New realm connections are coming, which is good.
But what about a revamp of the realm selection menu so that it indicates which ones are connected?
Long due imho…
They would never do that because it would make it look like their reducing the number of servers, bad for shareholders.
Indicating which cluster they belong to wouldn’t take them away, as the characters still hold names in the format Toonname-Servername.
But it would be handy for a player who wants a new toon with a specific name, to be able to check if it is available on one of the connected realms. 
Would be pretty cool if there was a “Do you know what an RP Realm is and what RP is?” Prompt.
Followed by “Right, so do you intend to RP then? Yes/No”
Click ‘Yes’ it says "Alright then, " if you click ‘No’ it says “Why don’t you go and Do One then mate, you’ve got literally every other realm in the EU to choose from!”
A pipe dream, but a man can dream…
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Would seem sensible to have that info available instead of having to use a third party site or check the forums first.
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This would be awesome too.
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Actually, it would give the impression that the number of realms is reduced, because actually with connected realms the number of real realms has been reduced, two realms connected act in every way as one single realm, two connected realms is almost like merge those two realms into a single realm except with the connection system it gives the illusion that both realms still exists because we see the same number of “realms” in the character selection screen.
A good example is the Spanish realms, those have been already connected and we just have 2 individual realms and 2 groups of connected realms, and we could expect more connections soon with the news of upcoming connections. But in the character selection screen, there are still the same 10 realms we have since WOTLK. That is the illusion of connected realms, it turns 10 realms into just 4 realms but make everyone believe those 10 realms still exist, there have not been 6 realms removed.
What you are asking for Blizzard is to break the illusion, it would mean news that Blizzard is closing down realms and shareholders do not want that news.
That would just potentially weed out the people who don’t RP but also don’t interfere with the RPers.
Trolls are just going to say yes to all of those questions to get in
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I am honestly not certain that the shareholders would or should worry about the number of servers… unless it comes to the point where they consider the proportion in between number of users and required computing power.
I mean, Blizzard could keep 10 Spanish realms open or even open more, but if they were (are) empty, it would be (is) just an awful waste of resources.
My personal take on realm mergers is that they most likely process them in order to save on space and computing power rather than to grant users a better experience… with the plus that having more thriving communities is more likely to keep the players engaged = paying.
So it sounds to me like the shareholders would be wiser to consider the success of their business venture on the base of active subscriptions, sustaining the minimum possible amount of servers, rather than wanting to keep as many active servers as possible.
I never said servers, I said realms. With all the changes made over the years like LFG, LFR, and cross-realm zones it is no longer true to said that a realm is equivalent to a server. In fact, just because of cross-realm zones the computing power it is probably more adapted and optimized to the number of users that any connection of realms could, because they just have in their servers the number of copies of every zone required per zone based on all the players from the region.
I know I just keep using Spanish realms as an example, but there are so few realms that it is easy to use as an example. As I said there are 10 realms but actually there is only 2 realms and 2 conected groups. Well, to make it clear how CRZ allow to reduce the computing power used by those realms you only need to check how many shards in non Warmode there is for Spanish realms: Just 1. Most of the time there is only 1 copy per zone for every Spanish realms in non-warmode. It is not possible to optimize it more unless Blizzard start to mix in CRZ Spanish realms with realms with other languages.
In this game there was a relation between realms and servers, but that does not exists anymore.
That is were connected realms come into play, there are 10 Spanish realms in the character creation screen but there are only 2 individual realms and 3 groups of connected realms. So actually those are just 5 realms.
Spanish realms have already been reduced from 10 to 5, and soon it will be reduced more, so there is no waste of resources, Blizzard has effectively removed 6 realms and there hasn’t been any bad news about Blizzard closing down realms because with connected realms most people believe there is still 10 realms.
That is the purpose of connected realms, to reduce the number of realms from 10 to 4 to avoid wasting resources while keeping the illusion that there is still 10 realms to avoid the bad news of removing realms.
You are asking Blizzard to break the illusion and show the realm number of realms the game has, people will realize the number of realms has been reduced and that will bring bad news that shareholders do not want.
Almost, they want to have the minimum possible amount of servers while pretending the game has never removed any server. Use conected realms to reduce realms to a minimun but make everyone believe we have the same number of realms today as in 2008.
EDIT: I made a mistake with the number of Spanish realms, with conections there is 5, not 4
Tiny mistake, there’s 5 spanish realms left, not 4!
Not sure which you missed but exodar-minahonda (new players), c’thun (low), tyrande-los errantes-colinas pardas (high), dun modr (high), uldum-sanguino-zul’jin-forgotlast (full).
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Wishful thinking Brigante.
I think they could maybe add a search by cluster/connected tab so it would show you 1 realm with a drop down menu of what other servers are connected.
I say this but with the strong understanding that they probably wont ever do anything to do realm selection.
Thank you, my mistake was with exodar-minahonda and tyrande-los errantes-colinas pardas, for some reason I thought those 5 realms were connected in one group.
Ahh, ok, all good.
And yes, I think you’re right with your point, blizzard seems to not want uninformed people to understand that they had to merge a lot of realms due to underpopulation, right now if you take a look at english realms you’d be like “omg, so many high pop realms”, but actually of those 20 high pops there’s only like 3-4 actual realms, post connection (talking about high, not full).
Well… While I understand what you guys mean about them not wanting to make things clear for their own sake, hence any upgrades to the realm selection screen being highly unlikely…
I still think for the final user it would be much better to have all the information readily available without having to check out forums or third party sites.
In the world of my dreams, at some point they’d switch from a Toonname-Servername to a Toonname-BattleTag format, which would eventually allow for huge mergers on the base of the type/language of realms, with a single cluster per type/language per region.
Which would mean a huge AH market and complete ease of character name choice for the player.
It wouldn’t stop them.
No doubt it’d be nice, for me it’d be very useful also if you could just have all characters of a connected cluster in a single list.
Example atm I have a dk on both arathor and hellfire, cause I had them before the original round of connections in 2014, and if I want to swap from arathor to hellfire I have to swap back, select new realm and get another list, while since they’re effectively the same realm, I should just be able to log the hellfire char once I am in arathor’s selection screen.
As a single episode might seem insignificant but I personally have 20 + of cases like this, so it’s getting annoying.
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Having a drop down menu in the char selection screen would be good.
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