Speaks highly that even though we may not agree on various topics that you support our cause. Thank you.
Amen.
Another day and another step closer to termination.
1 week and 3 days left Blizzard.
It makes no sense to say you can’t justify the existence of Zandalar Tribe due to it’s low population, after being the orchestrators of it’s death by keeping free transfers open for at least 6 months.
It’s psychological for most returning players or players that create new characters. They think something is wrong with the server.
Please close free transfers from Zandalar Tribe and open free transfers to Zandalar Tribe.
And in case of Celebras, it is even more hurtful, because a lot of people who would have started on our realm never came - because they already found guilds and friends on the other realms.
8 weeks… it was too late.
They should have waited until Wrath release before they opened the transfers and passed the death sentences over our realms if they had a minimum amount of players in mind to keep the RP realms alive.
I don’t really want to pour vitriol over the developers. They’re human, and to err is to be human. And what they did to Zandalar Tribe was a considerable error, and it may just be that shutting down the server is the only course they can take.
It is really disappointing for us who were affected by this error. Let’s remember that Zandalar Tribe was a fairly active server. At the beginning of November 2021 we had over 3000 players logging their raids. Compared to retail TBC I don’t think that size is particularly small. Yet people cried “dead server”. People cried “dead server” for reasons that really had nothing to do with the server’s health. Yes, it was much harder to find people for dungeons and heroic dungeons in Phase 2 on Zandalar Tribe if compared to a server like Gehennas. Just because people struggled to find groups for dungeons/heroics did not indicate that the server was dead. It indicated that the content was outdated.
I felt this myself. In Phase 1 I was eagerly jumping into whatever dungeon/heroic I could. This desire took a nose dive as I got geared up in T4. I would still play dungeons but it would only be to help out guildees and friends. I would not respond to strangers messaging in the LFG-chat because there was nothing in it for me. And I was in a casual guild. The real raiding guilds were going into T5 and so had even less incentives to run dungeons/heroics. Classic also didn’t have a steady stream of new players coming to the game unlike retail TBC. This meant that for players wanting to level or gear up alts had fewer people to play with. Of course, raiding guilds were also crying as most people had found their homes and new blood wasn’t coming in. Zandalar Tribe’s 3000 logs meant inconveniences that Gehennas with its ~18000 logs could fix.
People began to leave before the free transfers opened. It wasn’t that Zandalar Tribe was dead, it was that many no doubt wished that the server was dead so that they could get their free ticket to greener-pastureland. Some were happy, no doubt. Others may have felt regret. That something was lost. For me? I was devastated. Zandalar Tribe was close to being the perfect server in my view. It had a decent faction balance and it had a large enough population without being overcrowded. It was an RP-pvp server. But this little classic near-utopia was killed off because people wanted easier. People wanted convenience. And Blizzard truly did break their own vision for WotLK by giving into these demands.
Now here we are, with a golden ticket pressed into our hands that can take us wherever we wish to go. And the destinations available to us only makes us want to stay. Because we want the classic experience and many of us doubt that we can find it on the mega-layered mega-servers. You should never have opened free transfers off of Zandalar Tribe. You made an error. And while we aren’t many we are nevertheless deeply hurt by this decision and the lack of care you’ve showed afterwards. We’ve been hanging in limbo the entire summer.
Signing this from Celebras. After hundreds (!) of posts both here and in the German forums, we get no blue post whatsoever. It’s like they just can’t be bothered to even answer.
Ten years ago I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, another MMORPG. They made the very common error of opening too many servers at launch and had to shut down several servers within the first year. My situation back then was kind of similar to my situation today; I was playing on an RP-pvp server and I was forced to move to an RP-pve server.
But BioWare was at least transparent about what they were doing. They didn’t just open transfers and say “good luck, do what you wanna do!” … they opened up transfers with the specific goal of terminating servers. They didn’t open free transfers and then leave servers open for several months. They also took measures to make sure this was fair as possible. At launch it was impossible to know which server would be killed off and which one wouldn’t. If you had bad luck, yours was on the chopping block and you had to move. This meant that name conflicts were inevitable, and so they implemented a very basic rule: if your name was tagged on a server, the player who had the most play time would get to keep it (this did not apply to paid transfers, only the free transfers for merges (I think…))
Also, I said that “at launch it was impossible to know which sever would be killed off or not”… this is only partly true. It is true for pvp and pve servers. Why is it that “Gehennas” became a goliath but Skullflame just fizzled out entirely? I don’t know, maybe there are variables I’m unaware of. RP-pvp, however, did contain risk. A friend of mine actually said this at the very start of Classic. He said that he would not roll on the RP-pvp server because he thought the server tag “too niche” and that it would be at risk for termination. It wasn’t that he didn’t like RP-pvp he just didn’t believe in it for the longevity. And he was right. But he was only right because Blizzard caved in to hyperbolic complaints. RP-pvp was a niche. It attracted a certain player. And now we’ve lost it in Europe. And it really, really hurts.
Today I gave up waiting and moved to Earthshaker… was it so hard blizzard to communicate to us where you plan to put us, or some more information about it?
4 days to go…
One thing is for sure if it doesn’t work out for me over there I shall be quitting for good, as I don’t want to give any more money to blizzard after they ruined what was a beautiful and lovely realm anyway, like hell am I going to pay for a transfer if it doesn’t work out
It’ll be hard to find a realm with the characters on it like ZT had, even in death I still got daily amusement in LFG ! always found that with RP-PvP realms.
I had my classic characters on zt and whilst the constant ganks while I was questing sucked at the time I braved through it for quite a while.
But I stopped at around level 45 on two characters. I came back recently for wotlk and that’s when I saw the population on the server. It’s sad I spent hundreds of hours there, I had a guild there where I was one of the original members on the guild ledger. I spent a lot of time tanking dungeons. And it’s all so sad to see what’s left of the server.
I wasn’t attached to the server and I started new elsewhere but I feel for everyone who stuck around.
Logged in classic today for the first time in months to see ZT no longer exists. sadface.
And the realm I transferred to, Mograine, is already dead. Feels weird that Blizz will launch Wotlk onto dying realms, and closing realms is also odd, since they never closed realms on retail (even when they clearly should have). I’m not sure I’ll pay £19 to play my 70 mage in Wrath on another realm. £19 isn’t a small amount of money. I’ll just play SL until DF is out.
Blizzard’s vision from what I can see is whatever they wish it to be in the moment. They already went against NoChanges when they said “…and we mean no changes”.
There is little integrity around pledges and assurances given.
Speaks highly that even though we may not agree on various topics that you support our cause. Thank you.