New server connections, incoming!

Moonglade / Steamwheedle Cartel / The Sha'tar
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Very exciting news. We don’t know who gets one. But hopefully it’ll include us and our neighbours at Darkmoon Faire/Earthen Ring. I suppose Defias Brotherhood/ et al and even Argent Dawn may be options Blizz will consider too. But those are less likely.

I have my own preferences, but at this point I’ll take any connection they’ll give us. While RP is strong within guilds, and there is some community, it is small and public RP is a rare gem. RP realms, more than any other, benefit from a healthy population.

So yeah. I am very excited!

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same here,but what will happen when even now,it is a struggle to find a free day to RP with no other events,and a server with the potential to double our number gets here?

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Interesting news! Generally, I believe that it would benefit our overall roleplay experience if all the roleplay servers were combined into one large cluster. On the other hand, I cannot deny that I personally chose the Shar’glade Cartel because I enjoy its relatively quiet and friendly atmosphere in contrast to the more hectic and harsh environment at the Argent Dawn server. So far I remain ambivalent.

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I’m surprised that they’re merging more realms rather than enabling cross-realm guilds and a regional auction house.

It will be interesting to see what happens. I hope that we don’t merge with AD because I like the quiet but joining up with all the other RP servers will probably be okay. But as our current cluster is flagged as ‘medium’ I suspect that we’ll just remain as we are.

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Seeing how often we get dumped into Argent Dawn shards, just watch them connect us to it.

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I don’t think anyone will end up with Argent Dawn. The server is marked as Full, and they’ll throw a fit if they have to deal with “invaders”. But roleplayers on other realms should largely be eager for more connections.

The past mergers were very successful for a while. But it was clear they didn’t take it far enough from the start. We campaigned for a 5 way merger with Darkmoon Faire and Earthen Ring, as the only way to create a viable alternative to AD, 7 years ago. I told them then, that anything less would just bleed out again. But Blizzard commented they feared we might end up too big.

It’s too late now. Even if they merge all non-AD realms, we’ll be right back here in a few years, campaigning for a full merger of all RP realms. Still, I’ll welcome any merger with new friends at this point. More connections is long overdue. I’ve been waiting for it for the last 5 years. Blizz first promised there’d be more, at Blizzcon 2.5 years ago. They sure kept us waiting!

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This is exciting but I do NOT want to ever be merged with Argent Dawn. I didn’t leave that realm years ago just to be forcibly pushed back to it.

That said, I’m incredibly eager to meet new RPers (especially since the cross-realm experiences I’ve had so far had been splendid–big shout-out to the Stormwind Market team). That said, I am far less excited about getting saddled with even more OOCers, but I guess this is the price one has to pay for access to more RP.

All in all: good news, although I would’ve been far more excited if it happened years ago when all the non-AD realms had bigger RP presence than we do these days.

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What my ideal RP-future seems, is connecting with ER/DMF and remove the Defias Brotherhood cluster, giving the RPers free transfer to our new server, and an option for non-RPers to transfer to another server.

But im looking really forwards to a merge.

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I’d like to think the RP-PvP crowd is as attached to their realms as we are, so I absolutely wouldn’t want to see their cluster to suffer. That said, I am all for coaxing the OOCers into transferring.

There are tons of realms where you can PvE or PvP. I wish people who have no interest in RPing moved to realms more tailored to their experience instead of ours.

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Wasn’t Argent Dawn bigger than everyone else put together even back then?

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Connecting with more RP realms would be great, it would bring more people and guilds to interact with, especially on Alliance which needs it. I’m not that opposed to AD, that server already has a ton of guilds secluding themselves because they prefer the quiet, showing that it’s possible to do that while having the random RP of cities made available. But I think merging with just ER/Darkmoon would be the better call, the charm of our server cluster has always been that we’re the quieter alternative to AD.

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You may be right. Still, it was a fear at the time that it could potentially lead to queues like AD had at the time during new expansion launches. Not sure how realistic that fear was. Either way, no risk of that now.

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Good news. Gonna mirror what most have said already and I’d hope they merge all the non-AD servers into a single realm and carry on from there.

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More than one person has commented that this has been a long time in coming, but that most of all also hope it isn’t AD. That much seems clear. I’m also personally excited for a population boost; I’m fairly committed to running a guild-less toon as my main and would love for more public/open/non-guild events or simple walk up opportunities to occur.

Here’s a question for everyone, though. What sort of population pyramid/bell curve can we anticipate with a server merge? Is it possible to estimate, for example, that we could expect one enthused member of the RP community to be added for every five OOCers/non-RPers? One to ten?

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Unfortunately, if our realm is any indication, I fully expect the influx to be 90% OOCers.

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I’ll bite, As i don’t know much about what happens horde side, but You make is sound like you have Large mounts parked on your face and lollers bouncing around you 24/7

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Goodness no, nothing of the sort.

That said, our RP community is massively outnumbered by OOCers. As (afaik) we’re more active than ER/DMF, I have a feeling they have even more OOCers than we do.

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Any-who.

I wouldn’t of thought that we’d merge with Argent Dawn, as the server is quite full at the best of times. ER/DMF is pretty much Guarenteed, as for the RP-PVP cluster depending on their population I think it may be a possible candidate.

If we do get connected to the RP-PvP cluster, I doubt it would kill off what’s left of their ‘culture’ as you can opt-in, by using Warmode.

Hopefully we will find out soon about what will happen. Because last time when connections were done, the RP connections were nearly the lastto be announced.

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I dont understand this sharding.
I used to play on shatar, but I never saw any RP, people in any cities or out in the world o.O

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Ravn, I can give a short explanation, as there are 4 things in play with how servers can act, and that can get a little confusing.

Sharding: When a zone gets too busy, such as the starting zone of a new expansion at launch, a server can split the players in that zone, over two or more different versions of the zone. This is done to prevent it from getting too busy and laggy, and may result in you not seeing another player on your server, in the same place as you, because they are in a different shard. Blizzard tries to minimize this on RP servers.

Cross-Realm Functionality: These days, it is possible to play with friends from other realms. If I make a group with a player on the Turalyon server, they are transported to my server. It’s why you may sometimes see players from completely different realms on your own server.

Cross-Realm Zone: WoW is supposed to be a social game, but some realms are so small, or have zones so empty, that Blizzard activates CRZ to merge the zone of different realms together. It is why on this server, it is pretty common to see players from Earthen Ring/Darkmoon Faire or Argent Dawn. Not many people like CRZ, because the people you see remain separate. You cannot add them to your friend’s list or guild. Some RP addons don’t work cross-realm. You can’t trade with them. So mainly they are just competition for mobs and resources. Only Orgrimmar and Stormwind are immune to being Cross-Realm Zoned.

Connected Servers: Connected servers effectively merge servers into a permanent bigger combined realm, with all the benefits that come with it. Players from realms connected to you may trade, become friends and guildmates and all that good stuff. For realms that already Cross-Realm Zone together, this is a superior solution, as they would also gain the benefit of shared community.

The main problem with RP on a small realm is that lack of players means a lack of publicly available RP. If there are not enough players to encounter out in the world, roleplayers turn to guilds for all of their roleplay. This is what’s happened currently. There’s guilds around, but they are largely focused on their own roleplay adventures, not standing around in public, for other roleplayers to encounter. More connected servers would grow the community, and bring about positive change in that area. Especially if they do end up merging all the non-AD RP realms together.

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