I don’t suppose you’ll get any reaction, unfortunately. I completely agree that we should have been due for a connection in that last round, but they fairly clearly mucked something up somewhere along the line, and then just stopped doing them, without any reason for doing so. They specifically said they would be Connecting all “low” realms which, prior to the process started (ie, when they gathered the data to assess what was classed as low), Lightbringer was.
Obviously once they started connecting realms the calculation to show which were classed as “low” shifted, so some of those that were low, that were connected, still remained as “low” even though they suddenly had a higher population, because comparitively, they were still low.
Ours was one of the few left of the original realms that should have been connected, that were not.
I suspect that the time taken to get realms connected became much longer than they ever expected due to the problems they encountered, until they got too close to Shadowlands launch and had to stop to concentrate on doing that. Then they’ve basically just “forgotten” about it. I would imagine at the moment, bearing in mind the current state of Blizzard, they’re looking to just try and hang on to what they’ve got, without starting to get into problems with trying to connect realms - now no doubt with less people to fix any issues that occur in so doing.
There was this “update” on one of the forum threads fairly recently: New Realm Connections are Underway - #991 by Deezle-the-shatar
And this from Blizzcon (around the 42 min mark): https://youtu.be/-euCjcFtbqs?t=2525 where they talked about the “pause” in connections.
Unfortunately, typically for Blizzard, as far as I know there were no forum posts explaining what had happened, why it had happened, why they didn’t restart the connections and when/if they ever will do more.
Our realm, I do agree, is not the place to be if you want to Mythic raid. There are just not enough relevant level raider numbers to make it viable. I mean sure, you might get one or two teams going … but you need a decent number of players at that level sloshing around to make up any shortfalls, and you also need more new mythic raiders coming in which, quite obviously, they’re not going to do. They just have to look at our wowprogress list.
I do think we have “reasonable” number of guilds who do the lower end of raiding … normal and heroic, casual stuff - personally I run a guild where we are regularly looking at 15-20 in each raid. That has come down from the peak of 25-30 at expansion start, but that is to be expected. I assume that other guilds similar to us, are in a similar position.
Going back to the forum threads … I noticed one of them was commented on, in order to “keep it live” … and within the same month (so it wasn’t auto closed due to inactivity) it was closed by Blizzard without comment. New Realm Connections are Underway - #994 by Mehetabel-lightbringer
There is a “live” thread here still: Dead servers MEGATHREAD - Ghostlands/Dragonblights plea to Blizzard - #794 by Punyelf-draenor