Hello,
I may have also put it in the wrong place so forgive me if I have, I can move it if neccessary. I’ve never done a post like this before so please bear with me but I’m simply stating facts because honestly it’s killing me that nothing is being said or done about this.
Just to state my credentials, I’m an officer and raider (obviously) in my current guild on Agamaggan/Twilight’s Hammer/Emeriss etc, this expansion we have achieved world rankings of around 700 which isn’t the most impressive, but we’re not the most hardcore of players. I handle all of the recruitment, all admin and help out in the raids where I can. I’ve played on a hell of a lot of realms throughout my time playing, ranging from the deadest of dead servers (Lightbringer/Mazrigos) to the most popular (Draenor/Silvermoon), I’ve raided from the most casual guilds who bearly do any Heroics (back in the day) to the most hardcore (top 50 world). Raiding is my passion about WoW, I love raiding, I love the wiping, the min-maxing, the struggle of being stuck on something for a period of time and then of course as the stars align the death of an end boss.
Now onto my point, up until recently I’ve not really had a problem with recruitment onto this realm. Whenever I have discussions with a potential recruit I go through the same thing every time recently, we discuss the progress, I discuss what the guild has to offer, I discuss why I want them to join and sometimes what we can do for them. The MOST awkward point, is when I have to discuss the server. It’s my biggest feared question in the game at the moment (surprisingly as raider io score seems to be other peoples most feared question), because the majority of the players that I want in the guild decline straight away due to this. I can’t tell you the number of times someone has said “sounds really good, I’m very interested” to follow that with a 180 turn after I tell them the server we’re on.
So what can you do to fix this? Well there are a number of things to be honest, obviously I dont know the full ins-and-outs as I’m not an employee for you guys so I don’t understand the logistics. I just know it can be done as it has been done before (look at the success of Classic as an example):
- Reduce the amount of servers you have by joining them again - this I feel is long overdue with the amount of heavily underpopulated servers. You can say “this is already being done by sharding or cross realm partying”, but it’s not - you’re effectively sticking a plaster over the problem and saying “this is fine”. Merge more servers together, it’s as easy as that.
- Bring back [Realm First!] achievements - one of the biggest perks about being on a dead realm was that there was contention for the realm first achievement. I could single handedly sell that to people back in the day and it gives these big guilds a reason to be on the lower population servers (though at this point it’s probably too late as I dont think people would care for it these days as it’s all about this god awful “Famed” achievement scheme).
- Reduce the Transfer Price or give free transfers to lower populated realms - When I first started playing in WotLK up to Cata/MoP I saw these all the time and they could just be a weekend thing that you could transfer, where did they go??? I swear I haven’t publicly seen one since then. Having the knowledge that “I can transfer to any server that is Medium/Low” helps populate the lower realms because again, guilds could move freely with a bit of administration.
I’m just struggling to understand why you think perfectly fine for the game to have everybody pile onto these mega realms like Draenor/Silvermoon/Twisting Nether/Kazzak/Tarren Mill/Stormscale/Ravencrest - leaving the smaller realms to essentially die in terms of raiding, PvP and sadly for the community.
To better put what Im talking about into perspective, currently on my realm we are number 1 at rank 903, if I go to any of the realms listed above for example Draenor we would be 35th, on Silvermoon 18th, on Kazzak 45th (you get my point).
You may ask why do people pile into mega realms? Well I hope you already know, but there are many reasons:
- The AH prices are super cheap (this was a bigger problem earlier in the expansion), but this is again the aftermath of an overpopuulated realm, people are always farming.
- If there guild disbands they don’t have to pay money to transfer again because they have such a range of choice on guilds.
- “My friends are there so I’m transferring too” this is more of an aftermath to the problem, but if I know by experience that people will happily leave my guild to go transfer there because of the above, but because of the chain reaction that has happened.
- Competition, because as described before at the moment the competition on my realm is between 2 or 3 guilds for top spot with no sense of accomplishment to be number 1 because of the lack of realm first achievements.
I beg of you Blizzard to look at this and think about it. This is killing communities left, right and center for more than just raiding at the moment on the smaller realms and it’s causing more people to stop playing the game than you believe because people/players dont want to transfer but they also want to play with their friends etc.
Also sorry for the long winded post, I have a pet peeve with people that put a title which is probably a good topic of discussion and then put no context behind it or explain why, it’s not constructive and most likely just gets ignored. I may get a lot of backlash for saying the above but if I don’t try then it will never improve.
Thanks for reading 