Right now many guilds have a ton of people who don’t raid with any other guild but come as “pugs” with them on raid nights and have a level one in that guild on the server to sign up for raids. Despite having a lot of people on curve, and most having at least a few mythic kills in some of these guilds this progress isn’t also officially recorded because on paper lots of players aren’t officially in these guilds.
Of course not having progress properly recorded leads to the vicious circle of making it harder to find on server recruits.
And it isn’t the cost of transferring one toon for many people, it is the cost of transferring an army of alts with professions, raid slot playability, and around whom the player’s in-game economy revolves.
For the following reasons I can’t see the point in confining guilds to a single server anymore:
You group for a five man you are phased in
You group for world content you are phased in
You group for a raid you are phase in
Most active trading on the AH is cross server
It is getting harder and harder to recruit people interested in raiding and the days of spamming world chat or city chat in the hope of finding one competent recruit seem to be over and fruitless.
You are far more likely to meet other players recruiting through premade and have an early test of their competence and more importantly temperament than you are to on your own server.
This would also solve the problem of some servers being burned out husks and others being overpopulated.
I can no reason beyond milking server transfer fees out of players, who if it is an old well developed account could easily run into a couple of hundred Euro of a cost.
Because by delaying further server merges (or even shutting down some servers) they are getting quite a nice amount of cash from milking the transaction costs, may I add, that it is a completely automated process, so the price really is quite hefty.
And if you are trying to defend;
But I am using my gold to server transfer, then by all means, good for you, but by doing it like that you are actually adding even more cold cash into their pockets.
Nobody gives a rats butt of any server communities anymore, you are phased and sharded so many times before you’ve even reached the first quest hub when you start a fresh alt from 110 that it’s actually hilarious.
The only things that seem to be realm bound are economy on AH mostly affected by server population and the number of guilds available on those realms. I don’t think the game is ready for a region based AH. I’m on one of the high populated realms and the AH and GB were fairly unusable during the day time at the start of the expansion.
Whilst I do think they need to do something about dead realms I just don’t think wow really functions as a mega server. I’m not going to pretend I have any technical knowledge of how these things work in practice.
In theory you can run cross realm raiding via communities but there are clearly limitations.
Part of me likes this, even misses this, but the other part thinks there is already too much cross realm and sharding etc.
If they would just merge all low and medium pop servers, a lot of this problem would be solved, imo.
my server, Ghostlands (linked with Dragonblight) on Horde side only has 18 guilds that killed at least 1 boss in Uldir, with only 2 doing ANY mythic bosses, and 4 ONLY doing normal bosses. of those 18, 5 are possibly disbanding as we speak, and at least 3 are having issues finding players, though they hope its just cause new raid is out in a week, so people have been taking a break towards the end of the raid tier. the other 10 probably fall into one of these 2 camps also.
and of the 62 guilds, alliance and horde, the best this sever can manage is 3/8 mythic. although ONE guild got to 5/8 mythic during early december (alliance surprise surprise). we are also 120th of 123 servers EU.
i am trying one last desperate attempt currently to help ghostlands, but a craftsman can only use the tools he has, and i and other players shouldn’t have to resort to such things.
if blizz really had any degree of fairness about them, they would really look at this server, and others like us, and either merge us, or at the least, connect us with others so that we had populations closer to about 75% of the likes of Draenor or Silvermooon.
whit sharding as we have now, it could work, AH I am not sure though, it could end up having so much items in it that none can find anything or it would slow down way to much.
Just make the every AH item work like the WoW token and it would work just fine.
A similar system is used in Runescape grand exchange since 2007 and works perfectly its even less exploitable by goblins and AH campers.
Low population servers tend to be merged, so some are cross realm, but I can see the money milking to only half work, since you can have a limited amount of characters per realm anyway, so you can’t really transfer however you want.
They aren’t really cross realm. They are one server but in order to preserve peoples character name they give them the affix charactername-servername. It meant guilds and characters didn’t have to rename when there were duplicates.
