The 2-3 month period that you mentioned has amply passed.
As little as two years ago, Connected Moonglade was a medium population server with several mythic raiding guilds consistently finishing tiers. It now has less than a thousand active players per faction and the worst PvE progress of all English speaking servers, while full servers continue to grow to unprecedented sizes.
At the very least, please release some sort of statement on what you are planning to do regarding realm connections and population imbalance.
Soooo ā¦ I realise that it is unlikely something major will be started up again in the next week or two, simply due to staff holidays, etc, over the Christmas period, however, this is the current situation as I see it:
(a) Either your ācomprehensive study of realm populationsā discovered that all remaining realm populations are within your parameters for acceptable levels.
(b) Or they donāt, and youāve not finished (as per your promise of connecting every low population realm).
If itās the former, Iād suggest that many of here could argue your parameters may be a little āoffā, as there does seem to be plenty of pretty quiet realms, even taking into account covid (more people at home), Christmas (more people at home) and the new Shadowlands content enticing people back. I would therefore humbly request that you take another look at your calculations.
If itās the latter ā¦ would it be possible, please, to have an update on when the realm connections will start up again? And ideally give us some indication as to why they were stopped so abruptly (although I realise getting some background to it all may be taking the request a step too far)?
If you gonna keep adding realms then can you disable the whole faction tagging mobs atleast on PVE realms? I rather not have any more realms connected then having to fight for mobs with even more people from the opposite faction
Im glad i started fresh on Draenor now instead of staying on 2 of my dead realms, should really consider splitting up big realms into 4 realms also and then connecting them to each other to balance the load, while connecting all the dead servers with big realms while at it to.
@Brogash: Realm connections do not negatively impact opposite faction tagging, because that feature does not care about which realm the opposition in that particular CRZ shard comes fromā¦ and Blizzard can not disable the CRZs, because they act as a load balancing tool for the really big realms. What Blizzard could and possibly should do is adjust which realms belong to which CRZ groupings, but generally speaking more connections would be a far better option as that would actually increasingly limit people in CRZs to oneās own home realm(s).
True, it wouldnāt matter if another server is connection to my own, because I got the whole lot of Draenor anyway tagging stuff, despite Iām not directly connected with it. But only sharded with it causing all sorts of issues.
So blizzard, please resume the server connections please!
This is also defined by location and locality constraintsā¦ it doesnāt matter if there is 50 servers or a single server in a pool, there is really nothing more blizzard can do other than physically move servers around, and while this is probably less detrimental in EU where the data centres are relatively close together, some people might pick their server based on latency and wouldnāt be too happy to see it moved.
Beyond this any faction imbalance is naturalā¦ its impossible to get a 50/50 split because the player base isnāt 50/50 in any given locality. The war mode bonus is intended to mitigate this but on most servers horde just happen to be the majority while RP servers tend to skew alliance. Blizzard cant and shouldnāt connect these servers together via CRZ for obvious reasons so you will have imbalances.
Blizzard has said nothing officially since a while before they quietly unpinned this topic. I think that if they are planning to come back and finish the work, they wonāt announce it until their online Blizzcon next month at the earliest.
But at this point, I donāt think they will. Shadowlands is probably a higher priority now, so those of us on small servers will just have to make do with our ever-decreasing populationsā¦
Yes, Iām possibly being overly pessimistic, but thatās what months of Blizzard ignoring our questions has caused.
Hey blizzard, when are you actually connect more realms huh? Or even just merge them seeing as you have the server tech to hold more players than ever before.
Oh wait you wonāt because you will lose out on server transfers.
They donāt care if your realm is dead, if all topics are locked in your realm forum with maybe 1 or 2 open threads more or less your realm is pretty much dead.
Why not remove the boundaries all together and just make language based servers?
That way no dying servers and the high population realms could potentially be offloaded during peak hours leading to less of a disaster that the launch was for some high population realms like Draenor.
Unless thereās a technical limitation weāre not aware of ofcourse, but seeing that youāre tying low population realms together now i donāt see the problem / objection?
What i would imagine is that players get a temporary copy of themselves on the realm they get put on and that will be saved to database once you log out?
But i wouldnāt recommend offloading unto busy servers but offloading busy realms to low population realms to compensate.
Again iām not their server technician or have no idea of the inner workings of their network code that handles client / server transactions.
So Connections did come up in the Q&A. The Shadowlands launch did end up taking precedence (Honestly understandable, although they should have given themselves more time for the connections), but they didnāt want to continue with the connections straight afterwards due to lessons learned from when they first connected servers (It was just before WoD, and they didnāt expect returning players causing queues and lag on the newly connected servers).
There was no mention of a new round of mergers being planned, just that they will act if they need to.
Thatās all we got, more or less. I understand and can appreciate their reasons for āpausingā (Their specific word) the connections, but Iām not satisfied in the least. It has taken forever for them to finally say something, and itās not really of any real helpā¦
Such a shame, our guild cant take it any longer and currently looking to move realm. Weād hoped to be connected for soo long but nada. Player base has dwindled since shadowland release and currently only around 2k players (not unique) at its peak on our current realm.