5.4 PTR Discussion

[Tonuss]

This looks like it will help them to deal with population issues without having to shut down or consolidate realms, at least for a while. That always seemed to be a sign that a game was "in decline." It won't help high population realms that have a severe faction imbalance. I think Stormrage US and Darkspear US are both in that situation. It will be interesting to see if people take them up on any free transfer offers if there is less concern that they'll be moving to a ghost town or just going from one lopsided server to another.

[zenga]

It won't help high population realms that have a severe faction imbalance.

In EU at least, most high pop servers have 1 faction that makes up for almost 100% of the total server population.
Take a look at this list for example (counts amount of players that have killed a raid boss)

e.g. Kazzak is a complete horde realm, whereas ravencrest is a complete alliance realm. Shouldn't be too hard to merge both realms together without orgrimmar or stormwind becomes overcrowded ...
Or they merge 1 big horde realm with 2 lower alliance realms ... its not like only the high pop realms have only1 faction

but ye ofc for some it will work out better than for others. but in the end everyone will benefit from it

[Baltyre]

Yes, but i think that's majority of players like Kazzak and Ravencrest the way it is. So i'm not sure that's a good idea to merge them.

[Khatovar]

Yes, but i think that's majority of players like Kazzak and Ravencrest the way it is. So i'm not sure that's a good idea to merge them.

Majority, yeah, but it sure does suck being on the minority side of things. Stormrage US has been the victim of increasingly abysmal faction imbalance since the beginning of time. Nothing sells on the AH, there's no raiding guilds, there's barely even social guilds and the new people who come in see that and turn right around to reroll on another server. There hasn't been any world PvP to speak of since BGs were introduced, unless you count Alliance steamrolling in to kill everything in Org while the 10 Horde there move from the Valley of Wisdom AH to the Valley of Honor one, lol.

When free transfers come up, Horde are the only ones that leave. If it wasn't a huge, costly pain in the ass to move all my guys and all their stuff I would have left years ago. These merges are going to have pretty much 0 impact on Alliance, but could potentially have a huge impact on Horde for my server. Assuming Blizzard doesn't manage to turn the whole thing into a massive disaster, which is where my money's going, heh.