Some servers are full or high pop. But most are just barren wastelands.
Theres like 50+ mostly dead servers atm on english speaking alone.
Most of my characters are on hellscream since vanilla. And compared to Silvermoon or AD for example, i concider it dead.
I made my legion remix character on one of the recommended servers (Emeriss) and right now in dorngal i see 1 other person. ONE person..On a saturday…
If i was a new player and chose one of the recommended servers and see 1-2 other people in the main citys the first impression would not be great.
Logging into an MMOrpg and and only see a handful of other people around…oof.
Ive ended up transferring my most used characters to servers that actually are alive. but i suspect this is their wish. for everyone to swipe their card and move over themselfs…
The problem is, that’s the issue not only with low pop servers, but with a whole game. Even on high pop servers most of the zones are empty, especially vanilla ones.
Poor phasing system, layers, old zone abandonment, Chromie timezones, flying, world scaling, and no linear progression made the open world dead apart the newest zones. This game is a mess rn. As a new player I would feel almost betrayed when “the biggest” mmo has no people in open world. First impression is so bad, that it looks almost fake.
There will probably never be a server merge ever again.
It was abruptly cancelled when blizzard fired the entire europe office over 5 years ago and remains in limbo.
The reasoning is just gonna be you can join any group or guild eu-wide now through lfg, discord or other means.
A slight inconvenience with crafters being server specific and your ghost town.
Oh, about crowded servers, they have so many layers it is likely you will not see guildies in the main hub anyway.
I hope they NEVER merge retail servers. It put me off classic completely. I like being on a low-pop server and in times, such as an expansion release, where people are more likely to be active, then it’s plenty full.
Pity we got this dumb AF automated sharding system that randomly decides to remove you from a low pop shard while you’re camping out a rare or doing something that has a progress bar, and dumps you into another shard putting your rare camping timer out the window and reseting any progress you made.
I dont dont want sound hars but those realm statuses you see are not representative of atual active players playing on that realm anymore. Its more like realm popularity but high status realm can easly have jsut few players playing on it. They change it after WoD how realm status appear to players after they lost like 50% of theyir active player base.
If they would show real active players on those realms you would have like 95% realms on low which would people see as WoW being dead game and even more people would quit. Thats why they hide it from you.
I get up at 7am to play on release day. People play overnight and go to sleep, there are less people in the morning but definitely people. So sorry; big phat lie.
No when TBC launches you try to play with hundreds of players in zones but you can’t because everybody nicks everything and even trying to play in a group doesn’t work. Also the servers just permanently fall over.
I see lots of people but not to the detriment of my gameplay but if you want to be salty because you just don’t like retail then fine lol.
well sadly it does seem to matter.. If i log into one of my characters on the old low pop servers or any of the recommended servers im lucky if i see a handful of people in the main hubs, esepecially outside of peak hours…theres barely anyone talking, if any at all.
Meanwhile if i log onto silvermoon or AD for example. theres people everywhere. tradechat is going. guilds are recruiting. and its alive.
If they moved on from server merge i hope they do something about their sharding tech then.
It doesnt feel good logging into a massive multiplayer online game and seeing just me and the NPC’s around. it just make me think the game is dead or dying…
And i dont really feel like paying to move all my characters over to non dead servers just to feel like the game is alive and thriving..
I made the move years ago to be on busy realms and I don’t recommend the expense unless you’re going to just reroll characters. Levelling is quite fast but I’m very attached to my main.
I havent continued to make characters on hellscream at all. they have been there since vanilla like i said….Newer ones are on more popular servers except for my legion remix character wich i just picked a random recommended server (and now regret because its dead).
Which is ok becouse we are here play mmo. And if there is lot of people you just make groups and q together i know concept of retail palyer will nver understand.
Lmao I’ve played 20 years, I know how it works. As I said, making groups doesn’t work. Why? Because there are 20 other groups and nobody sits in a line waiting turns to kill that quest mob. It’s not fun. And don’t pretend anybody is social because you group up by saying “inv” and then MAYBE get a “ty” if you succeed. Over populated servers are not fun.
