World of Warcraft is best when you have a community of other players around you, and while numerous ways to participate in cross-realm play have been added to the game over the years, there are still many aspects of the experience that are realm-based. From your history with your guild to your interactions with the economy around you, a realm with a healthy population provides more opportunities, and it’s been several years since we last connected some realms.
We’ve now completed a comprehensive study of realm populations for every realm in the world. Over the next 2-3 months, we’re going to connect the low-population realms to other existing realms. This process will take place during scheduled maintenance, connecting a few realms each week, until we’ve connected every low-population realm in every region to a substantially larger population of players.
As this project unfolds, we will post notices in advance of each week’s connections in the appropriate regions and languages. During each maintenance period, everything will be automatically combined for the affected realms. When maintenance is complete, players on affected realms will log into Battle for Azeroth and find that they’re now part of a larger connected-realm community. At the same time, we’ll merge the appropriate realm discussion forums.
Please keep an eye out for notifications here as we proceed through this project. Again, we’ll let you know here in advance when realms in this region are about to be connected.
Bout fricking time and no you won’t get a pat on the back from me. You took too long, while saying a few times it was just around the corner and your communication was lacking.
But hey… at least you made quite a few bucks on players in a bind I guess.
Harsh, but sometimes you need to hear it.
It would have been something else if you’d offered players on death realms free transfers instead of having them spend their own money on a problem that was Blizzard’s responsibility.
On EU there are realms under English that consist mostly of non-english speaker. For example Burning Legion is mostly populated by Poles and Drak’thul by Czechs. It would be great if these or newly created realms got tagged the same as the Portuguese realm Aggra.
Please take a look at the small roleplay realms especially. I am on Moonglade/TheSha’tar/Steamwheedle and we’re really in need of further connections. And we’re not the only RP realm that is. A strong community is important for roleplay realms. The previous two mergers were very successful, for a while.
As a guild leader, I ask you Blizzard, please help out. I know a hundred players that would be super happy!
For now, I will happily bring this news to my guild and friends, and will keep my eyes on this closely. I am very enthusiastic!
RP realms are wildly different from normal ones, you can’t just fuse two together and expect it to work. For example on Argent Dawn we have a few guilds that does their RP in duskwood and they have sort of set up a server ‘lore’ that every serious RP guild takes into consideration.
Now if you have a server with a totally different and clashing culture around the zone it just becomes a mess, and this would apply not just in Duskwood but every zone that has RP guilds themed around it.
Roleplay’s just something that benefits a lot from players being about, and I feel at least on my realm, people were more positive to new connections than I’ve noticed on other realm types.
Right now there are 4 RP realms. The big black hole that is Argent Dawn sucking up all with its hungering presence. There’s the Moonglade cluster hovering at the bottom edge of moderate, Darkmoon Faire/Earthen Ring with a low pop. And the former RP-PvP group of Defias Brotherhood/ et al. No idea how those are doing.
So yeah, 3 options. At this point, I’ll accept any. Though a merger of Darkmoon Faire/Earthen Ring with Moonglade/Steamwheedle Cartel/The Sha’tar is probably most realistic.
I believe I’m on the realm with the most RP outside of AD. Horde’s bigger on RP here than Alliance. And right now we only have 3 big Horde guilds, and a small handful of small ones. It’s not going to upset the climate of even AD, even if they get all the other RP realms added to them. There’s just not enough left of them. Not that I think AD will get connections.
The smaller realms that were merged before, had a very positive experience. It wasn’t some huge hard endeavor. We made new friends. For a while, the community flourished. We wanted more, but Blizz at the time felt adding more could make it too large. I argued at the time that if we would remain too small to be a viable alternative to AD, it would just bleed out again. And it has. The people are great. There just aren’t enough.
