“Our goal is to maximize the opportunities for Classic Era players to establish strong communities and carry on enjoying their way of play. We hope to see healthy populations of connected realms for Classic Era players, and we’ll continue to monitor and consider further connections in the future.”
These are your own words. This is how you have misleadingly advertised the split between TBC Classic and ERA Classic, a lot of players actually believed it and PAYED for a clone. They have checked a few times the new ERA server and gave up since the population is way too low. The ERA community has asked you multiple times to take action in the last month to allow us to just continue to enjoy this game we love. There were a lot of proposals, listen to them and do it quickly to avoid having always more players quitting or unsubscribing…
At the moment we are struggling on the most populated ERA cluster on the ally side to get ONE raid group going… The horde faces a similar situation. Some of the other clusters can’t even form a raid group.
The AH is totally empty and almost no pvp is possible.
The new players are discouraged since they have no one to play with.
==> One simple solution would be to connect all PvP english servers together :
Ashbringer, Bloodfang, Dragonfang, Earthshaker, Gandling, Golemagg, Mograine, Noggenfogger, Skullflame, Firemaw, Dreadmist, Flamelash, Judgement, Razorgore, Shazzrah, Stonespine, Ten Storms, and Gehennas.
And additionnally to offer a free server transfer to all players currently playing on the PVE or RP english servers and to all players from the other EU areas (french, spanish and german) to allow them at least to have the choice and the possibility to join an healthy cluster. It would allow us to advertise it to the other servers and to finally be able to reach this “healthy population” that you’ve set yourself as a goal for the ERA servers.
Please consider at least to answer our calls by explaining us what are your plans to improve the situation of the ERA servers.
How about other way around, they offer free transfer from merged cluster servers to two unconnected RP ones. Healthy population and no bunch of silly server names, more vanilla like.
As a person currently on the PvE classic era realm, facing a lot of issues with getting any raid group going, especially for the content I enjoy (AQ40/Naxx), I fully agree with the suggestions and sentiments in this post.
Please listen and enable us to enjoy the game, as we would like it to be played.
How does moving from merged cluster to the RP one make any sense? If you want to play in the populated server you just stay on those and the once from RP realms just get a chance to move over there.
Moving people from merged servers away makes zero sense.
Let people play the way they like.
If you really want all PvP servers merged, I support this. If somebody want not-merged servers, I support this as well - ie. no merging of RP servers.
4 EU-English servers and free transfer in all directions would be the obvious solution.
And this is Blizzards fault how? Or do you mean that Blizzard should artificially create humans to play their games?
Or could it be that Classic was not as popular as the rumours had it to be and Nost, even tho it’s " high " registered player accounts didnt actually meant that 800000 players were playing 24/7
I personally never thought private Vanilla server was super popular, number vise. Registered accounts has nothing to do with actual players and I personally think the active numbers was in the deep lower region.
Nost ran for about a year and 2 months for those who didnt know, it’s limited how many " fresh " starts one can run within a year. About Zero
PvE players can’t actually transfer to a PvP server (at least it used to be) and most PvE players play on a PvE server for a reason like RP players play on a dedicated RP server. If so, providing a server transfer to players on a PvP server to a PvE server feels more natural. Those who want the thrill of being engaged in open-world PvP can simply flag themselves for PvP. Also, RP can be done on PvE servers as well.
But overall I agree, as mentioned in more than a handful of posts, that Blizzard should reveal their plans and join a vivid discussion with the actual playerbase. Their silence isn’t helpful at all and just builds up on the current frustration players have with this company. This not only affects classic-era but also players waiting on 9.1 and players waiting for essential fixes in TBC.
The popular PServers post Nostalrius had around 10k Players online on average till AQRelease - after AQ Release the Population usually shrinked cause the available Gear destroys “fair” PvP and AQ+Naxx Raiding just required heavy consumables After Naxx got cleared a few times it usually shrinked even more cause people went to fresh servers. If we assume 1/4 to 1/3 of that being Bots the Population still was very high.
I played Vanilla on Privates for around 9 years before Blizzard decided to release Vanilla. Dotox Classic WoW, Feenix (Emerald Dream), Nostalrius (which made Classic Privates popular), Elysium, Lightshope, Northdale (which btw pressed all Content through in less than one year cause of Vanilla rerelease) just to name Servers where i started fresh and raided the majority of content that i remember right now. There were also more popular Privates Henhouse (PvP and BGs only with BWL Patch gear), Kronos I, II and III, Warsong, cWoW.
Some of this names go back to 2008.
I have rarely seen a Private before Vanilla rerelease that was as abandoned as Era is. So yes Blizzad has to act on it one way or another. It is almost impossible to gather a normal 5man Group currently for any lvl 60 dungeon on primetime on Alliance Side (and i am a tank!) on EU-PvP1 (which btw is the most populated EU Cluster). Not to even talk about the empy auctionhouse or new people leveling chars - they are in for a rough time if they want to play the game.
Today when i logged on Primetime (around 8PM) on EU-PvP-1 we had 47 Players online. That simply is a joke.
The main thing here is noone wants to play that, at least any time soonish… blizzard classic ERA servers, so there isnt much blizzard cant do here, the only thing they can do is release new fresh era servers, and this is an ace up the sleeve for them for content burnouts at retail/tbc before months for a brand new expansion.
that being said, the people that actually want to continue playing vanilla already went back to private servers scene, as blizzard doesnt have any plans to release fresh servers for now.
the people who continue to play there are the people who want to keep holding on to a burning stick.
And yes, i paid for the clone service knowing all of this, my only purpose beyond it is just some WSG for fun with my geared warrior at some point.
The people who actually wants to play the game has already moved out to private servers just like i said moments ago.
Since the era player base is way too much divided between all these cluster, of course Blizzard can do something about it. And this is where we try to bring a solution :
-> To merge at least all PvP servers to get a bigger cluster and free transfers without PvE or PvP restrictions to all of the other players so that they don’t feel letting alone on the other PvE and RP clusters.
We won’t have thousands of players immediately but at least it will become possible to organize ourself for raiding or doing the normal dungeons more easily.
Connecting more realms (i.e., all pvp realms together) seems to be the easiest solution. Honestly, I am both surprised and disappointed that Blizzard hasn’t taken any action yet. An alternative, as pointed out above, is to create (or assign) one realm to which people can transfer for free. That would solve the ‘-realm’ tag issue as well.
There is little to no reasons to play on Classic Era realm. It’s not FRESH and it’s not CURRENT version. Same thing happened with private servers that released their FRESH realms. The old one died overnight and barely anyone played there while 99% moved to FRESH.
Blizzard could just connect/merge old realms but that would not really change much in the long run.
Some people prefer retail, some prefer tbc, some prefer fresh classic and others just like to continue playing their classic era character. There seem to be enough people who are interested in playing classic era. The issue is just that they are spread out over too many realms.
Yeah well the private aerver community think a realm that’s been our for about a month is no longer FRESH and they instantly ask for the next FRESH like idiots.
Maybe try and look past that and play classic era anyway? You can still enjoy it even if it’s not FRESH
I’m playing TBC only. And Fresh realm for classic and TBC were requested by current players, not some “private server community”. And no, nobody asks for fresh after a month but after many months after Naxx release.
Even if they connected all region realms together you would have to do a lot of things on your own, especially from economy side of things.
Yes, Blizzard didn’t predict correctly what will happen yet again which should not be surprising.
To be fair, people begin asking for fresh at least by the time the AQ scepter event is over and AQ40 is opened… if not even earlier. It’s like some people play Classic only to level from 1 to 60, maybe gear a little, and then they want a global reset anyway. I can’t think of any other version of WoW whose fans act like this, and I think this speaks volumes of how long-term unsustainable Vanilla is - at best, they’d have to keep releasing fresh after fresh after fresh and most people wouldn’t even get a chance to finish their PvE progression due to how few ppl are left for AQ/Naxx.
Personally, I think both TBC and WotLK will be a lot more sustainable in their endphase frozen state, judging from pserver experience. There’re servers, for example, who stayed in 3.3.5 state for years and still bustled after all that time. Partly because of how accessible the game is in that state, and how much content it offers. Vanilla can’t really vouch for the same.