’t been in balance for quite some time now, which is the entire issue, isn’t it?
It’s as if we’re simply some peasants that are occasionally graced with the presence of a clear statement from the gods themselves, written in holy blue letters.
I don’t believe whoever made the decision to not tell anybody anything regarding merges has any respect for their customers. And that’s the entire issue.
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A daily reminder that you left many servers dead empty. 
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They at least showed themselves in the german thread, though not much of an update on the actual situation 
Maybe with prepatch out they might be able to do a few extra before the expansion launches but well see i guess, probably wishful thinking. 
Saw this blue post too. The mod gave technical support for a guy who had issues finding his character in the realm overview, while ignoring dozens of people asking for a server merge update. Just shows that community mods evade giving any detail or information by Blizzard protocol. Ridiculous.
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Exactly, that’s what I noticed in the US forums too: they purposefully closed a topic about connections where players asked for updates!
A reason for them stopping the realm mergers, might be because of the problems with Mythic raid lockouts caused by the mergers. As far as I can tell every single mythic guild on a realm that got connected had their lockout destroyed.
And it seems like Blizzard couldn’t find the problem so as usual they just decided to not respond, so some guilds on the servers that got connected multiple times, lost weeks of progress. So, I think and hope (Really HOPE) that Blizzard just decided to wait till after prepatch with more connections as people can no longer get the achievement.
(Not sure if anyone has already mentioned this, since I haven’t really been checking the forums for the past month or so, as I have been unsubbed.)
To be honest this sounds like an insignificant issue comparing to thousands of players on empty servers.
Just to rub it in … on my almost dead realm, I’m currently stuck in a queue. sigh
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Same here! 
Last Blue post here was two months ago. Sterling job. We ALL know what this means, they just lack the honesty to say it. And I’ve love to be wrong.