Does anyone even care at this point? It’s all so weird. 
I DOES depend on the server.
I mostly play on Arathor, and the economy there is actually pretty good.
I have some characters on Stormrage-Azuremyst, and it’s atrocious. I can’t sell any mats or anything else really, even if the price is lower than on Arathor, AND if my price is way below the next cheapest.
And it’s not just the demand that’s low, the prices are high, too. When I want to buy something, like bags, they are far more expensive than on Arathor too.
It’s clear on my side, Ravencrest or twisting Nether (I also have a Horde char there) the AH is unusable outside of nights (especially for scanning purpose). It’s so crowded but the prices are way more fair. Runetotem/Nagrand/Killrog the AH is almost never slow and stuff is quite expensive due to not being enough listed. Heck we dipped to 579 pages of 50 auctions each last week. There are less than than 32 pages (of 50 each) for items/gear only useable at 120 level. This covers weapons, 4 armor types and stuff like vantus runes, contracts and augment runes. Also it’s way too expensive, I picked mogs for 500-1k gold on Ravencrest where they were 5k-10k on this cluster…
fear… so delicious…
Connecting realms is actually the same as merging realms.
There is no realm community in Retail. Go play Classic for that.
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I know.
Now what I’m suggesting is that that’s a problem. WoW’s structure was built around realms from the beginning, and it still hasn’t completely shed that legacy and, in my opinion, it never should.
But regardless of my opinion I will say this: So long as we have game mechanics that expect realm communities and no realm communities, we’ve got a problem.
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Yep. The current way WoW retail is, is messed up. At least on an RP server there’s some sense of a community. But I still hate how every other player out in the world might as well be an NPC or bot.
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Names… just give us ability to use 1x ’ and 1x [space] . Problem with names solved forever. It would also lead to 100 times better name ideas, esspecially on rp realms.
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Guilds… merging comes (should) with information about this event. Peoples should take their time and organize guild mates to recreating guild, not a big issue. Guild bank… you have a time, just monetize items pre-merge or whatever guilds want to do with it. Not big deal.
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Mail… again, you have time to deal with ur mails. Right now it’s 30 days anyway. What if Blizz would tell us about mergin lets say 2 months before ? I dont think mails are big issue, if at all.
Sharding is bs. It lead mostly to shattered realm community. Also playing with “ghost players” isnt really enjoyable. Imo Im not against cross realm lfX. I would take mergin over sharding 100x times.
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I say, make 4 to 19 A.I. driven players, make them available to the player. Entire game is now soloaboobble. And add endless higher difficulties to all the content of the game including old world zones, and also make everything lvl 120.
No more 50 minute queues to play the game. No more too easy content, you get to pick what difficulty you play. Everything is relevant again, everything matters. Everything is real. And immersive. The world is filled with endless adventures, story lines that can be played over and over again, on increasingly higher difficulties.
The game is immortal. Forever. Maybe even after the world ends. People will be playing this game on their portable computers in space or something.
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That’s actually a pretty good solution. Because it already is like that anyway. It’s not even a solution. It’s like the problem never even existed to begin with. 
Gameplay wise maybe, but it’s not as two players can’t have the same name in a merged realm.
Unless i’m missing something major that’s two different solutions.
Don’t remember praising sharding for it’s social aspect nor saying that realms should stay the way they are.
Blizzard did some merges back in wotlk iirc and recieved very negative feedback about it because of these two main reasons :
Guilds get disbanded and you have a forced rename. It really isn’t something you want to see when you come back after leaving the game for a few weeks.
Blizzard solution has been to use Xrealm tech to connect servers. It isn’t using sharding as it was done before sharding even existed and is more or less a merge without the previous issues
You can learn more about it here (at least how it was before sharding) :
Well, that’s pretty much how connected realms work afaik. I too believe it’s a much better solution than leaving dead realms on their own and don’t really understand why Blizzard hasn’t done anything about it for years now.
TL:DR If you merge realms you get bigger queue times potentially, alot of issues with character names & guild names. Since there are alot of popular names which would result in alot of issues and you cant exactly force somebody to do a name change. Thats why sharding exists in place of realm merging 
World of Warcraft has some pretty high player number estimations, but we can only play with a few of them.
- We can’t play with US (nor other regions) players
- We can’t play with players of another faction
- We are limited in the ways of playing with players of other realms
In the best case, it means that if you’re on a huge server you have like 15k players with which you can play without restrictions. Since not everyone is on a huge server, some people have less.
You might be able to run instances like M+, Battlegrounds, Arena, Heroic Raids together but you’re limited in many aspects. Tonight we had a Cross Realm trial in our raid and I wasn’t even able to give him a tome to respec.
I think Blizzard should generally work on these issues. It doesn’t matter if it means putting servers together or something else. I don’t want to be limited when playing world of warcraft with other people. I have tons of friends who play in TW region, some in US region. I have a lot of friends who play Alliance. And when I play with my Cross Realm EU Horde friends, I’d love to be able to trade them a tome, a flask or a broken iwin button sometimes.
One partial solution would be merging servers. But that’s not all. I just want to be able to play with everyone.
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Totally agree OP, it’s very jarring when moving from one area to another and sometimes not having to move at all, when suddenly people are appearing and disappearing at random.
I had one encounter this week where I could see a world boss inNazjatar and folks killing him.
Got a little closer and the boss and players phased out, moved further away and they phased back in.
I couldn’t get anywhere near to attack it. So annoying.
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Connecting realms and merging realms are exactly the same, because two realms connected share everything that is restricted to one single realm.
Auction House? Shared
Mail and trade? Shared
Guilds? Shared
Raids like Mythic that is not allowed with players of others realms? Shared
Outdoor zones that are not allowed with players of others realms? Shared
When two realms are connected the individual realms does not exist anymore except in the login page. There is not a single part of the game where players from two connected realms are separated like when their realms where isolated.
The purpose of merging realms is to merge two players populations to have a few big realms instead of many small realms. And connected realms fulfill that purpose. That two players can user or not the same name is irrelevant, and precisely connected realms are a good implementation of merging realms because it allows anyone to keep his name.
And from Blizzard point of view connected realms not only to that, it also allow Blizzard to close down servers without anyone noticing and so avoid bad publicity because many people still believe the number of realms they see in the login screen is the same number of servers the game have.
i cant believe some people would play alone rather then change their name lol
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I do think the tech is there to merg every single realm in game, if they wanted to, but why they do not do it i am not sure, name isssues can be solved, give us surenames and problem is gone, only problem I can se is AH becoming to big, way to big and stuff would be hard to find and most likely slow also.
but it can not be healty in any ways, seeing more and more people transfer to bigger realms eighter, yes it give money to Blizzard, but at same time many who do not want to transfer quit, or start over on a bigger realm, what doesnt realy contribute to anything in the long run, becuse as many that are transfering, there is probably close to equal who quit or log in less and less due to it also.
i fear the only way to have a realm community it would be to avoid at all the realm connection and lfg.
Im against it but sometimes i miss the time i knew all the ppl on sporeggar. But probably wouldnt be possible in the actual world of warcraft. So we are doomed to havent any community except the (few) guilds.
Well that is the solution, sorry to say.
The problem is that reintroducing old-school realms after breaking down the barrier is kind of like building the Berlin wall. There is absolutely no way that people will take kindly to it, even if it makes the game better, because they’ve made contacts across realms now - some of them across dozens of realms or even more - why should they have to put up with involuntarily being cut off from them? That’s right - they shouldn’t!
The dam has burst. WoW will never be the same great game it used to be. It can try, but we’ve fallen down the slippery slope long ago.
There is one way though… realm community servers that you have to migrate to that cuts off these things. An interesting idea to be sure, but one I’m not likely to believe Blizzard will go with.
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