World of Warcraft®

This is a direct plea to Blizzard!
Those of us whom are on low populated servers need your help!

I'm currenty on the PvP server, Executus.
We have about 5-6 Alliance guilds of note, all those guilds are trying to progress in the raid content but we're all trying to recruit the classes we need to make this happen.

Over the years, Executus has been on a slow decline.
More and more players are leaving to higher populated servers so that their gaming needs can be fullfilled.

With the up and coming guild migration service in 4.2.0, servers like Executus will be dealt a huge blow when the top guilds start moving to other servers. Servers with a greater player pool.

The region of EU, can not sustain the amount of servers there are.
The lower populated servers, become a bad place to game & those of us that don't want to pay to move our toons (I say toons as I currently have 3x85's, 2x80s and several others) & if the condition gets worse, which it will, it prob will mean the end of WoW for me alone.

I can not be the only person playing on 1 of the poor servers to feel like this.
I am shocked that its been allowed to get to the sorry state it has all ready.

We need a fix.
Not a short term tix.
A long term fix.

Suggestions?

1) Merging 2-5 servers into 1
2) Opening up a free character migration

Option 2 is a non-starter imo - who on earth wants to move to a low populated server?
Option 1 needs to be looked at very seriously.

Blizzard, pls start paying attention to the needs of your customers.
I love this game but I also bore of logging in & spending over an hour using a recruitment macro to find players for my guild with no reply due to the players just not being there.

Merge the guilds togheter and make 4-5 raiding teams of em, Depending on 10 or 25man groups

Merging guilds is not a solution to correcting a ever increasing problem on low populated realms as the population will still be low.

All guilds a different, they are ran different, have different kind of 'feels' and the way some GM's behave is damn right shocking.
I use to be in a guild where the ppl running it would allow 1 of its officers to bully ppl and their excuse was "That’s just him, get use to it or leave".
Some guilds force ppl to spec in a way, some guilds force ppl to raid but the current ppl in those guilds find that acceptable.

My guild, yes we raid but we don't pick specs, we don't pick what char that person must play in order to raid & we don't force ppl to raid.
Its the choice of the member to decide what his main is and what spec he wishes to play.

Back to the topic - Blizzard need to create a long term solution to fix this problem.

I've tried posting on the Blizzard facebook page - it was removed by Blizzard.
I've tried submitting a ticket in game - I was fobbed off.
There is a thread on Executus Realm page, no blue answer in the weeks its been running.

Executus is dying, our realm forum page has the same 10ish ppl posting on.
Our guilds are looking to move off the server, some all ready have gone.

It needs attention!!

you cant force ppl to move to a other server.

only thing blizz could do is, shut down some servers and offer free transfer away from those to others. but i bet those targets will be low pop also, and you go from 1 dead place to a other

Are both factions low on population?

My server, for instance, has a pretty decent number of Horde, whilst the Alliance is nearly empty.

On this kind of scenario (ours), opening up free faction changes from Horde->Alliance only would probably help quite a bit.

I've seen some argue with "if you want a better server, pay for a transfer", which I would generally agree, but I think in this kind of cases, on which it gets nearly impossible to make content progress, Blizzard should actually do something effective to fix the issue.

Free migrations in rarely make an impact. Merging servers is probably out of the question, not only because it would be bad for WoW's image, making it look like it's in decline, but also because it would probably cause a lot of technical issues (as different servers are hosted in different machines, and spread across a couple of different locations).

Another suggestion:

Make players who join faction/server combos with low population have some sort of bonus like 10% increase in reputation/experience/gold gained or something. Maybe some sort of vanity pet or mount? I dunno... But I guess Blizzard could come up with a good idea based on that principle...

Would love to see some kind of blue post......

Nothing is sadder than a dying server, you have my prayers, you have my tears

16/05/2011 08:55Posted by Gontier

Would love to see some kind of blue post......

Asking or demanding a blue post is the only way how not to get it, however rest assured they do read your thread, among every other aswell.

Blizzard have merged servers previously, it's a complicated task so it's not easy to decide if they should do it again. But just so you know they've done it previously. ^_^

Haven't asked or demanded, just stated it would be nice to see 1 :)

Don't suppose u remember anything about that do you? As in what servers it was, when it was?

**Bump**

Playing on executus myself, and can only agree that its not what it once was - pretty far from even. And I would love to see something done about it. However, there are realms that are way way waaaay worse of than executus. Realms that makes executus look like the capital of internet gaming.
As long as nothing is done about those, i cant see a fix incomming to us either.

don't bother, alliance on this toons realm is almost dead and has been for quite awhile, blizz have not bothered trying to help this because it's bad PR, merging realms is a sign the game is in decline and that won't look good to shareholders/potential shareholders etc

Well, me myself are playing on a low populated server and i agree, i started to talk with a guildie about the servers and he said it's really low populated, and me, who haven´t explored other servers as much, when on a high populated just to chekc it out.
The high populated had the same amount of people in Stormwind at 11 pm as my server has on a weekend...
Sure, it's not dead, i've heard stories about servers actually aving ghost capitals, where there were a challenge actually fins someone in Stormwind.
I kinda agree that blizzard should take a greater notice of the low populated servers.

Brunnhilda

don't bother, alliance on this toons realm is almost dead and has been for quite awhile, blizz have not bothered trying to help this because it's bad PR, merging realms is a sign the game is in decline and that won't look good to shareholders/potential shareholders etc

Doing that is really respectless of blizzard in my opinion, sincethat only shows that they care for their money more than the players.

When I saw the name of this thread, I was ready to bet that it was talking about Executus.

So yeah, Executus?
Horde is no better than alliance: same problems, different factions.
The realm is terrible, and I really mean terrible. Everytime there must be someone mentioning how bad the realm became. Trade is dead, making PuG groups for BH is hard.
I can name 3 horde guilds that stopped playing within the last 4 months, mine is one of those. (one of the reasons was the current state of the realm) The others have a hard, very hard time recruiting. The once in a while I go take a look at Stormwind, it appears to be even more dead than OG.
There's only a handful of pages in AH and not much choice too. There is no PvP either.

Well, guess there is no need to say more, you get the point.

Playing in Executus is boring, and frustrating due to a serious and huge lack of population.

One of the first things they should do is to remove the paid server transfer service, seriously. That is the biggest single contributor to the current mess. The only type of server transfer - or faction change for that matter - available should be free migrations offered when population on a server is too high or too unbalanced.

Now since paid transfers is a major source of income for Bliz they will not do this, so what are the options?

1. Merging servers. Technically troublesome and bad PR.
2. Free migrations. Doesn't work. Nobody wants to leave a high-population server with a working economy and a healthy amount of active, aspiring raiders to recruit from.
3. Shutting down servers and forcibly transferring the population to other low-population servers. The effect is the same as merging, but less technically messy. The bad PR would probably be even worse than direct merging.
4. Doing nothing. The result will inevitably be that the EU population will slowly but surely use paid transfers to converge on the high-population servers while the others become completely deserted. The high-population servers will become laggy overpopulated hells, but nobody will want to leave since they've already left lifeless servers behind and know what it's like.

How to solve this? Which of these options would mean the least amount of cancelled subscriptions? I honestly don't know, but I have a feeling the last one is the worst of the lot AND the one our dear Providers will go for... Oh they'll have free migrations from overpopulated servers, but that is really just option Nr 4 in disguise.

Gilijath, I'm fairly sure they do free migration from low-pop servers as well.

Never seen that happen, and why would they do that?

Edit: In that case I'm outta here!!!!

I'd like to show you the results of a study 1 of the servers community members has done.
At given times of the day over the period of a week & done again some weeks later:

Saturday (26/3) Saturday (7/5)
00:30 - 141 00:30 - 92
16:00 - 179 16:00 - 129
19:00 - 207 19:00 - 157

Sunday (27/3) Sunday (8/5)
00:30 - 146 00:30 - 106
16:00 - 170 16:00 - 121
19:00 - 207 19:00 - 153

Monday (28/3) Monday (9/5)
00:30 - 145 00:30 - 92
16:00 - 173 16:00 - 113
19:00 - 210 19:00 - 152

Tuesday (29/3) Tuesday (10/5)
00:30 - 140 00:30 - 89
16:00 - 172 16:00 - 122
19:00 - 205 19:00 - 154

Wednesday (30/3) Wednesday (11/5)
00:30 - 143 00:30 - 87
16:00 - 175 16:00 - 134
19:00 - 206 19:00 - 153

Thursday (31/3) Thursday (12/5)
00:30 - 141 00:30 - 98
16:00 - 171 16:00 - 132
19:00 - 204 19:00 - 145

Friday (1/4) Friday (13/5)
00:30 - 148 00:30 - 101
16:00 - 179 16:00 - 129
19:00 - 208 19:00 - 143

Look at those figures, on some evenings its a decline in gaming on the server by over 1/3.
On some evenings, that figure crept upto and over 40%.

This is a serious problem & as such, it needs serious attention.
I'm sure a Blue poster has read this & as such has decided its not serious enough for his / her attention.
Well this does need some kind of feed back.

I would quite happy e-mail this info on to Blizzard but I am not sure where to send it or if it would even get read.

Wyer.

Played on Ravenholdt for along time, have several 85's there. Then it started to go from a medium server to low pop all the time. I've not got the money to transfer my characters over to a high pop server, so i decided to do the next best thing, re-roll.

And i don't regret it for a single second. Argent Dawn is always high pop and it's great seeing players everywhere. Also since i just leveled as a healer in the DF i was able to reach level 70 in 10 days. Sure it's slowed down abit now but i imagine it'd be alot faster as a tank.

And if you re-roll, you'd get the chance to maybe try out a new class & quest in some revamped zones or enjoy the older content again. I'd also be willing to bet you'd spend more of your login time actually playing the game than just idling in the capital cities waiting for DF/BG ques or raids.

Just do it! Today!

Karazhan realm is low populated since it was open