recently transferred my first WoW character (been playing since late vanilla, took a break during WoD but joined back pre-legion) to the realm Dreanor because apparently it was a heavily used horde realm but i never figured it would be so busy that i would be overwhelmed by how alive it was!
reason i felt i had to make a transfer is that the realm i came from was Emerald Dream, a heavily alliance sided low population realm, over the years the horde has been thinning out, friends and acquaintances of the realm either quit or transferred to a new realm or switched to alliance, by BfA the AH is a mess and only 2 guilds seem to be actively doing raids.
this was a gameplay killer in that buying things or selling thing was a nightmare and wanting to do content ment i had to cross realm pug which as we all know pugging can be pretty painful.
anyway the point of this post.
why should i have been so pressured into having to transfer/start again on a new realm over an issue blizzard could actively solve by sharding/merging low population servers with faction imbalance so that there is far less low population issues?
a new player will be RECOMMENDED BY THE GAME to join a low population or new realm which actively CRIPPLES their game in the long term because they may end up on a one sided faction realm or just a dead realm in general just because of how empty it is.
there needs to be a huge merge, the list of low to empty population realms and realms with one sided action is massive and this shouldn’t be a thing.
TL:DR = Realm list is a newbie trap that can end up with someone joining a dead or one sided realm forcing the new player to either assume “wow is dead” or “[faction] is OP everyone joins it but i dont want to so i quit!” and the transfer cost is just a further salt on the wound trap since it means it will cost you money to correct a mistake the GAME RECOMMENDED when you join WoW for the first time.
I play on Emerald Dream and it’s just fine… it’s just a different point of view. You don’t need thousands of players around you, if you have a guild you enjoy playing with.
well you are playing as an alliance on a very much alliance server if that is a case which kind of reinforces my main point.
many of the ED horde went alliance on the server BECAUSE of the one sided issue of realms
I agree with that. I had another issue, I joined Buring Legion when I was new, which is a heavily Polish realm but marked as “english” I had to transfer to find guilds because I couldnt understand most of what people were saying.
That’s something I’m both sad and happy about, since you always had “tourists” on those empty realms to camp certain mount spots. However this isn’t happening anymore.
Especially your realm (or both Italian realms in general) used to be great for that and I know of a handful of people who made characters on there just to camp mounts.
But then, currently your realm only decides about two things:
AH prices (which, thankfully are cross-faction now)
Raid availability as Mythic raiding is the only content that can’t be done cross realm until HoF is filled
Which is why I find it less important to be on a full realm nowadays, than it used to be. But I agree, that new players should generally be pointed towards fuller realms and not “empty” ones.
The way Italian realms were handled is a bit sad. I played on Italian realms as well for a very short time - it’s a mistake to keep both. They should be merged and it would solve a lot of issues.
I’m Horde on Emerald Dream-Terenas and yeah, it’s not ideal. In BfA my guild had to stop raiding as we couldn’t even get 10 players together for most raid tiers. The in-game guild finder was an absolute god-send to us and allowed us to get enough people to raid Ny’alotha. I was really hoping we’d be connected in the recent round of connections but no such luck.
I refuse to pay for transfers and many of my guildies wouldn’t be able to pay for them anyway, so I’m stuck here. While you can play with people cross-realm, many of us still see value in being part of a guild, which is realm-specific. Allowing cross-realm play (or just finishing off the promised connections for ALL low pop realms) would be really helpful for our realm, and many others.
it’s just a different point of view. You don’t need thousands of players around you, if you have a guild you enjoy playing with.