Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Burning Crusade Realm Consolidation August 9, 2022

 


Kaivix:

To maintain healthy populations for Burning Crusade Classic realms, we’ve regularly reviewed realm populations and offered Free Character Transfers from realms that dropped to a low population. Additionally, we’ve made the decision to retire some Burning Crusade Classic realms and consolidate their remaining players onto other realms that have higher populations. We plan to perform this realm consolidation and retire the following realms with weekly maintenance the week of August 9:

Anathema
Bigglesworth
Blaumeux
Deviate Delight
Fairbanks
Felstriker
Heartseeker
Herod
Incendius
Kirtonos
Kromcrush
Kurinnaxx
Loatheb
Netherwind
Rattlegore
Reaper
Skeram
Smolderweb
Stalagg
Sul’thraze
Thalnos
Thunderfury

What this means is that all of the Burning Crusade Classic realms listed above will be retired and will no longer be accessible after August 9. All player-characters remaining on these realms will be automatically moved to a new destination realm. We will post a full list of retiring realms and their destinations soon.

Please note: Player-characters that are automatically moved during the realm consolidation on August 9 may be unavailable for up to two weeks thereafter.

All of the realms in the list above currently have Free Character Transfers available to multiple active destination realms. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of the Free Transfers prior to August 9 to choose your destination. Utilizing this service will move your characters quickly and will allow you to avoid being subject to the automatic migration on August 9.

Find more information on Free Character Transfers here. 345

In the coming weeks, we plan to remove the restriction on transfers from Normal to PvP realms in Burning Crusade Classic. At that time, we will open additional Free Character Transfers from underpopulated Normal realms wherever appropriate, and we will remove the rule on PvP realms that prevents players from having characters in both factions on the same PvP realm in Burning Crusade Classic. We’ll confirm all of the details as soon as we’re ready to take those steps.

Thank you!

 

Isn't this stunning news?  I personally feel that closures and merges are completely preferable to "Cross Realms".  I 'd like to see them let the people on these servers completely choose what realm they want to transfer to, rather than having limitations.

Cross Realms was the first time I saw Blizzard completely ignore the wishes of their customers. There were pages and pages of arguments on the forums against the cross realms rather than server mergers.  These threads were not answered and were routinely locked after a time.  To me it was Blizzard's NGE, though, ho! a glimpse into the future would show they had so much more in store for their loyal customers.

My acceptance of the realm closures of course goes back to Galaxies, which closed servers and let you go where you wished.  My scattered characters ended up on Bria, Starsider and Flurry.  It worked out fine, I thought.

Cross Realms, I have never liked. Blackwater Raiders, which had it's own friendly personality much like the Burning Crusade Classic Realm of Bloodsail Buccaneers, just disappeared in the merge. All the colorful personalities in chat disappeared, replaced by people from other realms who weren't as fun.

I like the idea of mega servers such as ESO uses, but you never see that many people around, so it isn't the glorious let's all play together situation one might wish for.  It may be they use layering as Blizzard does, but that is always a mistake, in my opinion.  You can't play with people you can't see.


 

7 comments:

  1. I personally think Blizz should stop using layering, period. That would eliminate the "never a downside" aspect of the gigantic population servers, and force people to understand what it really means to play in a huge server.

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    Replies
    1. I'm with you on layering. They should never have used it in the first place, then people would have moved themselves around to other servers if there were queues, rather than being fooled by the layers. It hasn't any place in the game for this time period.

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  2. I may have to reinstall Wow just to make sure my characters end up where I prefer (given whatever choices I have). The one thing I find interesting is there is nothing about possibly name conflicts. I suspect that was one of the larger reasons Blizzard went with connected servers versus merges in Retail. I guess they feel it is a minor issue with the XClassic servers.

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    Replies
    1. That's a good idea, you should choose where your characters go. My secondary server characters are on Westfall and Pagle, which are in no danger. I do have a server of Horde characters , I'd best check and see if they are on a server that might be affected. The name issue can be a problem, but it's not more important than having playable populations. I wish they'd just let you keep your name, and either add your origin server as a distinguishing addition to the name, or, take Final Fantasy's last name convention. Just allow you as you move to add a last name for your character, and voila, a distinct character name.

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    2. I checked and I only have three characters (on Fairbanks) that will need to be moved. Hopefully I can get them to a PvE server. My guildies wanted to be on a PvP server, only to discover that over time the faction imbalance didn't favor us. People started drifting away so eventually there wasn't anyone I knew to play with.

      This also gave me a chance to clean up some names I had reserved, but I know I'll never use. Hopefully someone else will eventually get a name they wanted.

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    3. May your characters find their way to a better realm. Welcome back!

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    4. I ended up moving them to Earthfury, another PvP realm as PvE realms weren't an option. My other options were a Brazilian realm, two Oceanic realms, and a PvP-RP realm. Not the best choices for me, but at least I have my characters somewhere I picked. I'll probably let my account go back to sleep for now as I'm involved in two other MMOs at the moment when Real Life (tm) isn't snatching away my free time. If Dragonflight gets good word of mouth I'll likely try that out and have fun being a casual tourist. :)

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